
Standardized testing reduces a student’s ability to learn. Sociocultural barriers, test anxiety and differences in rates of brain development may alter the results. In principle, neuroscience tools that allow observing brain activity can better identify learning gains. But neuroscience and education have not always been a fruitful partnership.
New research more beneficially pairing the two fields suggests that when students use spatial skills in the classroom, the benefits extend beyond spatial understanding to other types of thinking, such as mental -decipher a problem using words. The results, published on August 10 at Advances in Science, also shows that neuroscience tools in a real-world classroom can predict successful learning better than more traditional methods, such as testing and grades. This information can support programs and methods that offer the biggest learning bang for the buck.
Neuroscience research often requires large investments before knowing what the benefits are for society, says Markus Knauff, chair of experimental psychology and cognitive science at the University of Giessen in Germany, who is not involved in work. These results, he said, show how important such research is for real-world application when a study is carefully designed to answer an “incredibly important applied question with high relevance in society, which is how to improve learning in schools.”
Neuroscientists, psychologists and education experts collaborated in a new study to introduce neuroscience tools and a spatially based curriculum that requires the use of mapping tools to five high schools in Virginia.
Because it’s not good to shoehorn students into classes they don’t want to take for research, however, the investigators took a different tack. Students have the option of taking the “Geospatial Semester” course where they construct and assess geography-based data sets using digital resources. The researchers matched students who chose a geospatial course with peers who chose a different but equally challenging science course, creating two groups that were as similar as possible. In this way, the main difference between the groups was the course they chose.
For the geospatial class, students work on map-based solutions to problems such as how to reduce heat islands in urban settings or find bears that wander from the Blue Ridge Mountains. When creating maps as part of their problem solving, students need to “get a global understanding of how things are related to each other,” says study author Adam Green, a associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University.
Before starting their classes, students completed a series of tests that measured spatial skills and verbal reasoning ability, solving problems presented in words. For example, a speech problem might pose a pair of statements, with the first saying “the monkey is better than the cat” and the second saying “the dog is worse than the cat ,” which requires a logical approach. argued that “the monkey is better than the dog.”
A key test of the study is “spatial scanning,” the ability to locate features from one map to another. A test of this skill is the “embedded number task,” in which test takers look at a geometric shape in isolation and then have a few seconds to find it. -embed the second image of layered geometric shapes.
The researchers hypothesized that students taking the spatial skills course may also show improvements in verbal thinking. They based this prediction on a concept known as the “mental model theory,” which posits that the reasoning abilities of humans come from the brains that primates use to understand their spatial environment.
“From an evolutionary standpoint, as humans evolved, we needed brain regions dedicated to spatial and motor processing to get around the world,” said the study’s first author Robert Cortes, a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. “When we developed the ability to reason, we did not grow a new part of the brain but chose existing resources to solve non-spatial problems.”
Cortes and his colleagues hypothesized that if students are better at their spatial understanding, this overlap in the brain may translate into better language performance, too. One of the tests also assesses how much students rely on spatial strategies in their thinking and learning.
After the 346 students in the study completed their classes, they took these tests again, and the researchers compared the results before and after. For a subset of 63 students, the investigators also used brain imaging to track activity during two test periods, with a focus on brain regions involved in spatial thinking. They then compared how well imaging predicted progress on spatial and verbal reasoning tests to how well traditional performance-based tests scored.
Students in the geospatial class started with lower reasoning and similar spatial thinking scores to their counterparts in the other class. But after the geospatial course, students in that group improved significantly more than their peers on most measures.
The most interesting result for researchers supports the mental model theory: these students’ development of verbal reasoning is tracked with their development in spatial tests, suggesting that where spatial thinking is sharpened, is also verbal reasoning.
Brain imaging showed activity changes for regions involved in spatial reasoning in primates, with higher increases in students who completed the geospatial class, compared to their peers. These imaging patterns have proven to be better than conventional measures, such as tests and grades, in predicting how much students will improve on academic measures.
Mental model theory has a history that goes back decades, and these findings underscore its power, Knauff said. “They show again how important space is for our mind, even with non-spatial abilities per se,” he added.
Cortes, Green and their colleagues are on deck to introduce the geospatial curriculum in many schools. The course “teaches a useful skill,” and its general methods can be integrated into other science classes, Cortes said. “This is a cool course I want to take in high school.”
The findings offer a potential warning about what people risk by providing spatial learning experiences and relying on a smartphone navigator to get from point A to point B. paper maps and navigation methods to his children.
Despite multiplying challenges, having a full paper map to look at and remember means accessing a “spatial understanding of where you’re going,” he says, rather than relying on close-ups in a route map app. The students of the study should create a similar version of the skill of scanning the “whole map”, and the findings, said Green, “make a class like that and a spatial method of education in general that is more timely and more important.”