Brain-Based Learning

Building Brain Literacy in Elementary Students

Image source: iStockphoto

Practice Makes Perfect
For many students, the brain isn't a hot topic of conversation. This is especially true for younger students who are still trying to understand the world around them, and are still far from developing physiological self-awareness of the very thing that gives them that self-awareness.

But helping students develop "brain literacy" doesn't have to be a matter of dry science pumped full of confusing jargon. Understanding the brain can be empowering for students as they recognize their ability to strengthen it each time they use it. As a teacher, you can emphasize how using the executive functions, both in the classroom and outside of school, increases their strength for academic success.

Practice makes perfect!

To reduce anxiety about new "stuff" in the classroom -- whether related to Common Core State Standards, struggles with reading, or something else entirely -- you can find opportunities to emphasize students' ability to literally build the brains they want. Remind them that, when they turn in a story, demonstrate a science principle in a skit, or even raise their hand to respond to a question, they grow more dendrites and add new layers of myelin to their axons. To them this may sound gross, but it's actually good news. By activating these brain networks, they continuously use their executive functions as they apply new learning. Like a muscle, the brain responds to interaction and activity.

Much of this kind of thinking starts with an awareness of the brain itself, and how it functions.

Helping Students Understand Their Brains
One way to help students begin to understand their brains is by explaining specific types of executive functions -- or "brain actions."

You can support this instruction by explaining which executive functions will be activated during a unit, and how. Then invite students to describe the executive functions they believe they activated in the day's lesson, homework, assessment or even interaction with apps, friends or social networks.
Be specific. Remind them how the math word problem they worked on strengthened their organizing and prioritizing, which resulted in more dendrites in their brain's connections.

Describe how the multiple types of history documents they evaluated built their networks of reasoning and deduction, and added more myelin to the axons in those brain highways.

Through your words, diagrams and pipe-cleaner representations of the neuroplastic response, students' confidence in their executive functions will increase, along with their comfort and pleasure in their growing independence and self-awareness.

Building Student "Brain Literacy"
 A second grade class could have an "Executive Function of the Week." After introducing a new function and giving an example, you could invite students to offer their own examples. The emphasis here should not be on a formal definition, but an understanding about how they have applied and increased their capacity.

Other examples for elementary students might include:

Judgment

• What is a fair way to take turns when six students want to play 4-Square, a two-person handball game?
• What do you say when a friend is being mean to another classmate?
• How do you respond differently when a two-year old sibling, a new puppy, or an older brother damages your toy?
• Which library book do you select when you like three and can choose only one?
• How much paint of each color should you take for your table group's project?

Priority

• Which television programs do you most want to watch for your hour of TV?
• Which of your favorite stuffed animals should you pack for vacation when there is room for only two?
• Should you take full notes during a lecture or jot down key words to fill in later from a book or with a classmate?

Organize

• How do you sort your music on playlists?
• How do you find and sort art materials for others?
• How do you organize your classroom desk materials?

Analyze

• What strategies are best when playing a card or video game (independently and with others)?
• Is something your friend said about monsters in their closet true? How can you find out?
• Which your favorite video games can you complete? Which might be too easy or too hard?
• What does a new word mean based on context clues?

Cognitive Flexibility

• Cognitive flexibility and emotional self-control both support students' capacity to be more responsive to corrective feedback and learn from mistakes (rather than reacting to them as further evidence of the futility of their effort).
• How do you react when a substitute teacher does things a different way?
• How do you adapt when disappointed by changes in family plans?
• When you don't get your first choice of the topic you want to write about, how do you find things you like about one of the other choices?

A Growing Awareness
Just as students are aware of the health of their teeth, limbs or senses, they can also develop a recognition of how their brain functions, specifically which executive functions they use and when. This kind of visibility can help students build a powerful awareness of their own thinking patterns, and how "school" and "play" are not always so different at the brain level. It can build confidence, reduce stress, and keep them cognitively primed for learning, while also increasing their "fluency" with very basic neurology -- which may not be as crazy as it sounds.

My next blog will examine ways to gradually increase activating executive functions across all levels of academic instruction and assessment. The plan builds upon progressive successes that will reveal students' incremental progress as they achieve new challenges.


ORIGINAL: Edutopia
JUDY WILLIS MD'S BLOG
NOVEMBER 19, 2013

Unleashing oxygen ‘Superlattice’ structure could give a huge boost to oxygen reaction in fuel cells, increasing their power potential.

ORIGINAL: MIT

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

April 30, 2013

Professor Bilge Yildiz (left) and graduate student Yan Chen stand in front of the scanning tunneling microscope used for their research. PHOTO COURTESY OF BILGE YILDIZ

New research at MIT could dramatically improve the efficiency of fuel cells, which are considered a promising alternative to batteries for powering everything from electronic devices to cars and homes.

Fuel cells make electricity by combining hydrogen, or hydrocarbon fuels, with oxygen. But the most efficient types, called solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC), have drawbacks that have limited their usefulness — including operating temperatures above 700 degrees Celsius (roughly 1300 degrees Fahrenheit). Now, MIT researchers have unraveled the properties of a promising alternative material structure for a key component of these devices.

