Using the Power of Optimal Timing to Improve the Brain’s Ability to Learn

Learning is both a behavioral and biological process that is supported by the neurons in the brain over time.

When we learn, our brain cells physically change in response to stimulation, forming pathways to facilitate the connections we use repeatedly. For example, if you meet a person only once, you might not remember their name or recognize their face if you were to run into them on the street ten years on. On the other hand, if you see that person every day for a year, you will likely be able to recognize their face and remember their name much more readily should you not see that person for a long period of time.

Learning processes like these in the brain take predictable, measured amounts of time. While these rates will vary from person to person and nervous system to nervous system, we can depend upon certain relatively constant time frames for learning and processing an understanding of some of these time frames can allow educators to take maximum advantage of them. That’s why the Fast ForWord® products function on each of these scales by design, using the power of optimal timing to improve the brain’s ability to learn.

Learning depends upon a specific feedback loop characterized by timing between stimulus, response and reward [i] . Here are some of those timescales, along with how Fast ForWord works within each:

• Milliseconds: Auditory processing happens on the millisecond timescale. Fast ForWord helps improves auditory processing rate to ensure that students are able to “keep up” with auditory input such as spoken directions from their teacher.
• Seconds:Reinforcement learning happens on a scale of seconds and is achieved by interacting with one’s surroundings.  The Fast ForWord program’s reward system is based on this time scale, delivering rewards to students at just the right moment to maximize reinforcement learning, helping students get the most benefit from the program.
• Minutes:Our actions change based on how we perceive our surroundings. This kind of adaptation can take minutes. As students move through Fast ForWord exercises, they can see their performance results changing minute by minute. Being able to see such improvement helps motivate students toward greater learning. In other words, as they perceive the positive results of their actions, students adapt and learn to generate more of those positive results.
• Days or Weeks:Consolidation and maturation of memories can take days or weeks. When a student overcomes an obstacle in Fast ForWord, their confidence is strengthened and they not only learn the material, but they learn about their own capabilities and what success feels like. The memories of such experiences and the associated feelings – gathered and built upon over the days, weeks and months – lay the foundation to spur them on to future success. Such success in the classroom can lead to a greater drive to perform well in other areas, such as doing well on a test, winning on the athletic field, or successfully completing that college application.   We cannot underestimate the power of experiencing success and the sensation that it creates.

In the classroom, having an awareness of how long it takes for a student to assimilate and process certain kinds of information can add an entirely different rhythm to our instruction. In having such an understanding of how the brains of our students work, we can time our teaching to optimize learning and help our students achieve maximum success.

Stress and the Human Brain

Why are there more patients coming to my office with complaints of memory problems? Great question, and the typical answer is stress! In the course of human development, our brain developed the acute stress response that promoted survival when we were being chased and threatened by large animals—and it uses the same stress response to react to stressful events in everyday modern life.

A stressor triggers the amygdala in our brain that sets off the alarm bells for the body to prepare to fight or flee. Norepinephrine floods the brain generating a state of hyper focus, the pituitary sets off the adrenal glands and adrenaline cascades through the body. This causes the lungs to expand for more oxygen, the blood flow to increase to large muscles, digestion and reproduction to halt, and processing speed to increase. We are prepared to fight for our survival.

If this beneficial response to life-threatening stressors does not shut off appropriately, it becomes a chronic response that can damage the structure and function of the brain’s hippocampus. The hippocampus is the neighbor of the amygdala and the critical structure for memory and new learning.

The body generates steroid hormones known as glucocorticoids when under stress, and over time these hormones can do structural and functional damage to the hippocampus. This is the reason why chronic stress can cause memory problems. It is common, for example, to see memory deficit in those with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.

The good news is we do have some control over our perceptions and our body’s ability to regain a balanced and relaxed state.

In my practice, I spend time working with patients to first explain with pictures the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of stress and the brain. This provides a visual to the person. We then identify what the stressors are in the person’s life that are setting off the alarm bells in the brain. Using visualization, relaxation, meditation, and self-talk the person can connect with their amygdala and cool the alarm bells by triggering the “rest and digest” system, also known as the parasympathetic nervous system.

Consider the following tips as a means of cooling the amygdala, thereby promoting hippocampal function and enhancing memory:

1. Practice daily breathing exercises with deep inhalation (this will set off the stress response) and equally deep exhalation (this will set off the relaxation system). This should be done for three to five minutes twice daily.
2. Engage in quiet self-talk to help guide your brain to remain calm with emotional equilibrium. You have the power through self-talk to minimize the brain’s tendency to react with panic. By making the process conscious, you will be able to identify your own stress triggers and to work on avoiding the stress response.
3. Learn how to meditate and to gain mindfulness, as this will free you from conscious and subconscious distraction.
4. Engage in daily exercise with moderate exertion. Blood flow to the brain can help emotional stability and information processing.
5. Increase your fish intake to 8 ounces weekly, as the Omega-3s are wonderful for cognition and emotional functions of the brain.
6. Work on being in the moment and enjoying those you love. Life will always be stressful, unless we do not perceive it that way.

