The text below is an article I prepared for my course on ‘Cognitive Neuroscience in Education’ as part of the M.Sc SmartEdTech by the Université Côte d’Azur.
Cognitive functions in the work context
I am a teacher of French language and literature at the University of Madras in India. In my context I have to deal with French language learners and French literature learners (Masters students). Generally, students have around 6 hours of class with breaks in between. The second language learners have around 3 hours of classes a week. Both cases are challenging, in that the former group has somewhat of an overload and the latter has too light a coursework. Given the circumstances, teachers must conform to the university stipulated timing. This is further compounded by the fact that students are now having to do the same thing online with very few organisational changes that aid in the transition to virtual learning. How does the current situation impact learning? The answer to the question is a rather unfortunate one, student performance and overall morale is dropping.
In this assignment I will be discussing how I try to overcome these burdens by using some of the principles learnt in class along with facets of my own teaching experience.
Attention:
What is it? – In the course we learnt that “attention is the process of selecting one target among others and staying focussed on it without getting distracted.” This definition describes the mental process of ‘paying’ attention to something an object or an event in the present tense.
Why is it needed? – With the sudden transition to virtual learning, ‘paying attention’ has become a costly affair. Many journalistic reports talk of ‘Zoom Fatigue’ that is described as “the tiredness, worry or burnout associated with overusing virtual platforms of communication” by psychologytoday.com. This means that now more than ever it is primordial for teachers to gain and keep students’ attention for as much as possible using effective means.
Course reminder – We also learn about many facets of the function of attention, two of which caught my eye. We learn that ‘familiarity increases attention’ which means that more the student is exposed to a particular content matter and more they are familiar with it the more they will recognise it and pay attention. We also learn that we are ‘mono-attentive conscious’, this means that finding ways to help the student to concentrate on one task at a time can help increase their attention.
Adaptations to make – Among the many adaptions suggested by the course presenters two important ones caught my eye. They are:
- Attentional pre – activation
- Avoiding Habituation
The reason that these two elements caught my attention is because some level of this rule is something that I already use in my course work. Here is how I adapted them to virtual learning. Every time we are about to talk about an important topic in class or if we are about to start a new task, I display a bright slide with red and green colours that capture the attention of the students while also changing my tone and volume of my voice. This alerts students who may even be distracted or on their phone. I also recruited the help of the student representatives to repeat out loud the instructions on the screen (or sing them) to get the attention of the students or to change the mood a little. This refreshes their attention and their memory. Secondly, I also, avoid repeating too many times the same alert or sound in order to remove habituation.
Memory:
What is it? – The course made it noticeably clear that memory and memorisation were two different concepts and not the same as is often used in common parlance. Memory is the complex aspect of our neural system that aids in reasoning, understanding, adjusting mental models, executing tasks and so on. It is however often confused with memorisation which means the acquisition and the management of data. The course made it clear that the two terms are not interchangeable.
Why is it needed? – Students find fewer opportunities to revise content matter in the new, virtual method of learning. This is because there is less motivation to revisit the content between classes or fewer opportunities to learn on their own as the classes are mostly synchronous. In between synchronous classes the only work that gets done are the assignments and they do not necessarily contribute to the learning aspect per se as they are one-time activities.
Course reminder – We also learn that different kinds of memory systems exist for example, perceptive, semantic, procedural, episodic and working memory. We learnt about the different day-to-day activities that manifest these different memory systems.
Adaptations to make – We learnt in the course that memory needs to be consolidated and several strategies of memory consolidation were presented. Among these the second one called Testing effect really stood out due to its prevalence in the field of education. In this method of memory consolidation, we deal with varied and repeated tests or questioning and building several question banks. One manner of adapting this to my context was to pose questions on the class messenger group about the concept previously taught, in between classes to boost remembrances. Another way to repeatedly pose questions can also be inviting students randomly to share a specific concept learnt in the previous class and make them ask another question to the class.