Learning How to Learn Week 4 Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential

Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential - Part 1: Better Learner

How to Become a Better Learner

• Exercise
  • New neurons are born everyday, like in hippocampus
  • New neurons can be used and survive though use
  • Exercise benefits brain and all organs
  • Exercise also helps new neurons survive
• Practice makes perfect
  • Practice can prepare and repair the brain
  • There are critical periods in life when sudden improvements occur in specific abilities. Example is critical period for first language acquisition extends to puberty
  • People with brain damage can suffer planning, language and learning decisions. In the brain, the prefrontal cortex is involved in complex analysis in social behaviours, as well as decision making and planning.
  • It is the last part of the cortex to mature, so until this happens, there may be a little bit of zombie in you (brain development takes time)

Rat learning pictures with old neurons and new neurons in red being formed in background

Introduction to Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential

• “Knowledge collapse” - It is natural if what you are learning becomes temporary frustrating or cannot be understood. It means the brain is rebuilding a foundation to take the next step in learning
• Module topics:
  • Learn using metaphors and analogies
  • Profitably work with teammates
  • Perform well on tests

Create a Lively Visual Metaphor or Analogy

• Metaphor is realising something is similar to another
  • Examples: Electrical currents like flow of water; art visualization of concepts
  • Imagine you are inside the metaphor
  • Even science concepts are metaphors

Cat ion metaphor with cat and paws being positive (paw-sitive) words

Many attack angles to a fort like low intensity rays destroying cancerous tumour

• Stories can create connections

No Need for Genius Envy or Impostor syndrome

• Example: In baseball, your body learns about hitting a ball over many years
• After time, your mind will know the what and why. You learn complex concepts over time rather than just having someone explain it to you.
• The ability to have attention shifted and/or a smaller working memory can bring creativity and innovation. Brings sensory cortex, chunks for use in ideation.
• Practice mental patterns to improve your mind like building muscles with weights.

Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life

• Case study: Santiago Ramón y Cajal growth from a young delinquent to father of neuroscience and Nobel Prize winner
  • His thinking patterns was able to change how he thought
  • He could change his mind and admit errors and grow the mind even if you started out as a poor student
  • Understood there will always be critics, especially if you are successful
    • Ok to tune these people out
    • Take pride in who you are and different
• “Take responsibility for your own learning”

Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential - Part 2: Teamwork and Testing

The Value of Teamwork - Avoid overconfidence

• Brain research supports right hemisphere is important in doing reality checks, like a Devil’s Advocate to check for inconsistencies

  • Example: Is it normal that a hot dog stand makes $1 billion? No
  • Left hemisphere interprets the world for us, analytical approach

• People with strokes with brain damage can reveal pathology with brain use

• How to check yourself?

  • Work with others, finds your own errors
  • Others can function like a larger scale diffuse mode to check work
  • Concentrate on work and studying. Keep socializing as separate.

A Test Checklist

• Testing is important for learning and memory retention
• Like before flying, doing a surgery - checklist increase your change of success

1. Test Preparation Checklist, by Richard Felder, PhD.

   The answer to the question “How should I prepare for the test? Is ‐ Do whatever it takes to be able to answer “Yes” (meaning usually) to most of the questions on this list.

   1. Did you make a serious effort to understand the text? (Just hunting for relevant worked out examples doesn’t count.)
   2. Did you work with classmates on homework problems, or at least check your solutions with others?
   3. Did you attempt to outline every homework problem solution before working with classmates?
   4. Did you participate actively in homework group discussions (contributing ideas, asking questions)?
   5. Did you consult the instructor or teaching assistants when you were having trouble with something?
   6. Did you understand ALL of your homework problem solutions when they were handed in?
   7. Did you ask in class for explanations of homework problem solutions that weren’t clear to you?
   8. If you had a study guide, did you carefully go through it before the test and convince yourself that you could do everything on it?
   9. Did you attempt to outline lots of problem solutions quickly, without spending time on the algebra and calculations?
   10. Did you go over the study guide and problems with classmates and quiz one another?
   11. If there was a review session before the test, did you attend it and ask questions about anything you weren’t sure about?
   12. Did you get a reasonable night’s sleep before the test? (If your answer is no, your answers to 1–11 may not matter.)

   Yes No TOTAL

   1. Credits

      • Richard M. Felder, courtesy Richard M. Felder.
      • Checklist courtesy Chemical Engineering Education and Richard Felder; Felder, Richard M. “Memo to Students Who Have Been
        • Disappointed with Their Test Grades.” Chemical Engineering Education 33, no. 2 (1999): 136‐37.

Hard Start - Jump to Easy

• Scan test, recommendation is look at hard problems like for 1 minute, but quickly jump to easy ones to allow diffuse mode to work on hard ones
  • Makes progress on all answers
  • Avoids einstellung (getting stuck on a problem)
  • Requires discipline to pull yourself from a hard problem
• Most people do not have problems pulling away from a hard problem
  • You can practice on hard homework problems

Zombie on a trampoline, like jumping to easy problems

• As you return to hard problems, you can find it will seem easier

• Like a chef, waiting for a large item cooking, then while waiting do smaller tasks like vegetable preparation

Final Helpful Hints for Tests

• Body puts out cortisol during stress, which can happen in test
  • You can control how you react

1. Relaxation Techniques

   • “This test got me excited to do my best”
   • Relax your stomach, place your hand on it, slow a draw breath
     • Practice this technique regularly
   • Pretend you are in a calm environment
   • Face your fears, have a plan B - you will do your best on the test and what comes is ok

2. Test Preparation and Taking

   • Close to before test, review materials, but take it easy - you have already prepared
   • Check your answer from a big picture perspective
   • Check answers from back to front, fresh perspective to check

   Techniques above will use focused and diffuse modes

Summary of Renaissance Learning, Teamwork, and Testing