[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]From READING IN THE BRAIN by Stanislas Dehaene.
Copyright © 2009 by Stanislas Dehaene.

From Neuroscience to Education[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[SIZE="5"]What we have seen so far is that the acquisition of reading entails massive functional changes in children’s brains. They must first discover phonemes, then map letters onto sounds, and then establish a second lexical reading route. Learning to read implies a literal search for a proper “neuronal niche” for written words in the patchwork of cortical areas for face, object, or colour perception.
From a practical standpoint, it is essential to examine whether we can take advantage of these scientific advances to improve teaching. Does our growing understanding of reading lead to clear indications concerning optimal teaching methods? Do some educational techniques ease the transition toward the adult state better than others?
A great deal of caution is needed here. My own impression is that neuroscience is still far from being prescriptive. A wide gap separates the theoretical knowledge accumulated in the laboratory from practice in the classroom. Applications raise problems that are often better addressed by teachers than by the theory-based expectations of scientists. Nevertheless, brain imaging and psychological data cannot be detached from the great pedagogical debates. Relativism notwithstanding, it simply is not true that there are hundreds of ways to learn to read. Every child is unique ... but when it comes to reading, all have roughly the same brain that imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence. Thus we cannot avoid a careful examination of the conclusions—not prescriptions—that cognitive neuroscience can bring to the field of education.258
To define what reading is not is a good starting point. As over trained readers, we no longer have much perspective on how difficult reading really is. We tend to believe that one glance at a word will allow its immediate and global identification in a single step. Nothing could be further from the truth. The brain does not go straight from the images of words to their meaning. An entire series of mental and cerebral operations must occur before a word can be decoded. Our brain takes each string apart, then recomposes it into a hierarchy of letters, bigrams, syllables, and morphemes. Effortless reading simply serves to show that these decomposition and recomposition stages have become entirely automatic and unconscious.
With this definition in mind, the goal of reading instruction becomes very clear. It must aim to lay down an efficient neuronal hierarchy, so that a child can recognize letters and graphemes and easily turn them into speech sounds.
All other essential aspects of the literate mind—the mastery of spelling, the richness of vocabulary, the nuances of meaning, and the pleasures of literature—depend on this crucial step. There is no point in describing the delights of reading to children if they are not provided with the means to get there.
Without phonological decoding of written words their chances are significantly reduced. Considerable research, both with children and with illiterates, converges on the fact that grapheme-phoneme conversion radically transforms the child’s brain and the way in which it processes speech sounds. This process whereby written words are converted into strings of phonemes must be taught explicitly. It does not develop spontaneously, and must be acquired.
Reading via the direct route, which leads straight from letter strings to their meaning, only works after many years of practice using the phonological decoding route. ...
A Few Suggestions for Educators
In the final analysis, what can psychology and neuroscience recommend to teachers and parents who wish to optimize reading instruction? The growing science of reading has no ready-made formulas, but it does offer a few suggestions.
The punch line is quite simple: we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal, the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby each letter or grapheme represents a phoneme.
In kindergarten, very simple games can prepare children for reading acquisition. At the phonological level, preschoolers benefit from playing with words and their component sounds (syllables, rhymes, and finally phonemes). At the visual level, they can learn to recognize and trace letter shapes. The Montessori method, which requires tracing sandpaper letters with a fingertip, is often of considerable help at this early age. It helps children figure out each letter’s orientation, and makes it clear that “b,” “p,” “d,” and “q” are different letters.
After this preparatory stage, children must be taught, without fear of repetition, how each letter or group of letters corresponds to a phoneme. The child’s brain does not automatically extract these correspondences by dint of seeing a great many words. It must be explicitly told that each speech sound can be represented in different “clothes” (letters or groups of letters) and that each letter can be pronounced in one of several ways. Because English spelling is complex, introduction of graphemes must occur in logical order. Their presentation must start with the simplest and most frequent ones that are almost always pronounced in the same way, such as “t,” “k,” and “a.” Less frequent graphemes (“b,” “m,” “f”), irregular ones (“i,” “o”), or complex ones (“un,” “ch,” “ough”) can be introduced gradually.
Children’s attention must be drawn to the presence of these individual elements within familiar words. This can be done by assigning each grapheme a distinctive color, or by moving them around to create new words. It should also be explained that letters unfold in a fixed order, from left to right, with no gaps. The ability to attend to the various subcomponents of words is so essential that this must be taught explicitly by, for instance, covering words with a sliding window that reveals only a few letters at a time.
Of course, learning the mechanics of reading is not an end in itself—in the long run, it only makes sense if it leads to meaning. Children must know that reading is not simply mumbling a few syllables—it requires understanding what is written. Each reading period should end with reading words or sentences that can be easily understood and that the child can repeat, summarize, or paraphrase.
A great many teachers will consider my recommendations redundant and obvious—but it does no harm to specify them. I once tried out reading software that was supposedly “award-winning,” where the very first word introduced to the beginning reader was the French word oignon, pronounced onion almost as in English—probably the most irregular spelling in the French language!
Errors as ridiculous as this one clearly show that even the most basic principles of teaching have not yet been absorbed by everyone. Stressing what parents and teachers should not do is equally important. To trace the global contours of words is useless. Likewise, to draw children’s attention to ascending and descending letter patterns is not particularly helpful.
Exercises like these may even be detrimental to reading, inasmuch as they mislead children into paying attention to the global contour of words. This makes them conclude that they can guess at words without examining their component letters one by one. The contours of the words “eight” and “sight” are almost identical. Children need to understand that only the analysis of letters one by one will allow them to discover a word’s identity.
Because of the essential need to avoid distracting the child’s attention from the letter level, I am wary of the many richly decorated reading manuals that contain more illustrations than text. Word posters displayed in classrooms all through the school year, with the same words appearing at the same place, can also create problems. Some children, often the most gifted, merely memorize the fixed position of each word and the general layout of the page and no longer attend to the actual letters in the individual words. This strategy can give teachers and parents—and worst of all, the child himself—the illusion that he knows how to read. Illustrations also divert attention from text. Children now live in a world of constant overstimulation and distraction, so that some no longer learn to sustain attention for long periods of time. A return to sober texts, written on a blackboard during class (so that gesture is also memorized) might be beneficial. It might also be worthwhile to remind the child that although reading is hard work, it has its own inherent reward in the decoding and understanding of text.[/SIZE]

