Brain-Based Learning Wins All

 Why Brain Based Learning? (coined in the 1990s, the decade of the brain)

Brain Based Learning improves cognitve functions that include focus and memory. (Many scientific research articles support this).We all desire this, but with so many quick-fix options on the market-place, we are at a loss with making a final decision.

Peruse my 45 years of data backed events, (four juried, award-winning, longitudinal reports) combined with recent YouTube videos. My websites memspan.com and memexspan.com offer many new insights.

• 

YouTube Videos

Your investigation is now a personal search that will lead to meaningful actions.

Listening Success

This article continues my perspective on the importance of listening comprehension as it plays a role in procedural training and the cognitive skills required for deep learning acquisition.

 Technology now creates fast, easy, auditory enhancement deliverables not possible until recently.

 With consumers looking for quick solutions (my previous blog article, “Solutions Rejected”) of pills and relaxants, my application is most applicable for future cognitive brain/language/phonological research and/or upskilling by companies needing a workable, research-evidenced, practice verified. application.

This commentary follows my “Listening Your Best Asset” November 2021 blog.

It accentuates my “Hierarchy of Thinking” paradigm. [i]

 Understanding aural information is critically important in our every day life. Many take listening for granted, but there are three types: [ii]

 1.         Passive Listening as listening to music

2.         Active Listening: with full attention to learn and retain information

3.         Critical, or analytical to make judgments what was heard.

           

My innovative work is to strengthen short term memory spans for active listening. a requirement for critical listening found through parallel processing.[iii]  This process creatively applies images and sound/voices[iv] described in juried, publications [v]

 Many platforms, like YouTube, Patreon, and various podcasts, offer listening suggestions, but none have evidence-based, technological application.

 

---

[i]  Erland J. K. (c 1989), Hierarchy of Thinking. Lawrence, KS.

[ii] Cherednichenko G., (2011, Vedeco trendy technology conference paper) “The Role of Technology and Teaching Listening” monograph pp.78-83 available on online, Academia.edu.

[iii] Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. and the PDP Research Group. (1986).  Parallel distributed processing:  Explorations in the micro structure of cognition.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press    

[iv] Erland, Janis L. (February 4, 1986; copyright TXu 225 862). Contrapuntal Thinking and Definition of Sweeping Thoughts.

[v] Erland, J. K. (Fall 2000). Brain-Based Longitudinal Study Reveals Subsequent High Academic Achievement Gain for Low-Achieving, Low Cognitive Skills, Fourth Grade Students. Journal of Accelerated Learning and Teaching. 25, (3&4) pp.5-48. ERIC ED # 453-553. & # CS 510 558. https://Books.Google.com/jankuypererland page 44.

The Erratic Tik - Tok Brain Embraces Entertainment

To continue my ongoing discussion of “Solid learning factors”, including focus, many articles today discuss concerns about the current 1-minute Tik Tok brain instilling erratic focus for our young people. 

Poor focus interferes with listening integration sorely needed for sequencing, learning, retaining and applying new material.

 Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot compensate for learner cognitive deficiencies. Actually, AI can make matters even worse.

 Scrambling for Focus through Entertainment:

Historical Impact:

 No matter how poor an individual’s focus capability has become, one thing is certain: Entertainment will be embraced.

 What entertainment?

 Answer: Anything that excites the nervous system and brain, i.e. – video games or circus acts, and sporting events of all types. (Regarding the latter, erratic focus on the football game plays fails, when looking for Taylor Swift in the press box).

 Additionally, entertainment focus includes amusement parks, stage comedy, mime, ventriloquism, and magic tricks.

Subsequently, it stands to reason, that speaking, looping, puppet faces might provoke staring, leading to focus.

 The learning concept of looping, filmed faces emerged from a long puppetry/ventriloquism history.

 To begin – “The Entertainers”:

 1893 – Professor “Doc” Brown, living with a family of three, growing children, in rural Tonganoxie, Kansas, decided to carve some amusing vent figures. He liked to entertain rural area folks, who stared at the strange, wooden, talking faces. 

Professor Brown becomes a local “hit" for a few people, so decided to hike to the New York Stage with a backpack of puppets. 

Although it took him awhile to travel such a distance, he was well received on local city small vaudeville stages, making some income to feed his family. They have been surviving on buttermilk and popcorn in rural Kansas.

 

1923 - 1955 “Doc” Brown’s two sons, Fay and Foy E, are soon carving wooden faces like their father had done earlier. They perform for local Kansas folks and are well received at holiday organizational holiday events, needing entertainment.

