Evaluating and Identifying Online Resources

This week we were focused on Neuroscience and Information Processing. I found this learning topic very informative to myself as both a learner and a training developer. Being able to identify what type of learner I am and how I retain and store information was very insightful. As an adult coming back and furthering my education it has been difficult to remember how to study and formulate ideas and thoughts. As a Instructional Designer this is also a challenge because it is imperative that you develop materials that encompass all learning types. In order to make the content relevant for everyone it needs to appeal to the way they learn.

This week in doing some further research on the learning topic at hand, I found two articles to share that I found very beneficial.  The first one comes from the Greater Good Magazine and is called Nine Things Educators Need to Know About the Brain. I found this article to be very valuable  because it discusses the ways that the understanding how the brain works and using that information we can positively influence learning. Within this article Louis Cozolino details nine scientific insights for educators to keep in mind. Here are the two the stood out to me the most:

#6: “The brain has a short attention span and needs repetition and multiple-channel processing for deeper learning to occur”

• Cozolino (2013) stated “We have an amazing capacity for visual memory, and written or spoken information paired with visual information results in better recall. There is a greater likelihood that learning will generalize outside the classroom if it is organized across sensory, physical, emotional and cognitive networks.”
• I think that this is a very important thought to keep in mind when designing a training curriculum. It is important to think of ways to present the information to the learners in multiple ways to have a better chance of them storing and recalling the information.

#9: “Learning is enhanced by emphasizing the big picture- and then allowing students to discover the details for themselves”

• Cozolino (2013) stated “Chunking materials into meaningful segments makes it easier to remember, and improves test performance while increasing prefrontal activity during encoding.”
• Chunking is something that I try to do as an Instructional Designer when putting together a training. I believe that this allows the learners to learn all the relevant information about a certain topic and mastering that topic before moving onto the next more complex topic or segment.  

Overall this article really helps drive home what we learned this week and how we can apply it in a practical setting to be the most effective.

The second article I want to share this week comes from Edutopia and is called Metacognition: The Gift that Keeps Giving. This article is beneficial because it discusses how to teach students to apply metacognition which allows them to think about how they learn best. In this article the author explains how to teach students to be more metacognitive. I think this is very important because it is something that was not talked about when I was in school. I first remember talking about learning styles and theories once I got to college. I think by introducing this concept and talking about it in elementary-high school would set the learners up for success when they enter college. The same is true for designing a training curriculum. By allowing the learners to identify how they learn and to be more metacognitive will result in a more successful training program. My favorite point from this article discusses modeling metacognition by talking through problems. It is important for the learners to see the facilitator or teacher working through a problem with the class. This allows them to use their metacognition and think through strategies aloud.

I could go on and on about articles that I have found beneficial this week but overall these are the two that stood out to me. I hope these have given you a deeper insight like they did me into the brain and how people learn and retain information.

References:

Conyers M. & Wilson D. (2014, October 7). Metacognition: The Gift that Keeps Giving. Edutopia. Retrieved from: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/metacognition-gift-that-keeps-giving-donna-wilson-marcus-conyers

Cozolino, L. (2013, March 19). Nine Things Educators Need to Know About the Brain. Greater Good. Retrieved from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/nine_things_educators_need_to_know_about_the_brain (“./cl