The emergence of psychopathology in childhood following maltreatment
reflects adaptation to early adverse experience, not developmental
delay or regression. The mature, complex and high-level skills
of maltreated children are often overlooked when normative developmental
frameworks are applied to understand their behavior.
Importantly, several distinct, complex and, in some contexts,
adaptive developmental pathways exhibited by maltreated children
can be identified within the research literature. Most notably
traumatic experience in childhood has been clearly related to both
(a) sophisticated, negatively oriented relationship skills and
(b) alterations in the functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical
(HPA) axis (both hypo- and hyperresponsive), as well as children’s
suite of associated emotion regulation and stress behaviors. Examining
these patterns related to early adverse experience from a normative
developmental framework often results in the characterization of
maltreated children’s biology and behavior as deregulated
and disorganized.
Contrary to this standard characterization, we contend that insensitive
and unresponsive care giving, or abuse in the extreme condition,
results in infant stress system biology and behavior that is highly
organized, complex and, in fact, adaptive given the child’s
care giving history and expectations for his/her environment. In
this paper, we explore this alternate lens on trauma, detailing
how seemingly negative HPA axis functioning and atypical stress
related behavior among maltreated children can be conceptualized
as adaptive in certain contexts. Furthermore, we discuss the positive
implications for assessment and intervention of assuming this specific “person-in-context” perspective
on child maltreatment and psychopathology.
I have argued that educators and policy makers, as well as some
neuroscientists, are mistaken in claiming that purportedly new,
but actually long-standing, neuroscientific results about synaptogenesis,
critical periods, and the effects of environmental enrichment had
important implications for education. I have also argued that,
as a practical matter, if educators are committed to using research
to improve teaching and learning, they are best advised to concentrate
their attention and resources on cognitive and developmental psychology.
There is a wealth of psychological research about teaching and
learning that could be applied immediately in classrooms, but yet
remains unappreciated by most educators. As a practical matter,
cognitive psychology could be given priority in developing educational
interventions.
In this paper, I will argue that the brain science most relevant
to education – cognitive neuroscience -- assumes the methodological
priority of psychology over neuroscience. This is explicit in the
working hypothesis of cognitive neuroscientific research: the brain
localizes functions of the kind identified by cognitive theories.
Failure to adhere to this working hypothesis has diluted the cognitive
neuroscientific research program. Furthermore, failure to recognize
the priority of psychology has caused educators and educational
researchers to overestimate what brain science, that is the neuroscientific
aspect of cognitive neuroscience, can contribute to educational
practice.
Kurt W. Fischer, Marc Schwartz, & Michael
W. Connell
Cognitive Development and Learning: Analyzing the Building of
Skills in Classrooms and Neural Systems
Dynamic growth models, if made accessible and usable, can enable
powerful research on development and learning in students, teachers,
and classrooms. Growth models can specify the processes that
lead to change and variation and can explicitly describe and
analyze individual patterns of change. However, dynamic analyses
have been hampered by the absence of a common scale – a
ruler – that can be used across domains and tasks. Research
on the dynamic shapes of growth curves has provided a solution:
a ruler based on evidence of successive discontinuities in development
of cognition and emotion, as well as brain activity. This ruler
provides a common scale for development across tasks, domains,
and people and thus creates tools for addressing important problems
in development, learning, and teaching.
Phenomena illuminated
by research on dynamic growth using this ruler include:
(1) distinct developmental pathways for emotion, cognition, and
language, such as those described by
Ayoub & Rappolt-Schlichtman,
van Geert, and Shultz;
(2) relations between brain and behavior development; and
(3) patterns and processes of learning and problem-solving in
educational settings.
One particularly fruitful arena is analysis of patterns of microdevelopment
in learning and generalization in classrooms, including the effects
of particular curricula. Adding neural network models to growth
models can add important tools for illuminating the processes
of learning. For all three phenomena, the combination of dynamic
growth modeling with a common ruler for change creates advances
in the science of development and learning.
Usha Goswami
Acquiring Language and Literacy: Cross-Language Considerations
and Phonological Awareness
This paper will focus on how neuroscience methods can inform
our understanding of the development of the key precursor skill
for literacy acquisition across languages: phonological awareness
(the child’s ability to reflect upon the sounds of words).
It is first demonstrated that phonological awareness is an emergent
property of successful language acquisition, which follows a
similar developmental path across all languages so far studied.
