How Your Child Learns Best
Public school funding and educators' salaries are now directly tied to student performance on standardized tests. The result is a factory style, teach-to-the-test standardization of public school curriculum that sacrifices the most engaging school activities to devote more time to rote memorization. As a parent, it now falls to you to enrich and expand your children's learning experiences and them to help them find their strengths, interests, and talents outside of math and reading (which are where 90% of the classroom emphasis is being placed in direct proportion to the emphasis of these two subjects on the standardized tests)
With the narrowing of curriculum to the testable aspects of reading and math, your children will have fewer opportunities to discover and nurture their other abilities and gifts. They will leave high school defined almost exclusively by class ranking, grade point average, and SAT or other standardized test results. Not only do you need to help your children enrich the experiential aspects of their education, but they also need your help to keep up with the competition to be as successful as possible on the standardized tests that are becoming an increasingly restrictive window through which college and job candidates are evaluated.
Parents today have the double challenge of helping their children sustain the love of learning they had when they started kindergarten while also helping them learn and practice the memory enhancing strategies that result in greater success on standardized tests. Fortunately, brain research-based techniques and activities are available to help you take on these added tasks of teacher, coach, counselor, activities director, and study partner. You can help your children grow more dendrites and produce more neurotransmitters while you shop with them for the week's groceries, read food labels, discuss misleading billboards, or analyze your dog's behavior on his afternoon walk. The brain changes in response to information processing and these changes can become permanent memories when you provide the bridges that link your children's classroom studies to their interests and to experiential learning beyond the classroom walls.
The goal is to engage your children in learning enrichment and long-term, rather than short-term (rote), memory-building activities. Before children can make long-term memories or learn at a deeper level than rote memorization, something or someone must capture their attention. Neuroimaging and brain mapping studies reveal the structural changes in the brain that occur when newly learned information is retained in memory storage areas. It was once believed that new brain cells did not grow after birth. PET and fMRI scans show brain metabolism in real time as the brain actively processes information. These scans now show that the growth of brain cell connections, such as dendrites, occurs in all the lobes of the brain throughout life as long as learning is sustained. A recent study demonstrated increased growth of brain cell networks in the occipital lobes (vision and visual memory centers) after subjects learned and practiced juggling.
Similar imaging studies demonstrate that memory storage is more efficient when the new information is related to prior knowledge, personal interest, and positive emotional experiences. These relationships of new information to brain cell circuits that already exist build the longest lasting of new memories - relational memories. The more memories in the storage bank, the more neuron circuits there are to connect with the new information. Learning consists of reinforcing the connections (pathways, circuits) linking neurons in the brain to one another. Relational memory takes place when children learn something that adds to what they have already stored in memory; they attach the new information onto "maps" or circuits already present in their brains. PET scans actually show that when children are given new information their brains activate their stored memory banks. Their brains are seeking relationships or connections between the new information and stored memories of past knowledge or experience.
In a similar manner, for children with attention focusing difficulties. Each time they focus their attention they are activating the brain's alerting and focusing pathways. This repeated stimulation of these pathways makes the neural circuits stronger and increases their ability to actively direct their attention where it is needed. Children will certainly need this strengthening of attentive focus if they are to remain focused on drill and kill activities at school and then come home with any attention left to devote to more active, multidimensional learning activities with you.
In a study session at home surprise can be your wearing a funny hat, cape, or costume. If children sense novel experiences, from new objects, places, or even a story you tell or photo you show about your past or their childhood, the novelty (and enthusiasm your voice) will make it more likely that they will form lasting memories of information that follows the surprise or novel experience.
For example, if the science book asks, "What is the difference between a solution and a mixture?" your child can read the definitions and then predict which items in your refrigerator are mixtures and which are solutions. Then, he can investigate which salad dressings fit the definition of mixtures (oil and vinegar mixtures that need to be shaken) and which are solutions (ranch, thousand island, and others that don't separate out after standing so they don't have to be shaken to recreate the solution state).
After giving imagination free rein, more of their brains can be engaged if they put their visualization into words, diagrams, or pictures. They can describe their images to you, write them in words, or draw sketches. Just as athletes may visualize a move before they execute it, children can be encouraged to visualize the biological process as it is explained in the textbook. When they draw diagrams, create models, and engage their sight, hearing, smell, touch or movement they are making connections between the new information and something they already know. They are engaging multiple brain pathways and increasing the likelihood of memory storage and effective retrieval.
See previous musings for prior thoughts
