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Depth of Information processing is defined as "the way in which a person thinks about a piece of information" (Psychologist World, n.d.)

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Humans by nature must make meaning of our world, but how deeply we understand something is necessitated by the individual and the situation.

As an example let's look at the sentence "Movement breaks are helpful, but not panacea for all barriers to learning in the classroom."

At first glance, one can infer that panacea means a solution and move on satisfied that they understood. The depth of processing remains shallow.

Were one to continue to see and hear the term, they might feel the need to increase the depth of processing to find the definition. [a remedy for all ills or difficulties: CURE-ALL (Panacea Definition & Meaning, 2024).]

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It is easy for families, students, and educators to limit our depth of understanding of education to what we see on the surface. When we dive deeper into concepts like listening, attention, motivation, assessment, the brain, and more, we find they are all interconnected.

Understanding how the brain works enhances our understanding of all practices that go into being an effective teacher. If we can deepen collective understanding on learning and the brain, we can improve education for all students.

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Panacea Definition & Meaning. (2024, April 27). Merriam-Webster. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/panacea

Psychologist World. (n.d.). Depth of Processing. Psychologist World. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/depth-processing

Willis, J. (2014, March 17). 5 Assessment Forms That Promote Content Retention. Edutopia. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/assessment-forms-promote-content-retention-judy-willis

Willis, J. (2016, January 28). Matching Edtech Products With Neurological Learning Goals. Edutopia. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/edtech-products-neurological-learning-goals-judy-willis

Willis, J. (2016, February 11). Brain Development and Adolescent Growth Spurts. Edutopia. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/brain-development-adolescent-growth-spurts-judy-willis

Wilson, D., & Conyers, M. (2014, January 22). Training the Brain to Listen: A Practical Strategy for Student Learning and Classroom Management. Edutopia. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://edutopia.org/blog/training-the-brain-to-listen-donna-wilson

Wilson, D., & Conyers, M. (2015, January 6). Strategies for Getting and Keeping the Brain's Attention. Edutopia. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/strategies-getting-keeping-brains-attention-donna-wilson-marcus-conyers

WKCD. (2013). Wikipedia. Retrieved May 5, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_BskcXTqpM&list=PLvzOwE5lWqhQkin4ZZQl_mjh_SplPZL07&index=7

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Overall, I feel the deeper we process information, the more benefits we can find.

More connections to other information

Faster processing of new, related information

Not every piece of information we encounter will or should be processed in depth. Our brains do an exceptional job of determining what we need to focus and what we can forget.

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I read six articles provided by Edutopia to further my understanding of learning and the brain. They fell into two categories:

1. How the brain works and develops

1. 5-Minute Film Festival: Learning and the Brain - How Youth Learn: Ned's GR8 8

2. Brain Development and Adolescent Growth Spurts

2. Planning meaningful instruction with the brain in mind

1. Matching Edtech Products With Neurological Learning Goals

2. Strategies for Getting and Keeping the Brain’s Attention

3. 5 Assessment Forms That Promote Content Retention

4. Training the Brain to Listen: A Practical Strategy for Student Learning and Classroom Management

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Browse a list of articles, videos, and other links for exploring the connection between education and neuroscience.

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This video breaks down eight criteria that teachers can provide to enhance the learning of adolescents. Paraphrasing, we should ensure that:

1. Students feel okay.

2. Learning is relevant to students

3. Learning is active

4. Learning should challenge students appropriately

5. Students are "coached"

6. Learning is actually put to use more than once

7. Students should reflect on it

8. Students should plan the next steps of their learning

(WKCD, 2013)

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Brain Development and Adolescent Growth Spurts

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Brain Development and Adolescent Growth Spurts

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As a middle school teacher, I found this article helpful in deepening my understanding of adolescent development. Knowing how their brains compare to adult or child brains helps to plan more effective instruction.

Key Takeaways:

In adolescence, the part of the brain in control of executive functions is going through a lot of growth

this includes organization, impulse control, risk assessment, reflection, and more.