It is then shown that certain acoustic parameters are important
for initial language acquisition, with a focus on parameters
that yield speech rhythm. As the brain uses the same cues across
languages to represent and segment speech, it is argued that
similar psychoacoustic and neuroscience methods can be applied
across languages to understand how individual differences in
sensitivity to these parameters affect language and literacy
acquisition. In particular, psychoacoustic and ERP data from
different languages is presented to show that the brains of dyslexic
children show similar deficits in processing rhythmic cues across
languages. Therefore, it is argued that (a) neuroscientific investigation
of basic auditory processing phenomena are useful in understanding
the neural basis for language acquisition; (b) the optimal time
scale for such study is longitudinal and from infancy; (c) the
components of interest for this research question should be brain
responses to simple auditory stimuli; (d) all kinds of learners
should be included, with comparisons between typically-developing
and atypically-developing children being particularly important;
and (e) regarding methods, we need to start small, with (in this
case) tractable questions that nevertheless inform basic phenomena
in the learning and teaching of reading.
Robert Plomin and Yulia Kovas
Brain, Mind, and Education: Genetic Links
Genetics has been a missing link in discussions of brain, mind,
and education. During the past decade, quantitative genetic research
has gone beyond merely demonstrating the importance of genetics
in three ways that have far-reaching implications for the field
of education:
(1) Genetic factors correlate with environmental experiences
in that children actively select, modify, and create environments
that match their genetic propensities;
(2) Genetic and environmental influences on common learning disabilities
are the quantitative extreme of the same genetic and environmental
influences responsible for normal variation in learning abilities;
and
(3) Genetic factors largely contribute to comorbidity across
diverse learning abilities and disabilities, whereas environmental
factors contribute to heterogeneity.
Molecular genetic research has begun to identify specific genes
responsible for the ubiquitous genetic influence on learning
abilities and disabilities, which will have important consequences
for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of learning disabilities
as well as for basic research on the brain pathways that mediate
genetic effects on cognitive development.
David Rose
Universal Design for Learning: Meeting the Challenge of Diversity
For two decades, school buildings have been universally designed
-- ramps and elevators have been built into the architecture,
for example -- to make them accessible to people with disabilities.
Such alternatives result in buildings that are not only more
accessible to people with disabilities but more accommodating
to everyone, whether they are pushing a stroller, pulling a suitcase,
riding a skateboard, carrying packages, or merely tired or elderly.
Our buildings are increasingly able to meet the challenge of
diversity.
Within school buildings, in contrast, our learning materials
and curricula are still usually designed as if “one size
fits all.” Teachers, faced with the reality of widely divergent
abilities and disabilities, skills and backgrounds, and languages
and cultures are forced to “retrofit” their materials
and methods as best they can to meet the challenge of diversity.
New options are becoming available. Digital technologies have
revolutionized the ways in which neuroscientists can study learning
and individual differences in the brain. These same digital technologies
can also provide a more powerful, flexible, and more individualized
platform for teaching and learning. In this paper we will investigate
the intersection of these two advances: meeting the challenge
of individual differences through universal designs for learning.
Paul van Geert
Dynamic Systems Theory:
A Natural Tool for Understanding Development and Education
A dynamic system is a collection of components that change their
properties by interacting with each other and which exhibit self-organization
and non-linearity. Dynamic systems theory provides a natural
tool for describing and understanding educational and developmental
processes and has significant practical advantages over models
and theories that are less general and focus on specific aspects
of education and development.
First, it offers a number of general concepts that describe
characteristic features of developmental and educational processes,
such as self-organization, non-linearity, and attractor states.
Second, dynamic systems theory provides a framework for reconciling
various existing theories and models because it focuses on the
general dynamics of processes and has no preconceived notions
about mechanisms. An example is the model integrating basic dynamic
principles from Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories
(Van Geert, 1998).
Third, dynamic systems lend themselves easily to the building
of simulation models, which are great “didactic” tools
because they allow the user to actively discover the possible
developmental pathways that a set of processes can generate.
These models show that complexity is a matter not so much of
the number of interacting components, but of the dynamic complexity
that arises with even a small number of interacting components.
In addition, simulation models provide deductive tools for generating
specific empirical predictions that can be tested against available
empirical evidence, and can also lead to new types of research.
Maryanne Wolf
How the Brain Learns to Read and What Happens When It Can’t:
Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience for
Intervention in Dyslexia
Written language represents one of the major breakthroughs in
the cognitive evolution of the species. It is a remarkable example
of the human brain’s capacity to use novel connections
within its genetically-given physiological structures to create
new functions. Equally remarkable is the development of reading
in the child: it is a superb example of how the brain learns
an evolutionarily recent cognitive skill through the rearrangement
of older neurological structures. The study of reading’s
evolution, development, and pathology contributes to our understanding
of how the brain learns, but also, importantly, informs treatment
of reading problems for children who struggle to learn to read.