Building Better Writers (Without Picking Up a Pen)

When teachers think of teaching writing, they typically begin with the type of writing they want their students to compose—persuasive pieces, personal narratives, academic essays and the like. They think of following the steps of the writing process—prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing—and conduct mini-lessons during writers’ workshop. Others teachers begin diagraming sentences, discussing subject-verb agreement or distinguishing between nominative and objective case pronouns.

All too often, however, little attention is given to the cognitive skills of writing. And that’s a shame, because cognitive skills are the building blocks upon which writing depends.

The Cognitive Building Blocks of Writing

Cognitive skills such as memory, attention, sequencing, and processing speed underlie all composition. It is generally presumed that by middle and high school, students have mastered these basic cognitive skills, and, as such, mainstream writing curricula for secondary students rarely explicitly address the cognitive skills of writing. Nonetheless, research evidence is mounting that many middle and high school students who continue to struggle with writing have not mastered the underlying cognitive and linguistic skills on which written language depends (Berninger, Fuller, & Whitaker, 1996)

Memory

To write cohesive, readable, and understandable text, the writer must not only have a firm linguistic foundation in order to select the appropriate vocabulary and grammatical structure to convey the meaning intended, but must also hold the concepts, vocabulary, and grammatical form of sentences and paragraphs in working memory while formulating each new sentence.

The writing process itself places considerable demands on real-time verbal working memory, as writers construct and hold in mind the ideas they wish to express, inhibiting the irrelevant and attending to the relevant details of what they are presently writing. Simultaneously writers must keep in mind what they have already written, and plan for what they are about to write to complete their thoughts (Torrance & Galbraith, 2008).

Attention

Another cognitive skill that has been shown to affect writing is focused and sustainedattention (Ransdell, Levy, & Kellogg, 2002). A writer’s full attention is consumed in thinking about what to say and applying correct spelling, punctuation, and syntactical rules to what is written. Sentence generation involves consciously reflecting on and manipulating knowledge that needs to be retrieved rapidly from long-term memory or actively maintained in short-term working memory.  Writers must toggle their attention between formulating their thoughts to be written and the transcriptional demands of actually recording these thoughts in written form, all the while inhibiting distractions from the environment.

Sequencing and Processing Speed

Writing also places heavy demands on both perceptual and motor sequencing. Writers must process their thoughts sequentially as they compose letters into words, words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs that conform to the rules of any language. Applying language rules during writing—from recalling the correct sequence of letters within words, to recalling the proper order of words within sentences (such as, in English, nouns precede verbs and adjectives precede nouns), to building multiple paragraphs within a composition—also places particularly heavy demands on the writer’s sequencing abilities.

As the writer translates this mental process into a motor process of composing each word in a sentence, all preceding words in that sentence must be kept in working memory while words and sentences are strung into paragraphs. The writer needs to coordinate these cognitive tasks almost simultaneously, placing heavy demands on processing speed . The significance of processing speed is felt most heavily in the classroom, where students who cannot process rapidly enough are often times left behind.

What the Research Says

Because of the heavy cognitive demands that writing places on attention, sequencing, working memory, and processing speed, Robert T. Kellogg, a professor of psychology at Saint Louis University suggested (Kellogg, 2008) that explicit cognitive skills training programs—especially ones that emphasize deliberate practice—might prove particularly beneficial in improving student’s writing skills.

In two separate studies conducted by the author (Rogowsky, 2010; Rogowsky, Papamichalis, Villa, Heim, & Tallal, 2013) a significant improvement in students’ writing skills occurred after their participation in a computer-based cognitive and literacy skills training. In the first study, a pretest-posttest randomized field trial was conducted in a public middle school (Rogowsky, 2010). The study compared the writing skills of sixth-grade students who either did or did not receive individually adaptive, computer-based cognitive skills instruction ( Fast ForWord) in conjunction with their standards-aligned comprehensive literacy curriculum for one school marking period (45 days). The writing skills of students who received the cognitive training, in addition to the standards-aligned comprehensive literacy curriculum, improved significantly more than those who received the standards-aligned comprehensive literacy curriculum alone, with a large between-group difference.

In a second study, Fast ForWord training was shown to improve college students’ writing (Rogowsky et al., 2013). College students with poor writing skills participated in 11 weeks of computer-based cognitive and literacy skills training, and were compared to a group of college students from the general population of the same university. Results from this study showed the group who received training began with statistically lower writing skills before training, but exceeded the writing skills of the comparison group after training. Although writing was not explicitly trained, the individually adaptive, computer-based training designed to improve foundational cognitive and linguistic skills generalized to improve writing skills in both middle school and college students.

What it Means for Writing Instruction

Based upon these two studies, there is clearly a link between writing and the foundational cognitive skills upon which writing exists. Learning to write is one of the most cognitively demanding academic activities a student must perform. It is not surprising that so many students struggle to perfect and improve their writing abilities throughout their academic years. In addition to the traditional writing methodologies, the future of writing instruction calls for the inclusion of cognitive skills training.