Teachers can support the development of executive functioning skills at this time by:

modeling and discussing strategies

making instructions clear

having student model and demonstrate

checking for understanding

giving more responsibility to students over time

providing timely, constructive feedback

(Willis, 2016)

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The prefrontal cortex is where the highest cognitive and emotional control networks are being constructed, especially during the school years. These networks are what neurologists call executive functions.

The networks of the executive functions direct the complex mental processes that you see emerging as students grow. Executive functions can be thought of as the skills that would make a corporate executive successful, abilities that allow them to:

Organize

Prioritize

Communicate effectively

Accurately interpret validity and value of information

Make long-range plans to achieve goals

Assess risk

Solve problems creatively

Innovate

These networks do not reach full effectiveness until early adulthood. When well nurtured by use, executive functions ultimately guide the brain's abilities to:

Manage emotional stability

Control impulses

Plan

Respond productively to corrective feedback

Learn from mistakes

Remain resilient to setbacks

Reflect thoughtfully before making decisions and choices.

Early adolescence (ages 10-12) is a good time to build students' skills of organizing and prioritizing information and time management. The opportunities you provide to guide them in using these executive functions also provide the activation to strengthen these networks when they are at peak neuroplastic responsiveness. As a result of this strengthening, your students will build more skills en route to becoming self-directed learners.

Helping Students Organize Themselves

Successful organization is needed for preparing and completing most activities related to school. The development of this executive function becomes even more critical as the responsibilities and requirements of school and extracurricular activities increase each year. Using strategies that increase student awareness of these skills and providing guided opportunities to use them will help adolescents build the brainpower that they need.

Start by promoting student awareness of their existing organizing skills. Ask questions such as:

How do you sort your music on playlists?

How do you organize your files on your computer?

Also, ask questions about familiar things that are already organized systematically, such as:

How is the content of this book organized into chapters?

What organization do you see in the periodic table of elements or in dividing plants and animals into classifications such as kingdoms, genus, and species?

Other Strategies

1. Teacher Modeling and Discussion

Model your systems of organization (filing, recording progress, how you set up the classroom, etc.). Draw students' attention to the organizational strategies that you use during instruction.

2. Clear Instructions

Initially, when providing organizational strategies, emphasize them both verbally and in writing. Give students clear instructions for procedures, projects, or class transitions as you model organizational structure.

3. Student Modeling

Assign selected students to model the procedures that you've described, such as the right way and the wrong way to organize their class groups during collaborative work time.

4. Checking for Understanding

Stop between segments of complex or multi-step instructions, allowing students to organize their thoughts and ask questions. Ask students to repeat back their understanding of the instructions so that they can respond to your feedback and reorganize appropriately.

5. Gradual Release of Responsibility

Throughout the year, plan a gradual decrease in the scaffolding that you provide for student organization of time and goals. For example, back away from giving them your timeline schedule for parts of a book report or project, let them plan and write their own timelines, and revise these as you help them monitor their progress.

6. Feedback

Observe student progress and setbacks and provide feedback with opportunities for them to revise their organizational systems.

The Case for Investing in Executive Functions

As the caretaker of your students' brains during the years of rapid prefrontal cortex development, the opportunities that you provide for them to use these critical neural networks are precious gifts. The tools and skills that you help them build will empower them to achieve their highest potential now, and will increase their satisfaction and success as they inherit the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

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Brain Development and Adolescent Growth Spurts

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The prefrontal cortex is where the highest cognitive and emotional control networks are being constructed, especially during the school years. These networks are what neurologists call executive functions. The networks of the executive functions direct the complex mental processes that you see emerging as students grow.

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Matching Edtech Products With Neurological Learning Goals

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Matching Edtech Products With Neurological Learning Goals

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This article provides qualities of Edtech products to look out for that align with the learning from the video How Youth Learn: Ned's GR8 8 by WKCD.

Key Takeaways:

Verify the efficacy of Edtech products before committing

Make sure the product matches your goals

Products should be

relevant to students

individualize achievable challenge

feature ongoing assessment and timely feedback

(Willis, 2016)

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What might some of these goals look like?

