The whole episode is worth watching, but this little section (at 10:52) of MythBusters’ attempt to build an earthquake machine there demonstrate the resonance frequency in a water tank provides a nice visualization.
Rethinking Classrooms with Pedagogy in Mind
OnlineUniversities.com has compiled an interesting list of ways what we’ve learned from neuroscience is being used to rethink school and the classroom.
Much of the list consists of simpler, practical things that are straightforward (if not easy) to implement: like starting school later (for the adolescents), emphasizing more group work, and stressing the importance of the emotion (positive affect).
But the article also points out some of the newer technology based approaches, such as interactive “cognitive tutoring”.
It’s a useful introductory reference.
↬ K.Cole.
Landing the Mars Rover: 7 Minutes of Terror
NASA gets dramatic. But the drama is oh so appropriate when you see what they have to do to land a rover on Mars. There are so many steps to the landing — heat shields, atmospheric friction, parachute, rockets — that it’ll be amazing if it works, and the video is a wonderful “strike the imagination” introduction to the physics of forces.
Positive to Negative Feedback: Three to One (at least)
Three positives for every one negative is the minimum ratio required for people to flourish, according to the work of Marcial Losada (and others).
To flourish means to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience.
— Fredrickson and Losada: Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing (ᔥ PubMed), in American Psychologist (2005).
Why do we need more positives than negatives? Because we’re impacted more by negatives than positives, so we need more positives to offset. Note that people tend toward happiness on average.
Why are positive feelings good? Positivity increases:
- the scope of your attention. Making it possible to see the bigger picture (see Hirsh and Anderson, 2007 (pdf));
- intuition;
- creativity;
- physical healing;
- the immune system (at least in conjunction with mindfulness meditation: see Davidson et al, 2003);
- resilience to adversity;
- happiness;
- psychological growth;
- cortisol (positivity reduces cortisol levels — cortisol is a stress hormone; see Steptoe et al., 2004);
- resistance to physical pain;
- how long you’ll live.
- how much you learn.
In terms of education:
… initially positive attitudes—like interest and curiosity—produce more accurate subsequent knowledge than do initially negative attitudes—like boredom and cynicism. Positivity, by prompting approach and exploration, creates experiential learning opportunities that confirm or correct initial expectations. By contrast, because negativity promotes avoidance, opportunities to correct false impressions are passed by …. positive affect—by broadening exploratory behavior in the moment—over time builds more accurate cognitive maps of what is good and bad in the environment. This greater knowledge becomes a lasting personal resource.
— — Fredrickson and Losada: Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing (ᔥ PubMed), in American Psychologist (2005).
So, once again, research shows how important it is to have a positive (happy) learning environment, and to be able to “spark the imagination” at the beginning of a lesson.
Cumulatively, there is the Losada Zone, a range from 3:1 to 11:1 of positive to negative feelings that are indicative of complex (good) interaction in groups, which separates people who flourish from those who languish.
Epigenetics: How our Environment Affects what our Genes Do.
The middle-school introduction to genetics tends to start with Mendel‘s pea experiments and end with Punnet Squares. The focus is on dominant and recessive genes and what’s expressed given various combinations.
However, the way genes behave are not quite that simple. Tim Spector’s new book, Identically Different, goes into the ways that people’s behavior and environment — the things they eat; the chemicals that surround them — affect the way their genes behave. Even identical twins can be profoundly different depending on things that happen in the womb.
Perhaps the most intriguingly argument is that the behavior of grandparents can affect their grandchildren. In the post World War II period in Britain food was scarce, and some people tended to episodes of starvation alternating with binge eating. Spector links this to an increase in the obesity of their grandkids.
The idea that your behavior can affect the expression of your kids’ genes is more akin to Lamark’s view of evolution than Darwin’s.
DarwinTunes: Watching Music Evolve
Take randomly generated sound waves (using sine curves for example), mix them together to get beats, and then let people decide which ones sound best. Let the best ones mate — add in small mutations — and wait a few thousand generations for the sound patterns to evolve into music.
That’s what DarwinTunes does, and they let you participate in the artificial selection process (artificial as opposed to natural selection).
The details are included in their article: Evolution of music by public choice by MacCallum et al. (2012).
Slow Motion Popcorn
The Slow Mo Guys do popcorn:
Meaningful Progress: The Ultimate Motivator
Motivation is key to learning. Amabile and Kramer (2011) explain that strong motivation has been an essential driver in scientific discovery and the business world as well. They assert that:
Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work . And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run [my italics].— Amabile and Kramer, 2011: The Power of Small Wins in Harvard Business Review.
So for education, we need to design work so that students can be challenged (which makes it meaningful), yet be able to make good progress. It’s a delicate balance to get each student into their “flow zone“, where the work is neither too hard, nor too easy.