The new structure, a “superlattice” of two compounds interleaved at a tiny scale, could serve as one of the two electrodes in the fuel cell. The complex material, discovered about six years ago and known as LSC113/214, is composed of two oxides of the elements lanthanum, strontium and cobalt. While one of the oxides was already known as an especially good material for such electrodes, the combination of the two is far more potent in promoting oxygen reduction than either oxide alone. 

The interfaces between these two oxides were thought to be the key. But until now, no one had been able to observe the LSC113/214 interface properties in operation, at sufficiently high resolution, to figure out why it worked so well.

The MIT team used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to study the electrical activity of a superlattice material composed of two different compounds of the elements strontium, lanthanum and cobalt. At bottom, a diagram of how they "sliced" the material on an angle to expose wider bands of the thin layers of material. The center two images show the resulting measurements of the surface topography of the material, and the activity of electrons moving through it. At top, a diagram of the molecular structures of the two compounds. 
GRAPHIC COURTESY OF CHEN ET AL

Oxygen reduction is one of two main reactions in a fuel cell, and the one that has limited their overall performance — so finding improved materials for that reaction could be a key advance for fuel cells, the researchers say. The new findings are published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials in a paper co-authored by graduate student Yan Chen, professors Harry Tuller and Bilge Yildiz, and three other researchers at MIT.

Yildiz, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, says LSC113/214 has been “a singular example” of a material with extremely high reactivity to oxygen reduction; the new results explaining why it works so well could lead to further optimization or the discovery of other materials that might perform even better.

The best of both

The key to the material’s performance, she explains, is the marriage of complementary qualities from its two constituents. One of the oxides allows superior conduction and transfer of electrons, while the other excels at holding onto oxygen atoms; to perform well as a fuel cell’s cathode — one of its two electrodes — a material needs to have both qualities. 

The close proximity of the two materials in this superlattice causes them to “borrow” one another’s attributes, the MIT team found. The result is a material whose reactivity exceeds that of the best materials currently used in fuel cells, Yildiz says: “It’s the best of the two worlds.”

Now that the MIT team has analyzed LSC113/214, it may be possible to discover even better materials by conducting systematic searches, Yildiz says; the team is now working on that. “If we can crack this problem, then we can make great strides in improving the performance,” adds Tuller, a professor of ceramics and electronic materials in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Unique tool enables observations

The finding was made possible by instrumentation developed in Yildiz’s laboratory at MIT for observation of electron-transfer properties on surfaces: The instrument, a modified scanning tunneling microscope (STM), can observe materials at high temperatures and in an oxygen-rich environment — “representative of the operating conditions of a fuel-cell cathode,” Yildiz says. This high-temperature phenomenon would not have been detectable with conventional methods.

Tuller describes the superlattice as a “layer cake” of the two different oxides. But these layers are vanishingly thin. To overcome this, the team “sliced” the layers on an extreme angle, exposing much wider surfaces of each. “That magnifies the layers by a hundredfold,” Tuller says.

That slicing is done using a focused ion beam, Chen explains, to expose the interface in a way that the STM can observe more easily at high temperature.

The researchers hope that with this new knowledge, it will be possible to make rapid progress in the search for better electrode materials, helping make fuel cells practical for a wide range of energy applications, from powering homes to powering mobile devices. 

John Kilner, a professor of energy materials at Imperial College, London, who was not involved in this project, calls this “a very elegant set of experiments that contributes a great deal toward our understanding of the very complex problem of oxygen surface exchange.”

Kilner adds, “It waits to be seen if we can capitalize on this knowledge to aid in the construction of practical devices, but it opens up the possibility of engineering new structures with enhanced performance at low temperatures.”

The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Program.

What if the Internet ran out of room? In fact, it's already happening.

ORIGINAL: Google

Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, and a founding father of the Internet, discusses the next version of the Internet, IPv6, and why we need it.

Why is the internet running out of room?

Just as phones use a system of phone numbers in order to place calls, every Internet-connected device gets a unique number known as an "IP address" that connects it to the global online network.

The problem is that the current Internet addressing system, IPv4, only has room for about 4 billion addresses -- not nearly enough for the world's people, let alone the devices that are online today and those that will be in the future: computers, phones, TVs, watches, fridges, cars, and so on. More than 4 billion devices already share addresses. As IPv4 runs out of free addresses, everyone will need to share.

How are we making space to grow?

Clearly the internet needs more IP addresses. How many more, exactly? Well, how about 340 trillion trillion trillion (or, 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)? That's how many addresses the internet's new "piping," IPv6, can handle. That's a number big enough to give everyone on Earth their own list of billions of IP addresses. Big enough, in other words, to offer the Internet virtually infinite room to grow, from now into the foreseeable future.

When is the transition happening?

At Google we believe IPv6 is essential to the continued health and growth of the Internet and that by allowing all devices to talk to each other directly, IPv6 enables new innovative services. Replacing the Internet's plumbing will take some time, but the transition has begun. World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, marks the start of a coordinated rollout by major websites and Internet service and equipment providers.

You do not need to do anything to prepare, but if you're interested in learning more and supporting IPv6, check out a few frequently asked questions.