Closing the gaps in students' foundational knowledge

Skill practice to build automaticity in facts and procedures

Enrichment beyond mastery

Applying learning to projects, inquiries, strategic planning, and other transfer opportunities

Strengthening neural networks of executive functions

Once you know your goals, the following suggestions can help you select tools best suited to engage and sustain the perseverance of your learners.

Qualities to Seek in Edtech Products and Programs

What we've learned from the video game model has facilitated neurological approaches to classroom instruction (without computers). The attributes of buy-in, achievable challenge, and ongoing feedback activate the brain's intrinsic motivation system. In this way, we've come full circle. Learning design can take important cues from the neuroscience and psychology of how and why video games are so successful at motivating K-12 students. Further, these same attributes from the video game model can now help guide your edtech resource selection.

1. Buy-In

If the brain isn't engaged early and doesn't receive frequent feedback of goal progress, engagement drops and, eventually, effort stops regardless of whether it's in classroom instruction, an edtech tool, or a fantasy video game. If a learner doesn't find the edtech tool enjoyable and goal-motivating, it won't be effective.

2. Individualized Opportunities for Achievable Challenge

The best online learning games, apps, and programs sustain engagement through intrinsic motivation. This is provided by the brain's self-motivating dopamine-reward system. When challenges are achieved, the brain releases dopamine, which results in characteristics of intrinsic gratification that can include increased motivation, pleasure, perseverance, attention, and memory.

Products hooking into this brain achievement-reward system can most successfully provide learning personalized for each learner's level of mastery. Initial assessments place the learners at the level of challenge and practice suited to their current skill development or foundational knowledge. The programs then adjust the challenge (in whatever form) as mastery builds.

These best programs show the user that mastering progressive steps will result in successfully achieving the overall learning goal. These steps are needed to let the learner recognize that each level includes a challenge that can be achieved with practice. The ongoing assessments then adjust the level of challenge, allowing each student to experience the repeated boosts from dopamine surges from feedback and incremental goal progress. (These video game attributes have been described in my Edutopia blogs and videos, including How to Plan Instruction Using the Video Game Model).

3. Ongoing Assessment and Feedback

For students to sustain effort, there must be frequent assessment and ongoing feedback of incremental goal progress. This feedback fuels the learner's intrinsic satisfaction needed to persevere through ever-increasing challenge and setbacks.

The edtech products that you're considering should not only adapt any challenge appropriately, but should also provide frequent learner feedback of interim challenges achieved en route to the final goal. You'll recognize the tool as effectively motivating when students are able to recognize and describe the direct correlations between their effort, time, and practice with their ongoing goal progress.

Understanding builds when students need to think of which procedure, formula, or tool is appropriate to solving a variety of problems. If they use only new information for a set of practice questions without understanding why that's a good idea, it's unlikely that they can use the tool when not prompted with the same context or questions used for practice. To achieve transferrable concept understanding, learning and review should be mixed and spaced so that students are required to consider which knowledge to apply, rather than just how to apply it.

Look for Evidence in Reviews or Trial Use Observations

You can also evaluate edtech tools from objective reviews and/or from trial use with your students. (See What Edtech Can You Trust? and Neuromyths and Edu-Ca$h-In: Vetting the "Expert" Claims.)

Consider the following questions when you evaluate whether or not an edtech tool is best suited for your goals and learners.

1. If memorizing rote facts is the goal, how well does the edtech product. . .

Sustain attention, hooking and holding student interest and perseverance (e.g. enjoyable gameplay, collaboration, or choice)?

Offer timely, corrective feedback and periodic review opportunities at intervals after mastery is first achieved?

Supply periodic review questions to assess and reinforce content and procedure automaticity?

Note: Reviews on Graphite.org provide buy-in information through compiled data about student ratings and teacher assessment of student response. Students rate in categories of Liked, Learned, and Recommend.

2. For remediation of missing foundational knowledge, how well does the edtech product. . .

Match each student with the best online tools for his or her cognitive, social, and emotional attributes and academic needs?

Assess and adapt to students of varying abilities and needs (e.g. instruction with scaffolding supports, content, and practice in a variety of styles and approaches)?

Provide options for you to adjust the facts/skills practiced and assessed?

