What is the fundamental purpose of the brain? Although the brain can perform a multitude of complicated thinking tasks, its main purpose is the survival of the individual and the species. Throughout the course of cerebral development, those neural features that enhanced survival endured, whereas those that didn't eventually disappeared. In a very real sense, we are "programmed" to pay attention to and remember stimuli that keep us alive and functioning. Our brain is designed to scan its environment constantly, to make sense of what it experiences, and to determine whether the incoming information is meaningful for survival. Information that the brain determines is important is much more likely to be attended to, stored, and later retrieved than that which the brain decides is meaningless or of little consequence.
We could easily argue that much of what we teach in schools has little survival value. Punctuating sentences, measuring angles, solving equations, or analyzing social systems are activities that students' brains often find meaningless or difficult to understand. Yet, we could also argue that all of these examples are essential for survival in modern society.
How do we solve this educational quandary? Telling our students how important correct punctuation will be to them later in life is ineffective. Assigning page after page of equations hoping that the process will eventually sink in is also unlikely to result in real understanding or in an ability to apply the process to new situations.
Finding ways to infuse meaning into what we teach is difficult. But in this new century, when information is expanding at breathtaking rates and the ability to apply learning is crucial, we must use all the resources available. Developments in neuroscience and cognitive science, as well as research on effective teaching methods, provide valuable applications for the classroom.
Meaning and the Brain
If our goal is to make the curriculum meaningful, we first have to define meaning in terms of brain functions. The neural processes that lead to the storage of meaningful information begin with the input of sensory data. Our bodies are constantly bombarded with sensory data: sights, sounds, tactile sensations, smells, and tastes. It would be useless for the brain to pay conscious attention to all this information because much of it is not important. The brain immediately begins a filtering process to determine which data are relevant and need our conscious attention and which are irrelevant and need to be discarded.
How does the brain determine what to keep or drop? A major factor is whether the incoming information has a recognizable pattern or feature. Throughout our lives, we store information in neural circuits. To comprehend new data, the brain searches through these previously established neural networks to see whether it can find a place to fit the new information.
For example, a teacher prepares her 4th grade students for the concept of ratio. If the students have not been exposed to this concept, the lesson will have little or no meaning because the students can't link it to an earlier experience. The teacher, understanding that the brain sifts out information that has no meaning, brings to class a can of frozen juice and asks the students whether they have ever mixed juice using a concentrate. After receiving a positive response, she asks them how to mix the juice. The students tell her to blend three cans of water with one can of concentrate. The teacher tells them that this recipe uses a ratio of three parts water to one part concentrate. Finally, she asks them to brainstorm other examples of ratio from their own experiences.
This teacher increased the probability that the term ratio would have meaning for the students by linking it to information that was already stored in their brains. This is not a new teaching strategy. Educational researchers have demonstrated that previous experience enhances the understanding of new information. Today, however, we are in a better position to understand why it happens: If the brain can retrieve stored information that is similar to new information, it is more likely to make sense of the new information. This leads to increased understanding and retention.
Linking Meaning to Experience
At Jefferson High School in Anytown, U.S.A., two teachers introduce an ecology unit to their biology classes. Mr. A begins by writing an extensive list of important vocabulary terms (habitat, niche, predator, prey, food web) on the board. He asks the students to take notes as he defines each term, including specific examples from his own experience. At the end of the lesson, Mr. A assigns questions from the ecology chapter of the textbook as homework and warns the students to be ready for a test the next day.
Across the hall, Mrs. B uses a strikingly different approach. She starts the lesson by asking her students to think quietly about their favorite outdoor places and then write short descriptions of those spots. After 15 minutes, Mrs. B asks volunteers to read excerpts from their papers. Enthusiastic comments—"Oh, yeah! That's a cool place!" and "No fair, man! That's my spot!"—fly across the room. After several students share their favorite places, Mrs. B suggests that they look at these spots from a new perspective—an ecological point of view. To do that, she says, they'll find that some new words are useful, and she distributes a sheet of ecology vocabulary terms. The homework assignment is to look up the definitions and to give specific examples linked to the students' favorite outdoor places, if possible. "Tomorrow," she says, "we'll discuss how these terms are interrelated and how you can group them to make them easier to understand."
Which lesson will have the most meaning? Having used both methods, we can say without hesitation that Mrs. B's strategy is much more effective for student involvement, retention, understanding, and applications of the information in new settings. As this example shows, linking new information to previously stored information accomplishes two things. First, the students can see that they already have some knowledge about the new topic and are less apprehensive. Second, the personalization of the new topic lends meaning or relevance to the information, which makes it more interesting. Interesting information is much more readily learned.
