Sticky Learning: How Neuroscience Supports Teaching That's Remembered

Holly J. Inglis

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781451488784
• eBook ISBN: 9781451489651
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Despite the introduction of new technologies for classrooms, many seminary courses still utilize primarily auditory methods to convey content. Course outcomes may include opportunities for learners to demonstrate knowledge and skills gained but may not include opportunities for learners to begin to embed knowledge and skills into their long-term memory.

Educators are engaging with neuroscientists to reshape classroom practices, content delivery, curriculum design, and physical classroom spaces to enhance students' learning and memory, primarily in elementary and secondary education. Why not in seminary education?

An overview of how learning occurs in our brain, what the different types of memory are, and how memory is created serves as a framework for suggesting pedagogical tools. These brain-friendly tools are specifically applied to individual academic disciplines, enabling instructors to make concrete modifications in the structure and content of what is taught, making learning more 'sticky.'

As a group, Inglis, Dawson, and Nishioka create a text that extends pedagogical innovation in inspiring but practical ways.

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The Courage to Change the Things You Can

Read what my medal says: “Courage.”
Ain’t it the truth? Ain’t it the truth?
—The Cowardly Lion, The Wizard of Oz

5

Tips for Sticky Learning

Holly J. Inglis

In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the tornado deposits Dorothy’s house at the beginning of the Yellow Brick Road, which eventually leads her and her companions to the Emerald City in the Land of Oz. You may not have noticed this, particularly if you have viewed the film in black and white, but there is another road, a red brick road, that can be spotted starting at the same point as the Yellow Brick Road but going in a different direction. You may also recall that after Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, there is a three-way fork in the road and together they decide which road to take. As we head off on our journey into the Land of Sticky Learning, know that there will be choices along the way. Given what you have read so far, you may have already decided that this journey is not for you. If you are intrigued and interested in following this path, you will have opportunities to choose what may or may not fit for you or what you are willing and not willing to try.

Sticky learning depends on many things. Content delivery is one of the most important aspects of sticky learning. The way in which information is delivered, who delivers it, and what form the information takes are all important considerations if we want to encourage our students to remember what they learn. We want our students to be excited about learning in part because when they are excited then we are excited. We know that, in reality, sometimes neither one of us is very excited about what is happening in the learning context. I have distilled some of the most well-respected brain-based teaching and learning information into five factors that seem most relevant to religious education and which, I believe, are worthy of discussion with your colleagues and across disciplines. I believe they have the potential to excite your students about learning as well as excite you about teaching. We will examine each of these factors and then pause to allow you time to process and apply the information to your particular situation. The five tips for sticky learning are intended to spark your imagination about what you teach, how you teach, and even who is doing the teaching.

While content and information is certainly a key element of formal learning that takes place in traditional educational settings with overt curriculum, we should not negate the variety of informal settings in which learning also takes place. The coffee shop, living room, carpool, gym, any of the places where your students interact are equally capable of sticky learning. To affect learning in the informal setting, you need to make the formal setting sticky. Sticky learning also has broader applications than a formal classroom setting. The concepts can infuse the hidden curriculum (the organizational design, room arrangement, grading structure) and the concomitant curriculum (that which is taught or emphasized at home, at church, or in social experiences). Paying more attention to all the ways and places in which we learn and how our brains create memories increases the potential that all of us, teachers as well as students, will develop rich, robust understandings that can transform our actions. Transformative learning is our Oz, the land we seek. So off we go!

Five Tips for Sticky Learning/Sticky Teaching

1. Stimulate more senses; vision trumps all senses

The senses are the loading docks of the brain, delivering loads of information to our brain. But not all of our senses are treated equally. The brain devotes more neurons and more of the cortex area to receiving and processing visual information than any other sense.^[1] If you took a poll of your students, it is likely that more than 75 percent of them would declare that they are visual learners. In fact, approximately 25 percent of brain activity is devoted to visual perception, followed by auditory perception at a distant second. If vision trumps all the other senses, why bother to stimulate more senses? The more of our senses we engage, the greater the likelihood that the information will be more elaborately encoded. The more senses that are involved, the deeper the memory path is embedded.^[2] Our senses were designed to work in concert with one another, so that in the caves or savannahs of the ancient world, we could create an instantaneous picture of the world around us in order to assess our surroundings and situation. Our senses were intended to work together for our survival. In the same way, a multisensory learning experience grabs the attention of your learners and may possibly spark the attention of more of your students than simply using one sense, such as sound. Remember the image of aisles in a grocery store that we used when we introduced the concept of the five memory pathways? Stimulating more of the senses in your classroom is like shopping on multiple aisles at once. As the pathways interconnect, the stimulation of one area stimulates related areas and increases the patterning and encoding of the information.

We receive most of our sensory data through what we see and hear, and this is especially true in most educational settings. The power of visuals is undeniable. If you think we see with our eyes, you would be technically incorrect. It is our brains that actually “see” the visual images which our eyes receive through the retina and then send on to our occipital lobes at the back of our brain and other areas of the brain for processing, recognition, and interpretation. Our brain processes visuals sixty thousand times faster than we process text because data from text is received sequentially, like you are reading from left to right across this page.^[3] Reading is one of the slowest ways to get data into the brain, while data from visuals is processed instantaneously. We see an image and then we think about the image. Researchers at MIT describe this idea as vision-finding concepts.^[4] Hearing verbal information leads our brain to produce its own images of what is being described, but seeing images intentionally chosen to communicate information speaks far louder than words and allows our brain to focus its energy on processing the image rather than having to create its own or search for something similar stored in long-term memory. In October of 2011, I led a small group of adults on a worktrip to Joplin, Missouri, only five months after a devastating tornado ripped through the town. I read magazine articles and news reports to get prepared to lead this trip, but no words could communicate like the visual images we saw. Some of the trip participants remarked, “I didn’t think it was this bad” and “Having seen it first-hand, I understand better.” Seeing is believing, or at least it is a powerful tool for learning and memory.

Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior, and his brother, Dan Heath, a business consultant, say that naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images. John Medina echoes the Heaths’ idea and offers specific suggestions for multimedia presentations, based on the work of cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer.^[5] Mayer’s research on multimedia and learning is clear. People who receive information through a multisensory approach always have better and more precise recall than those who receive the same information through a unisensory approach. Not only that, but the recall persists for several years. Creativity and the ability to problem-solve also improves in a multisensory learning environment, according to Mayer. Is your classroom unisensory or multisensory? As a way to assess your environment, imagine being a student in your class without each one of the senses. Which senses are most necessary for participation in your learning environment? What would you learn and how would you learn it?

Simply using more visual images is not enough to make information stick with your students. More is not better! If you use multimedia or presentation software in your classroom, here are some suggestions that keep in mind our first tip for sticky learning.

• Reduce the number of words on a slide to no more than thirty. Eliminate extraneous material so that brains won’t have to work so hard to take in the visual, word-based information. Work at reducing or eliminating multimedia presentations that are exclusively word based. Medina calls a class that uses exclusively heavily loaded, word-based slide presentations “death by PowerPoint.”
• Consider using nonlinear presentation software, such as Prezi, which provides a storyboard approach, rather than traditional PowerPoint, which is text based. Both tools allow for integration of images, videos, animations, and sounds, so you have no excuse for only using words in either case.
• If you use visual images, make sure they clearly connect to your intended point and do not detract from your point. If the images are poorly done or do not connect clearly to your point, learner’s brains will be more focused on trying to make sense of the image and trying to determine meaning than on the point you are trying to make in your verbal presentation.
• Keep your visual images to a minimum. Remember how short our short-term memory is? Visual short-term memory is just as short and has a limit of about four items. Some researchers say this limit is even decreasing. The more complex the image, the fewer images can be held in short-term memory and working memory. Find one or two relevant, moderately complex images and you will do more to help your students learn than with six or eight images. Once again, more is not necessarily better.
• Combine corresponding words and pictures concurrently rather than consecutively. If you use images and words on the same slide, place them close together so the connection is clear. Better yet, unless it is clearly evident, label the images so the students do not have to waste time and focus trying to figure it out.
• If you use animated multimedia, such as YouTube videos, let the animation speak for itself. Allow time to watch the animation, then follow it up with your own narration. This has proven to be more effective and engaging than on-screen text following an animated presentation.

During a visit to an introductory Old Testament seminary classroom, this is what I observed. The professor began by instructing the students to pull up the class notes on their computers from the learning-management system (LMS) course site. As he began to lecture on the book of Job, the students seemed focused on the prewritten, outlined notes. Some added their own notes. Since much of the book of Job circulates around a terrible locust plague, the professor referenced a handout from the previous week and began to read that same handout out loud to the students. Several of the students were busy thumbing through their handouts from the class trying to locate the correct one, while he was busy reading aloud. Finally, after a so-far highly auditory class, the professor told the class that he had placed a link to a YouTube video of a locust plague in Africa on the LMS. He did not show the video in class but invited them to view it later. You can imagine what most of the students did at that point. Several students within my eyeshot immediately connected to the online link and began viewing the video while the professor continued to lecture. Others used a search engine to view images of locusts. Maybe this sounds like a classroom you know. This method of teaching is replicated over and over every day in classrooms across the country. Simple changes in the use of visual stimulation in balance with auditory presentations could improve the stickiness of this Old Testament class.

Make It Stick Here is your opportunity to practice stimulating more of the senses in your classroom. Take the suggestions for multimedia presentations and imagine how you might present these concepts to your students that is not primarily word based and that follow the suggestions for use of visual images. Remember to begin by looking for natural connections to the five senses.

Of course, all these suggestions are still utilizing only vision and hearing. What if you added an olfactory sense to your educational experience? The sacraments are a great illustration of how a multisensory experience can create memory. While the words and the gestures of the liturgist convey meaning and tell us something important is occurring, it is our physical senses of taste, touch, and smell that create the long-lasting recall of the experience. The last sensory connection to memories to fade is sight and smell,^[6] both of which are employed in the celebration of the sacraments. Smells trigger the amygdala. That’s why neuroscientists know that smells connect best with emotional memory and autobiographical memory, a combination of personal experiences, people, and events experienced in a particular location. It is undoubtedly a bit trickier to incorporate appropriate smells into a classroom, but are there times where you might trigger some amygdalae or encourage your students to trigger the amygdalae of their peers during class presentations?

Effective use of sensory stimulation begins with your imagination; as you prepare your next lecture or presentation look for points of sensory connection. Enter the material using all your own senses. What sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and elements of touch do you sense? For many disciplines, the sensory element may be difficult, if not impossible to ascertain. Professors who teach courses that use sacred texts can encourage students to look for multisens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Additional Praise for Sticky Learning
• Where We Are
• Where We Are Headed
• The Courage to Change the Things You Can
• Works Cited