Provide ongoing corrective feedback supportive (e.g. encouraging words) at each step, encouraging students to try again?

3. If you want a resource that addresses the problem of varied levels of mastery, how well does the edtech product. . .

Provide ongoing learning experiences adapted to each user's achievable challenge level?

Provide frequent goal progress feedback?

Offer opportunities and resources to support, strengthen, and extend learning?

4. When the goal is ongoing transfer opportunities to build understanding, how well does the edtech product. . .

Allow a variety of ways to engage students in a personally relevant experience?

Adjust to incorporate the new skills or learning that are developed through a unit?

Provide opportunities for novel learning applications to solve new problems, develop strategies, and use creative innovation?

Build (activate) executive functions through measures such as tool selection, prioritizing, or having learners evaluate resource validity?

Assess (and provide teacher feedback of) students' concept understanding?

Joy and enthusiasm are essential for learning -- literally, scientifically, and as a matter of fact and research -- and the best edtech can help us increase these responses in our students. If you start with a clear goal and ask relevant, critical questions of what you're considering, you're well on your way to improving student achievement in your classroom.

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Matching Edtech Products With Neurological Learning Goals | Edutopia

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What might some of these goals look like? Closing the gaps in students' foundational knowledge Skill practice to build automaticity in facts and procedures Enrichment beyond mastery Applying learning to projects, inquiries, strategic planning, and other transfer opportunities Strengthening neural networks of executive functions Once you know your goals, the following suggestions can help you select tools best suited to engage and sustain the perseverance of your learners.

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Strategies for Getting and Keeping the Brain’s Attention

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Strategies for Getting and Keeping the Brain’s Attention

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This article builds on our learning from Module 3. How much are they learning if we don't have students' attention?

Key Takeaways:

focus on the benefits of training our brains to focus our attention

Reiterate that focusing attention is a skill to be learned and improved upon

Use student attention to pace lessons

(Wilson & Conyers, 2015)

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Editor's Note: This post is co-authored by Marcus Conyers who, with Donna Wilson, is co-developer of the M.S. and Ed.S. Brain-Based Teaching degree programs at Nova Southeastern University.
The human brain has an amazing capacity to wield a potent cognitive strategy: selective attention. When we consciously focus our attention on something, we bring the power of the prefrontal cortex to this endeavor. By honing our ability to focus attention at will, we can more effectively screen out two types of distractions:

1. Input through our sensory organs

2. Our emotional responses

Distractions via sensory input may be the easier of the two to block, according to Daniel Goleman in his book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. As educators, we may tend to notice the impact of sights, sounds, and touch points that draw students' focus away from lessons and learning activities. But while all of the sensory stimulations in the environment are readily obvious, emotions can be even "louder" when it comes to diverting attention in unwanted directions and making it hard to focus on learning.

Which Neural Network Do We Activate?

To help students learn to maintain focused attention, we can guide them to wire their brains for staying the course even during times of emotional upheaval, remaining level-headed, and riding the emotional waves of life. As with other skills, this cognitive strategy comes with conscious recognition and deliberate practice.

Brain research summarized in a briefing paper from the Dana Foundation indicates that attention activates not one but several neural networks, including an alerting network that signals the brain about incoming sensory stimuli and an orienting network that directs the brain to take notice of the source of the stimuli. A third network, referred to as executive attention, enables us to choose which of the stimuli competing for our attention we will focus our thinking on. In effect, executive attention functions as a control tower for guiding the brain's higher-level cognitive processes to land on specific tasks and information.

Applying this research, scientists suggest a different way of thinking about and addressing attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The "deficit" in its label suggests inaccurately that students diagnosed with ADHD have a shortage of attention, when in fact the problem may be that they have difficulty in allocating their attention on learning in the classroom.

Cognitive Strategies

This shift in emphasis about where problems with attention may lie, when combined with recent neuroscientific findings, suggests that explicit instruction on regulating students' attention may provide them with a valuable cognitive strategy to support self-directed learning. The focus of this instruction is on guiding students to understand that they can consciously direct and maintain their attention on learning tasks and that, with regular thoughtful practice, they can improve their ability to attend to learning.

