Blog Week of September 12, 2011
Cognitive neuroscientist Robert Logie writing in the Association for Psychological Science Journal, University of Edinburgh, has challenged the model of the brain that only one flexible system directs the brain’s focus, suppressing the rest. In other words, he is questioning the notion that we attend to only one thing at a time.
Most psychologists explain working memory with a "controlled attention" model: one flexible system that directs the brain's focus to tasks that are important, suppressing the rest. Working memory, they say, is limited by our ability to attend to only one thing at a time. Logie disagrees.
"We have a range of different capacities, each with its own function, and they operate at the same time" when we perform a task or think about something. Within this "multiple-component framework," working memory capacity is "the sum of the capacities of all these different functions."
The brain’s "workspace,” as Logie calls it, allows us to do something while other functions operate in the background or to apply ourselves to a single task involving more than one function. Reading requires we both see words and process meaning at the same time (possibly debunking the phonics or whole language dichotomy.) ”The "sum" of the capacities isn't a gross measure, though, because we often tax one function more than another. In reading, processing has its shoulder to the grindstone, while vision takes it easy.
"Imaging data demonstrate that if you ask people to do one sort of task, you get one [brain] pattern, and if you ask them to do another, you get another pattern." Make the same task harder-say, remember word lists faster-and "you see increased activation in the same area." Complicate it-add words to the sequence, and thus processing along with recall-and different networks fire.
The multiple-component model holds great practical promise, says Logie. In education, "if you assume there is a single general capacity," interventions for people struggling to learn are few. Assume multiple components to draw on, and those other resources stand ready for development.
Hooray for the 4MAT Learning Style with its multiple components and combinations of words, symbols, images, and hands-on strategies!
Also, could this new research be an answer to the opponents of learning cycle teaching that encompasses learning styles who bemoan the fact that learning results from single techniques have not been measured? Is it perhaps that the brain can do more than one thing at a time, making such research very complex, and that multiple and differentiated instruction works much better? And they are telling educators to stop dealing with learning styles!!
l library.
Frederick sits around observing. The other mice criticize him for being lazy, but Frederick insists that what he's doing is important - he's collecting words and colors. When winter finally comes, of course, the food Frederick's family gathered sustains them. But eventually the food runs out and it is Frederick's vivid memories of the colors of spring, as well as his poems and stories, that take the other mice's minds off their troubles and get them through the winter.
How is the use of 4MAT aligned with a common set of standards? Simply because now we can stop arguing and obsessing over WHAT will be taught and get the important business of HOW it will be taught and how it will be CONNECTED to learners. Once we know the entire WHAT, we can get to work creating the concept maps and learner connections that will bring this material to life for kids.