Lecturers at 14 universities and further education colleges in England are staging a strike over budget cuts.

More...

Parents should find ways of punishing children without smacking, says the deputy head of the Council of Europe.

More...

The three main parties clash over education funding, school standards and classroom discipline.

More...

[SIZE="7"]How Does The Human Brain Work?[/SIZE]

[SIZE="6"][COLOR="Navy"]When we look at anything closely it is most usual to divide it into its smallest possible segments/atoms, we humans like to think we can eventually understand everything, but the extent and manner of space and all the intricacies’ of the human brain may always be beyond our understanding. Believing that our human brains are the most capable working system we are ever likely to encounter, it is vital that we understand them just as much as is humanly possible. It appears at the moment that forty thousand neuro scientists have not unveiled the holy grail of human thinking, which is some relief to me, having given over almost one quarter of my working life to the study of brain function and the manner by which we can best enhance it. Reading copious amounts of scientific papers regarding brain function and education alongside the consideration of what I have read has kept my own brain fully occupied in trying to prove scientifically what I realised in a ten minute television program, that very young children build a visual mathematic map quite easily and quickly simply from using an abacus.

My work is intended to enhance the human mind of every child born, simply be showing its parents something they cannot remember naturally. (how they learnt to count read and think logically)

My hypothesis is based on human and brain philosophy rather than scientific evidence, at nearly seventy I shall of course continue my reading to that end but my reasoning is already provable as far as my work is concerned. Obviously my work concerns utilising the Abacus mans very first intellectual assistant. A simple Childs counter containing over one thousand one hundred and eleven answers on one moving page, not to mention the possibilities concerning the millions of questions that can be framed on that one page. (I am reliably told over one billion questions can be framed by that one page.)

So for every child’s high speed realisations and every parent`s benefit here is a thorough systematic process for teaching your own child and any child, to count read and think logically, system one 4 ever 1

We need to take note of every neoro scientists observations and their theories in regards to their experimental findings in order to build the bigger picture regarding our human brains. In order to clarify human brain function it is most likely that well written reasoning in relation to what is already known will be the simplest way forwards, so looking at a common philosophical explanation as to mind over matter will best suffice.

I have included some scientific reasoning from the results of scientific investigation, combined with its associated well reasoned but still hypothetical arguments.

Every one of us is scientifically proven to be related for over one million generations, it follows therefore that every one of us in good health is in possession of our species brain which must be regarded as capable of development as any other.

To that end I give you my findings.
[/COLOR][/SIZE]


[SIZE="5"]How Does The Human Brain Work? New Ways To Better Understand How Our Brain Processes Information
ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) — The human brain is perhaps the most complex of organs, boasting between 50-100 billion nerve cells or neurons that constantly interact with each other. These neurons ‘carry’ messages through electrochemical processes; meaning, chemicals in our body (charged sodium, potassium and chloride ions) move in and out of these cells and establish an electrical current.
Scientists have, for a long time now, stimulated with different types of inputs individual neurons that have been isolated for study. To have enough statistical power, these experiments typically involved stimulating a single neuron over and over again, to get a general idea of how it responds to different signals. Although these studies have yielded a lot of information, they have their own limitations.
An article by University of Leicester bioengineer Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga appeared recently in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. In the article, Prof. Quian Quiroga and co-author Dr. Stefano Panzeri discuss new methodologies that are enabling scientists to better understand how our brain processes information.
Prof. Quian Quiroga explains, “The human brain typically makes decisions based on a single stimulus, by evaluating the activity of a large number of neurons. I don’t get in front of a tiger 100 times to make an average of my neuronal responses and decide if I should run or not. If I see a tiger once, I run”. Traditional studies thus undermine this complexity by only accounting for the responses single neurons.
Moreover, these studies take into account an “average response” obtained by stimulating the neuron numerous times. The brain, on the other hand, acts based on single stimulus presentations. Therefore, the information given by an averaged response can often be insufficient.
Prof. Quian Quiroga and Dr. Panzeri stress, on account of these factors “it is important to shift from a single-neuron, multiple-trial framework to multiple-neuron, single-trial methodologies”. In other words, it is more beneficial to study responses of numerous neurons to a single stimulus.[/SIZE]

Schools Secretary Ed Balls urges head teachers not to go ahead with plans to boycott England's national school tests.

More...

Head teachers should not be treated like football managers and face the sack if they have a bad year, a union warns

More...

Head teachers planning to boycott national primary school tests in England say they could face disciplinary action.

More...

I am pleased that the consultation process between stakeholders in education and the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) regarding the draft...

More South Africa Education ...

A teacher is cleared of attempting to murder a 14-year-old pupil with a dumbbell at a Nottinghamshire school.

More...