The science of learning

On  Dr Itiel Dror's practical suggestions about how people learn based on  the latest neuroscience findings. 

1. The brain is a machine with limited resources for processing the enormous quantity of information received by the senses. As a result, attention is extremely selective and the brain must rely on all sorts of shortcuts if it is to cope effectively.
2. Teachers/designers can adopt two strategies to reduce the risk of learners experiencing cognitive overload: provide less information (quantitative approach) or take much more care about how this information is communicated (qualitative approach).
3. It is easier for a person to focus their attention on the desired point if there is minimal noise (other information) surrounding it. Reducing noise also reduces context, so a balance needs to be struck.
4. Overload can be reduced by grouping items/steps (what Itiel calls 'chunking'). Grouping can be accomplished by placing people/objects/events into categories, or by compressing a number of procedural steps into one, automatic action. Visually you meay separate items by space, size or colour. Learners will naturally employ grouping as a strategy, although they may do this inappropriately and the process requires effort. Better for the designer/teacher to present material ready grouped.
5. A side effect of grouping is that once the action is completely familiar (that old 'unconscious competence' phase), the individual finds it hard to explain how they do it; they lose control over the process because it has become automatic (so old hands may not always be the best teachers?). Grouping is essential to our functioning, but there are obvious dangers, i.e. unhelpful stereotyping.
6. Individuals use top-down processing to reduce overload. This draws automatically on their past experience of the particular context, existing knowledge and intelligence and avoids them having to evaluate all new information from the bottom up. An example would be how people can easily read a sentence in which the letters in each word are jumbled up.
7. Designers/teachers need to take account of the way in which the information is likely to be encoded and processed - it's not 'what you teach' but 'what is learned'.
8. Different parts of the brain specialise in different tasks. Individuals can engage in more than one task at the same time, as long as each uses a different part of the brain.
9. It's a myth that we only use 5-10% of the brain - we use it all.
10. The brain continues to change throughout our lives, even though we stop adding new brain cells in our early 20s. Some parts of the brain are relatively hard-wired (through nature or nurture), some very plastic. It makes sense to concentrate in recruitment on finding those people with hard wiring which suits the job, because no amount of training will sort the problem out later. 
11. As you grow older the hard-wired capabilities persist - the most learnable capabilities go first.
12. Language is more than just a means for expressing thought - in many ways it is thought. If a person is not exposed to any language in early years, then by the age of seven they are incapable of learning it.
13. The two sides of the brain really do have different functions. The left brain concentrates on language and analytical skills; the right has the spacial abilities. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. The left and right sides of the brain do not interact physically.
14. The size of a person's brain is not an indicator of intelligence.
15. 20% of your blood is in the brain.
16. You never lose anything from long-term memory, just the ability to retrieve it. Retrieval is a function of how you encode memories / the number of links you provide.
17. Working memory consists of 7+/-2 items.
18. To reduce cognitive overload, take out every word or picture that is not necessary or relevant to your learning goals. Even then, don't deliver more than the learner can handle (presumably by modularising the learning).
19. Provide the learning when it is needed, not before.
20. Be consistent in the manner of your presentation, e.g. the interface.
21. Be consistent in the level of your presentation, i.e. not too complex, not too simple. Try to work with homogeneous groups; better still personalise the learning.
22. Engage the learner by grabbing their attention, allowing them to determine their progress, providing constructive feedback, introducing an element of excitement/surprise.
23. Be careful of allowing the learner too much control over the learning process if they don't have the metacognitive skills, i.e. they don't know what they know and what they don't know, nor how best to bridge the gap. Ideally help learners to increase their metacognitive skills, i.e. learning how to learn.
24. Providing the learner with control over pace and allowing them to go back and repeat any step is important.
25. The learning benefits by being challenging. Performance targets, rewards and competition can increase the degree of challenge, perhaps through the use of games.
    

    Itiel E. Dror
    Itiel Dror (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London) holds a doctorate in psychology from Harvard University and specializes in visual cognition, human performance, expertise and decision making. Dr. Dror's interest and experience is in taking scientific knowledge and theoretical models about the human brain and mind, and translating them into practical ways to improve and affect human performance and decision making in the workplace. His applied research and consultancy has taken place in a variety of countries and has included governmental bodies (such as the UK Passport and Identity Services; the US Air Force; and Police Forces in the UK, the US, the Netherlands and Israel) and commercial companies (such as Deutsche Bank, PWC, and IBM), as well as providing expert reports and testimonies in court cases (such as in the Levi Bellfield case in the High Criminal Court at the Old Bailey in London). Dr. Dror has published more than 75 peer reviewed articles, including a number of leading articles in the forensic science domain, and he has conducted empirical studies on bias in fingerprinting and other forensic domains. He is an associate editor of the journal Pragmatics and Cognition, and is presently a member of the NIJ/NIST expert working group in human factors in latent fingerprint examination. More information is available at: www.CognitiveConsultantsInternational.com.