1. Shine the spotlight on attention.

Introduce the subject of attention by asking students to share examples of being so focused on an activity that they've blocked out distractions around them, such as getting lost in a good book or movie, practicing the piano, or perfecting their jump shot in basketball. In the same way, they can purposefully focus their attention on learning, and shift their attention from one learning task to another throughout the school day. The prefrontal cortex is in charge of focusing attention, and students can train their brains to better control their attention. Brainstorm ways that regulating attention can improve learning, such as:

Paying attention to a lesson instead of being distracted by noise in the hallway or something happening in the schoolyard outside the window

Switching from learning one subject to the next or from one class to another

Putting aside a lunchtime disagreement with a friend to focus on class in the afternoon

Completing a homework assignment before turning on TV or a video game

"Turning off" worries about doing well on a test in order to stay focused and remember everything studied

Identifying what's most important right now and paying attention only to that most important thing

2. Emphasize that focusing attention is a skill that can be learned and improved.

Like any other skill, students can develop their attention for learning through regular practice and training. Give them good reasons for training their attention -- people who can take charge of their attention are better at remembering things and figuring out what new information means and how they can use it. They are better at metacognition and higher-order thinking processes. For practical tools to increase student attention and other thinking skills, check out these suggestions.

3. Pace your teaching with students' attention.

While attention spans vary between individuals, we've found that a useful rule of thumb is to focus on presenting new information in roughly eight-minute "chunks." Students under age eight may benefit from even shorter chunks of lessons and learning activities. In our book BrainSMART: 60 Strategies for Increasing Student Learning, we suggest the acronym CRAVE as a way to remember five other strategies for keeping students' attention focused on learning:

Build curiosity for learning with "teasers" that get students interested in a lesson.

Look for ways to make lessons relevant to students' lives.

Ask questions to engage students in learning and inquiry.

Remember that variety is the spice of attention -- a mix of learning activities helps keep students engaged.

Evoke emotions. Just as emotions can be distracting, they can also be used to enhance attention by making a lesson or learning activity more interesting.

Advertisers use these same strategies to grab consumers' attention, so you might find inspiration for ways to adapt them to your lessons in a TV ad or on the side of a city bus! Keep this in mind as you guide students to improve their selective attention: The first step toward learning is paying attention.

Research

Wilson, D. L., & Conyers, M. A. (2011). BrainSMART: 60 Strategies for Increasing Student Learning. Orlando, FL: BrainSMART.

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Strategies for Getting and Keeping the Brain's Attention

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Editor's Note: This post is co-authored by Marcus Conyers who, with Donna Wilson, is co-developer of the M.S. and Ed.S. Brain-Based Teaching degree programs at Nova Southeastern University. The human brain has an amazing capacity to wield a potent cognitive strategy: selective attention.

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5 Assessment Forms That Promote Content Retention

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5 Assessment Forms That Promote Content Retention

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This article calls back to the principles listed in How Youth Learn: Ned's GR8 8 by WKCD. Our understanding of how the brain learns should inform how we assess learning as much as it does the lessons we teach.

Key Takeaways:

Assessments can help increase long-term memory retention and motivation

Assessments can (should) help students track and reflect on learning.

Learning journies that are recalled positively are better retained

Sharing learning that we are pleased with boosts these effects

(Willis, 2014)

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If we hope to construct enduring understanding in our students, it's critical that, now more than ever, we know their strengths and interests. By incorporating students' strengths and weakness into authentic learning experiences from the beginning of each unit, while at the same time including opportunities for feedback, metacognition and revision, we promote a variety of cognitive and emotional benefits that can lead to academic success.

For example, students with interpersonal learning strengths find that cooperative group work increases perseverance. Students with artistic, computer, dramatic or organizational skills benefit from appropriate opportunities to engage in building knowledge through their strengths and interests.

It follows that assessments should also provide opportunities for each student's unique learning strengths to access his or her highest performance success level. A variety of assessment modalities and some student choice in assessment type can bring students to the assessment with less anxiety, increasing the positive learning experience as well as providing the opportunity for them to demonstrate what they know -- not simply what they memorized, forgot or never learned.