This paper will describe a research program that uses evidence
from reading’s evolution, development, and pathology to
construct a broadened conceptualization of both reading and reading
breakdown in developmental dyslexia. The importance of this view
of the reading process lies in its more comprehensive approach
to the treatment of reading acquisition difficulty. An intervention
for struggling beginning readers will be presented that is based
on the conceptualization that there are multiple components involved
in reading and thus multiple, possible sources of breakdown.
Emerging data show that this intervention supports gains in multiple
components of reading for various types of dyslexic readers.
Landmark School: Robert Kahn and Christopher Murphy
Connecting Research and Practice at Landmark
Landmark School’s founder, Dr. Charles Drake, was a dyslexic
who based the school’s philosophy and methodologies on
his own experience. Increasingly, research into the nature of
language-based learning disabilities (LBLD) and brain-based learning
has validated much of what Drake believed. This paper identifies
practices employed at Landmark to teach teachers how to work
with LBLD students and to teach students how to learn and be
effective advocates for their learning needs. Landmark faculty
are introduced to the rationale for multisensory learning, the
neuroanatomy of attention and memory, and the need for a fundamentally
organized, emotionally sound, socially appropriate community
conducive to remediation.
Landmark’s specific reading and math approaches have been
refined by experience and informed by research into phonemic
awareness, visual processing, and memory load. Current research
initiatives in biology and biochemistry of attention and memory,
the neurological bases of language-based learning disabilities,
cognitive processing, brain-based learning, and emotional intelligence
are connected to selected areas at Landmark’s lower and
upper schools. Students learn to identify factors related to
their own executive functioning and to act as their own advocates
as they navigate a variety of educational and vocational settings.
The social realm at Landmark also reflects conscious choices
about ways to assist students in managing their lives at school
and beyond.
Liz Spelke
Core Knowledge, Combinatorial Capacity, and Education:
The case of
number Abstract:
Research on human infants provides evidence for
two early-developing systems for representing
numerical information: one that serves to represent small numbers
of objects as numerically
distinct individuals, and a second that serves to represent larger
numbers of visual forms,
visible events, or sounds as sets with approximate cardinal values.
Each of these systems emerges
in infancy and continues to be present and functional in educated
adults. Before most children
begin elementary school, moreover, they construct a third system
of numerical representation that
is based in part on the combinatorial functions of natural language.
The latter system overcomes
the central limits of the two core systems and allows children
to represent whole numbers exactly,
with no upper bound. In light of these abilities, I ask two questions.
First, what is the point
of formal, elementary mathematics instruction: are there concepts
and skills that children cannot
develop through the spontaneous exercise of their core knowledge
systems and their combinatorial
capacities? Second, how might mathematics instruction build both
on children's core knowledge and
on their remarkable combinatorial capacities to select learning
opportunities that children find
meaningful and engaging?
Bruce Stewart, Jennifer L. Chidsey, and
Tom Liao, the Ross School
Convergence of the Ross Spiral Curriculum and Mind/Brain
Research
The Ross School interdisciplinary curriculum, developed
around a core of cultural history and practiced with emphasis
on multiple intelligences, offers many opportunities for MBE
collaboration. In science education, we discovered that recent
research applying hierarchical complexity analysis to high-school
students’ energy conceptions supports and informs the historically
integrated design of our physics curriculum. We believe skill
theory can also be applied to sharpen our instruction on the
physics of motion in ninth grade. Astronomy and cosmology (taught
in middle school and high school), and modern physics (in eleventh
and twelfth grades) seem particularly suited for applying skill
theory across developmental levels and ranges.
In our math curriculum, we appeal whenever possible to spatial
intelligence, taking our cue from Euclid. Thus we have a strong
interest in applying skill theory to geometry; opportunities
in our curriculum include geometric constructions in sixth grade,
a preview of geometric proof in seventh, and Euclidean and non-Euclidean
axiomatics in upper levels of our high-school program.
We are intrigued by studies of brain activity and development
suggesting a cyclical pattern of brain wave correlations associated
with the emergence of each new developmental level. Do these
sequences of correlations of different regions occur in micro-development?
Would it be more effective to teach to the bodily-kinesthetic
intelligence before teaching to the musical intelligence? As
a school that applies multiple intelligence theory routinely
in the classroom, such questions are of great interest to us.