1935 – 1955    Roughly in the same time frame, Ventriloquism was becoming a hit comedy act for night club entertainment on the East and West coast areas. Many tried to perform in Hollywood films but failed to succeed in that medium.

 1960 - 1972 – 1979    Jan, with a teaching background in Des Moines, Iowa, training children to emulate science, math, and reading units learning into writing poetry and comedy scripts for parental shows. Parents were thrilled with their children’s’ learning prowess obtained through the arts, science, and music.

 The Erland family now moves to Kansas City, and later to Lawrence whose school district finds arts and science creativity learning incompatible with their educational philosophy. The local district employs The University of Kansas’ “strategies,” paper and pencil methods. 

 Jan is applying the puppetry into her University of Kansas master's degree’s learning disabilities project “Following Oral Directions” with peers and puppets. 

The final outcome of the “Peers and Puppets” experiment was that team students’ TIED with the puppetry methods. Both groups focused on a peer role model and the teaching cloth puppet. All win-wins.

 Jan Erland is soon introduced to Foy Brown, the wood carver and former entertainer, who is a fire fighter, by trade. He carves, as a hobby, during –fire call lapses, at the fire station.

Jan meets with Foy, in 1972, purchases two ventriloquist dummies, and soon is applying puppetry comedy routines for advertising with her three children as musical and speaking performers. It becomes a summer activity for the three children, who are musical.

 Soon, Foy introduced Jan to Lucille Elmore, the noted 1940’s to 50’s stage performer. retired in Topeka, Kansas. Jan purchased her “Lily” (then called Snoopy) vent figure, and Lucille later bequeaths her 1935 carved “Butch O’Malley” puppet to Jan. Butch becomes filmed, as Lucille desired, for his final destiny.

 1980 – 1981 – 1996 Jan forms Mem-ExSpan, Inc. and Innovative Learning Stratagems, a 401 c3, nonprofit, as teaching/training entities for creative methodologies. Data collections become paramount in establishing creative puppetry for learning change.

 Milestone filming years: 1986 – 1988 – 1997 –2007 – 2012 – 2017 ­­­­– 2023 – converting wooden figures to a film format laced with data collections. (Five filming/audio recording generations applying puppet vocals).

 Foy E. Brown witnessed the film transfer just before he passed in 1988 and was astounded. What would our “Professor –Doc Brown” (Foy’s father) think if he saw his wooden figures able to transfer easily, streamed online, rather than walking to New York City?

 Do we have a valid conduit for focus and mental coding transfer applying the puppets’ looping faces and voices? Continuous data confirms that we do. But, will anyone apply it in a world of advancing technology forces with an erratic one-minute Tik Tok brain focus?

Think Twice

Memory (Listening) Transfer Awareness

 

Many of us are familiar with the big variety of brain games designed for visual working memory speed. Unfortunately, they do not measure long term memory transfer, visual and auditory, needed to understand, and retain, in-depth meanings when learning new material.

 Also referenced as deep learning memory, or brain knowledge transfer, it becomes vital for remembering math and science operations and reading comprehension. These fundamental academics underlie the ability to follow procedures and instructions in many professional arenas.

 Seldom does a single game application address all cognitive processing pieces simultaneously. Multiple training programs address “one-at- a- time” training of each perceptual processing unit. Specific cognitive skills training will initiate opening the door for additional long- term memory transfer applications. Keep in mind that there are a myriad of additional internal cognitive ability elements maintaining the overall learning and memory structure.

My writings for years have emphasized the need for visual and auditory integration, for following procedures, but there are additional properties often unnoticed; long term memory transfer, the basis for understanding/comprehending, retaining, and applying new information.

 Additionally, many brain games measure visual memory speed primarily, in repeated replicated – isolated patterns, but are not integrated with listening memory. Inadvertently, they are achieving the inverse of what they are trying to accomplish through visual memory training, by pulling the visual memory segment faster, and out of sync, with the overly needed auditory processing. The two memories, then, do not integrate properly for applied conceptualization.

 As a result, we now experience national low school reading and math scores. This is not only due to adherence to these autonomous, yet limited, skill practice screen games, but they inadvertently create a shortage of a skilled workforce that can not follow or remember detailed instructions and procedures, as the required auditory memory transfer practice unit had been overlooked.

We become horrified and baffled, blaming the problem on CoVid isolation with too many applications to sort through coupled with school/parent/business administrative issues.

I have referenced this transfer as: Deep Learning. My initial trial studies suggested that certain environmental parameters or conditions had to be in place. These earlier conditions are now replaced by online learning through the adoption of device screens.

