About Andrew Watson 
Harvard’s Initiative for Teaching and Learning has posted videos of their most recent conference. The topic: interactivity.
As you listen to these Harvard professors, you might find yourself thinking: their students, and their teaching problems, sound a lot like my students and my teaching problems.
Pro tip: each video begins with a very generous introduction. If you skip ahead 3-5 minutes, you’ll get to the good stuff much more quickly…
Is a man’s amygdala larger than a woman’s? And: why does it matter?
The amygdala is central to neural networks that process strong negative emotions: especially fear and anger. Because psychological studies have shown gender differences in the expression of these emotions, researchers have hypothesized that men might have a larger amygdala, on average, than women do.
That is, gendered behavior might have a biological foundation in a gendered brain.
According to a recent meta-analysis of 46 studies: not so much. Lise Eliot’s research team found no statistically significant difference between male and female amydalae.
(More precisely: men’s amygdalae are–on average–10% larger than women’s; but, men’s BRAINS are–on average–10% larger than women’s. So–relative to brain size–there is no meaningful difference.)
Of course, male and female brains are not identical. And: behavioral differences between genders are important.
However, if Eliot’s results hold up, we can no longer say that these behavioral differences result from meaningfully different amygdala sizes.
Research into the benefits of bilingualism has gotten lots of attention in recent years. For example, some scholars argue that being bilingual protects our cognitive dexterity as we age.
However, a recent study suggests a potential downside for bilinguals. Folke et. al. find that, compared to their monolingual peers, young bilingual adults have a harder time with metacognitive processing — that is, analyzing their own cognitive performance.
If further research supports this finding, then teachers and scholars will have to add this potential short-term cognitive detriment to their calculus as they consider long-term cognitive benefits.
To be clear: this research does not show that being bilingual is cognitively bad, or that bilingual education is a bad idea. Instead, it offers one potentially interesting data point for a complex discussion — a discussion that must consider benefits, detriments, and many, many unknowns.
For every enthusiastic voice championing the use of laptops in classrooms, we hear equally skeptical claims. College professors, in particular, have been increasingly vocal about banning distractions to ensure that students stay focused.
James M. Lang–a professor of English, who also also directs the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College–pushes back against such bans.
In a striking comparison, he views problems with distracted laptop users the same way he views problems with cheating.
If lots of students are cheating on a particular assignment, Lang argues, then it’s time for us to change that assignment.
So too with laptop distractions. If lots of students are browsing FB posts, their disorientation lets us know that this current teaching method just isn’t working.
Lang’s argument implies that even if we take away the laptop, our teaching method hasn’t gotten any better.
Provocatively, this argument shifts an important responsibility from students to teachers; Lang, after all, tells us that students’ attention is as much our job as theirs.
Wisely, Lang offers specific classroom approaches to ensure that students use their laptops for good, not for ill.
Russell Poldrack reviews Sex, Lies, and Brain Scans: How fMRI Reveals What Really Goes on in our Minds, by Barbara J. Sahakian and Julia Gottwald.
As Poldrack emphasizes, it’s falling-off-a-log easy to overestimate the power of fMRI: in fields such as lie-detection and neuro-prediction, we regularly see hype and misunderstanding rather than sober and substantial understanding.
My favorite line from the review: “[N]euroimaging is usually only as solid as the behavioural research that underpins it.”
The take-away for teachers: brain images from neuroscience-world are compelling, but we should be sure to have psychology research as well before we make changes in our schools and classrooms.
Nancy Kanwisher asks: is the brain like a kitchen knife, or is it like a Swiss Army knife?
That is: is it one big all-purpose instrument that we use to accomplish many different tasks? Or, is it made up of many distinct mini-tools, each one to be used in a special way under special circumstances?
And: what tool can we use to answer that question?
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Kanwisher starts hunting for a part of the brain that recognizes faces. Even more intriguing, she looks for the part of HER brain that recognizes faces.
The result: a fascinating exploration of our Swiss-Army-Knife brain, and the limits of our knowledge.
At EdSurge News, Sydney Johnson ponders neurotransmitters, social development, and the marvelous Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.
This open letter–signed by many psychologists and neuroscientists well-known to LaTB audiences–argues that current panic about “screen time” isn’t based on evidence.
The authors argue that guidelines ought to be based on clearer thinking and deeper research.
In at least this one college classroom, non-academic laptop use is inversely related to performance on the final exam.
Of course: school teachers may be able to supervise and control our students’ activities while using computers. In other words: this study is interesting to us, but shouldn’t be the final word in the debate.
[Hat tip: Daniel Willingham]