The First 3 Assessment Forms

What Might These Look Like?

These should be assessments that students prepare and the teacher can alter so that the answers are not just memorized. For example, in a history unit, after studying the different agricultural products in the northern and southern colonies, the self-test questions a student writes might be:

What were the crops from the colonies in the north and from the south?

How are the climates, land and water supply different in one northern city and one southern city?

When the teacher rewrites the question, it could prompt more analysis and executive function connections if it is rephrased as:

Give an example of how the climate, water supply and soil influenced the agricultural products in one northern and one southern city during the Colonial Era.

In this example, the teacher knows that the student has reviewed the facts necessary to make the higher-level connection and analysis and therefore has the tools for successful higher-level thinking.

4. Projects Pre-Approved by the Teacher

Projects that demonstrate comprehension or mastery of the material covered in the unit can be ideal assessments. They can become the packaging that connects the newly learned patterns of knowledge to related, previously stored knowledge.

To see if the project assessment achieves this end, consider the questions:

Does this assessment examine understanding and not just rote memory?

Is the student called upon to think during the creation of the project?

These projects can include skits, posters, oral presentations, debates, papers or demonstrations that assess understanding apart from rote knowledge. For some units, the projects can be done in pairs or groups, as long as there is a means of assessing each individual student's participation in the final product. This could be through verbal interviews with students individually after the completion or presentation of the project.

What Might This Look Like?

A project example for a unit of study about modern Europe would have students select a country and simulate travel to that country, including finding out how to get passports and visas, what the passport oath is, what clothing to bring, and what hotels are near the important historic or cultural places they plan to visit.

They can also identify the money exchange rate, create a budget, establish the location of cities in their country to visit along a travel route, memorize useful phrases in the national language, and understand cultural behaviors appropriate to that country. They might also create a menu, a travelogue, cook a meal, or prepare a "scrapbook" with pictures from the Internet and descriptions of their "visits" to these places.

5. Revision and Retests to Build Skillsets

Students benefit most from the ongoing assessments that provide corrective feedback and opportunities to use this information, allowing their brains to construct accurate memories. Instead of just a retest, if students first respond to prompts on a test correction sheet, they gain metacognition as well as memory.

What Might This Look Like?

On a test correction sheet in math, the student is asked to find and write down the page number in the textbook where he or she can identify an example of the problem, and then to review that example. Next, the student describes the type of mistake he or she made on the test. Was it an error in simple arithmetic addition? Was it more extensive confusion about the concept of multiplying negative numbers?

After assessing where their understanding was incomplete, students should write what they will do to learn the material (such as meet with the teacher during study hall, review textbook examples before tests, or practice their multiplication tables).

This process shows students how to review text examples to study for future tests, and gives them confidence in their ability to work through challenging problems on their own with the textbook as a resource. The result is a reduction in test anxiety and learned helplessness. They are motivated to do the test correction sheets because they know it is their key to being able to take a retest.

Motivating Students

Long-term memory retention and motivation increase when students keep track of, reflect on, and look back on their learning journey with pleasure. This works even better when you give them opportunities to share that pleasure with others.

How do you know when your assessment has been effective? Please share in the comments section below.

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5 Assessment Forms That Promote Content Retention

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If we hope to construct enduring understanding in our students, it's critical that, now more than ever, we know their strengths and interests. By incorporating students' strengths and weakness into authentic learning experiences from the beginning of each unit, while at the same time including opportunities for feedback, metacognition and revision, we promote a variety of cognitive and emotional benefits that can lead to academic success.

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Training the Brain to Listen: A Practical Strategy for Student Learning and Classroom Management

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Training the Brain to Listen: A Practical Strategy for Student Learning and Classroom Management

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Similar to Strategies for Getting and Keeping the Brain’s Attention by Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers, this article helps teachers understand a practical method of improving learning by understanding listening.

Key Takeaways:

Listening means blocking out external and internal thoughts

Predicting and replaying are critical parts of active listening

Focusing on listening is a skill to be practiced and developed, like so many others

(Wilson & Conyers, 2014)

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.