The Neuroscience of Joyful Education
Judy Willis,
ASCD,
Jul 06, 2007
This is mostly good advice - my main concern is in the tendency to lump together neuroimaging and measurement of brain chemicals, EEG measurements, glucose or oxygen use and blood flow, positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging and more under the heading of 'brain based research', giving all such analyses equal credibility. When such studies are used to say things like "under stressful conditions information is blocked from entering the brain's areas of higher cognitive memory consolidation and storage" I think that there's a lot of interpretation going on. Just which of these electrical or chemical activities constitutes a unit of information? Not so clear. And while I think that memory is associative, as the author suggests ("Input from each individual sense (hearing, touch, taste, vision, smell) is delivered to these areas and then matched with previously stored related memories") it's not clear to me that it is the 'brain studies' cited here that tells us this. All of that said, despite my criticisms, I agree with almost all of the actual assertions here - just not the scientific dressing in which they are cloaked. Via PEN Weekly Newsblast.
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