A common problem is that the brain has difficulty making meaning out of very large numbers. We read in the newspaper that a federal program is estimated to cost taxpayers more than $100 million. Do we really comprehend how much money that is? How much is $1 million—or $1 billion or $1 trillion? To most of us, these numbers are too large to understand fully because they aren't part of our experience. But visual images help. For example, a 4-inch stack of new $1 thousand bills (tightly bound) would equal $1 million. A stack that was a city block-long would equal $1 billion, and a stack that was 63 miles from start to finish would equal $1 trillion. Analogies, metaphors, and similes are excellent ways to help the brain find links between new data and that which is already stored.
Creating New Experiences
In a perfect world, the teacher would tie all new information to the previous experiences of students. But as we know, this isn't always possible. What if we can't help students make an association to something they already know?
Consider that much of the information stored in our neural networks has come not from associations but from our concrete experiences. This is how the vast majority of connections are made in the early years before formal schooling begins. Understanding that we create new neural networks through experience gives us a second avenue for making the curriculum meaningful. Because our strongest neural networks are formed from actual experience, we should involve students in solving authentic problems in their school or community. Figuring out the area of a classroom or the dimensions of the school playground will be more effective introductions to measurement concepts than will paper-and-pencil activities.
A secondary-level environmental science teacher asked her class to redesign the ugly, useless quad area in the center of the campus. Working in groups, the students measured the quad and drew scale models of the designs on easel-sized graph paper. Each design was different, but each incorporated a variety of environmentally sound concepts. Finally, students gave oral presentations to students, teachers, and the school principal. Some of the students' ideas were incorporated into the final design for the quad renovation.
A 5th grade teacher in Napa, California, hoping to increase his students' understanding of the role of public opinion in the presidential election, had students conduct a poll at their local mall. They tabulated their results and discussed the implications.
In a school-to-career program in San Bernardino County, California, teachers contacted local business owners and asked them to list their workplace problems. Groups of students were challenged to come up with possible solutions. The students set up interviews with the business owners to gain a better understanding of the problems. After analyzing the data, the students brainstormed and selected the most feasible solution. Finally, they presented their solution to the business owners. The owners accepted and implemented most of the students' solutions, and teachers reported that the students' motivation, sense of efficacy, and self-esteem were immeasurably improved.
Creative teachers report numerous other examples of using community resources to add meaning to what they teach. Students in a middle school special-education class who were studying the Great Depression interviewed senior citizens in a mobile-home park about their experiences during that era. Later in the year, during a discussion about living on a fixed income, the students decided to interview the seniors a second time. The teacher found unexpected side benefits: a bonding between the seniors and the students and a large number of senior volunteers in her classroom.
Even young children can become involved in meaningful activities. In a study of television and violence, 2nd grade students generated a list of actions that they considered violent. They analyzed a number of children's videos and created graphs depicting the number of violent acts in each video. They eventually wrote a "Declaration of Independence from Violence," which they presented to other students in the school, urging them not to watch violent programs or buy products advertised on those programs.
What do these examples have in common? The activities are more meaningful to the students than such traditional activities as reading a chapter and answering questions or solving textbook problems that have little relevance to the students' own lives.
The curriculum cannot always be addressed by real-life activities, however. At times, these activities are neither desirable nor feasible. Simulations, then, become useful teaching strategies.
One effective simulation translates statistical information about the earth's population and makes the unequal distribution of resources come alive with a more manageable scale model of the world. The classroom divides into six major geopolitical regions, and students are assigned to populate each region in the same proportion that exists in the real world. In a group of 52 students, for example, three students would populate North America, whereas 31 would populate Asia. The class could represent resources with common items: chocolate candies for wealth, peanuts for protein, and matchbooks for energy consumption. Students could easily identify the haves and the have-nots when they see three North Americans with 45 pieces of candy and 28 matchbooks, compared with the six candy pieces and four matchbooks shared by 31 Asians.
To help elementary students understand the seemingly counterintuitive fact that sound travels faster through a solid than a gas, a teacher has several students "become" molecules by first spreading them far apart (as in a gas) and then bringing them very close together (as in a solid). One student who represents sound touches the first molecule, which then touches the second, and so on. Students see how much faster the sound travels through the closely spaced molecules than the molecules that are spaced far apart.
Punctuation and new vocabulary are also often meaningless to students. One 2nd grade teacher has her students "walk" the punctuation marks as they read silently. They pause for commas, stop for periods, jump for exclamation marks, and shrug their shoulders for question marks. Another teacher, rather than have his middle school students memorize dictionary definitions of new vocabulary, teaches them to create vocabulary posters that depict the meanings of words, which the students then use to teach their peers. He reports that their understanding and retention of word meanings has increased tremendously.
Ensuring Understanding
The possibilities for making the curriculum meaningful are endless. These examples are but a few of the many brain-congruent activities available to teachers. If the content is rigorous and relevant, debates, storytelling, art, music, drama, games, mnemonics, graphic organizers, and hands- and minds-on laboratories can dramatically enhance student understanding.