My former writings have cautioned about too much screen time with visual images can create an inverse auditory memory transfer needed for conceptualization. Screen time should couple not only with concept practice, but inherent strategies that include widely adopted note taking and visualization coupled with self-talk while slowly increasing the difficulty measures through a variety of lessons.

 Deciding to recognize, understand, and adopt, long-term visual with auditory memory integration transfer is your first important step towards personal growth and professional progress.

"Cracking Math and Science"

Why Students May Not Perform Well in Science and Math

Unfortunately, there is a reason learners may not progress in science and math as expected. Many do not have enough underlying memory capacity to learn the varied sequential information and then apply it logically.

Furthermore, assuming this, students are unable to understand and follow procedural instructions basic to conceptualizing mathematical and scientific information.

Why is this?

Numerical arithmetic is taught in grades one to three, and there is a major shift in the curriculum in grade four. Right-brain spatial numbers shift into left-brain sequencing with advanced concepts. National test scores show that math scores, including advanced concepts, drop off  beginning in grade four.

Understanding science requires not only doing simple experiments and reading scientific stories out of textbooks, but requires procedural, stepwise learning.

Procedural learning requires the mastery of learning step-wise procedures. Following directions is usually taught with simple question and answer digital question/answer assignments taught by animated characters that may speak and move too quickly for the necessary absorption needed.

Why do we fall behind other foreign countries -- how can these children encode-decode information while ours do not? Perhaps their students have more musical training and learn foreign languages that train auditory (listening) memory, critically needed for learning technical sequences.

What is missing?

Students may be unable to listen to complex instructions (teachers spend hours daily repeating directions continuously). Subsequently, students work in teams where one member does the application "thinking" and fills out the required responses on devices. Others work in small tutorial groups with simple assignments that can be below grade level work. These students may then "fall through the cracks" with their math instruction and output.

Every student processes information differently, with different learning styles and capacities. The missing link is teaching students how to encode and decode sequential information with "mental toughess training", and expand their visual and listening memories an underlying requirement for conceptualizing formulas and mathematical equations.

Yet, teachers do recognize each child's proficiency level in math and science. Unfortunately, completion demands may be placed upon students who naturally lack the necessary "brain-power" to sequence and code math and science instructions.

Yet, we need to understand and expand our technological capacities with performing students in science and math.

Parents can now help fill in this gap - the missing link. There soon will be more parent "how to" information readily accessible through digital learning. Applications will be pleasurable, scientifically tested, and learning will be fast.

The ability to encode/decode sequential information will be taught through specific, scientifically tested training regimens. It might be something for all of us to consider. Let's look to future, innovative possibilities to foster advanced learning in science and math.

"Can Puppetry With Musical Choral Speech Serve as a Tool to Enhance Memory and Intelligence?"

Today, there are many brain exercise programs, and most expect the client to have the motivation and interest to stay with a new, often tedious program. Many are random exercises without a specific goal in mind, and are no more than mere visual memory improvement of some sort. The various types of memory are not completely pre tested or delineated, and if they do, they are with the pretests primarily visual in nature and deliberately made difficult so the applicant performs poorly.

What is obviously missing from this paradigm is the crucial "listening-auditory memory" facet. Researchers have long written that auditory memory must couple with visual memory for comprehension to ensue. But how to teach auditory memory and the various subcategories of it?

My program has always used recognized nationally standardized cognitive skills tests. We did pretests and posttests to see and compare the improvement after twenty-four hours of intensive cognitive skills brain-skill practice. The results always showed improvement, and yet, every person's profile was different; pre- to posttest. That was most interesting to me and the client, and remains to be so, even today.

None of us have perfect profiles, although we would like to think that we do have them.

To teach rapid auditory-visual memory, and to make the training palatable and exciting, we used a family of ventriloquist puppets, speaking in tonal sequences.

Puppet characters have the following qualities: 1) they offer a non-threatening, stress free presence. The student remains in an abstract "one-up" position. Puppets do not challenge or intimidate you.

2) Their messages are rapidly understood. For example, they are used in political cartoons and comic strips.

3) With the recent surge of ventriloquist puppets as entertainment (America's Got Talent), they are now, and have been accepted for a long time, as a sophisticated arts medium for adults (remember Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy? and puppetry in the Czech Republic and India?).

Now, we can learn from them, too. They can improve our cognitive skills, which include visual and auditory memories. And, if puppet characters do give us "guff," we really do not mind!