Neuroeducation to Improve Learning

Want to gain an edge on increasing your learner’s retention on the materials and the way you teach? Want to have your learners competences reinforced and heightened so they can use what you taught them right back into their day-to-day, on-the-job tasks to ultimately increase productivity? Alas. Researchers and scientists give you neuroeducation.

What is Neuroeducation?

Before learning about what educational neuroscience is it is best to begin with how it was birthed at the root; through neuroscience itself. Wikipedia defines Neuroscience as:

“the scientific study of the nervous system. It is a multidisciplinary branch of biology, that deals with the anatomy, biochemistry, molecular biology, and physiology of neurons and neural circuits while drawing upon fields including mathematics, pharmacology, engineering, and psychology.”

Ok, so let’s break that scientific mumbo jumbo down to nuts and bolts. In general, there are two parts to neuroscience.

• One part of the science deals with the physiology of the brain under a neurodevelopmental, neurological, or psychiatric disorder.

• And, the second part is education; In part, it is the study of how the brain learns, uses the information it has absorbed and stores it. It is through learning that the brain enables us to adapt to our ever-changing environment. For instructional design and eLearning purposes, this is the half we’re obviously going to focus on.

Physical Brain Change in Learning

So why do I need to know how to modify the physical brain when I create my learning? Since the brain changes, so does the behavior of the learner. And, by knowing this, you can increase the learning and enhance a person’s acceptance and retention.

Neuroeducation is a new and highly interdisciplinary research front and its objective is to improve learning by applying findings from brain research. Listed below are some highlights to some critical findings from the neuroeducational community of scientists that you can embrace and include in your eLearning development. For those that have been using these techniques, it is not by chance that they work, it is but findings through the neuroeducational tunnel that these are proven methods in the world of design. So keep these gems high on your development list and use them over and over again. They work if you work it!

Start Using These Methods

By combining some or all of these eight knowledge enhancement techniques into a corporate training environment, along with some of your already tried and true methods, evidence proves you will be creating star learners and participants in your classrooms and self-paced development. Companies such as Deloitte are already using these design principles and evidence-based learning techniques in their current trainings.

It seems to some scientists that teachers, trainers and even individual learners have a responsibility to participate in this research and inform researchers of their experiences. As Katie Quinlan stated in an Oxford Open Learning blog, “Without interdisciplinary dialogue, the potential benefits of this field of research are lost to the pages of academic journals rather than applied to the learning environments and methods of teaching that will benefit learners today and in the future”. If you are already giving some of these a try in your own trainings, good for you. For those that aren’t, go ahead and broaden your training to see for yourself how these techniques will enhance learner’s scores.

Article Image Source: http://www.training.dupont.com/coastal-maintenance-and-reliability-training

References https://www.td.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2013/04/Inside-the-Learning-Brain and https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-neurolearning-impact-elearning-francesco-furnari

Copyright: Abbie Martin