HOW THE BRAIN DECIDES WHAT TO LEARN
In order to learn about the world, an animal needs to do more than just pay attention to its surroundings. It also needs to learn which sights, sounds and sensations in its environment are the most important and monitor how the importance of those details change over time. Yet how humans and other animals track those details has remained a mystery. Now, Stanford biologists report October 26 in Science, they think they've figured out how animals sort through the details. A part of the brain called the paraventricular thalamus, or PVT, serves as a kind of gatekeeper, making sure that the brain identifies and tracks the most salient details of a situation. Although the research, funded in part by the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute's Neurochoice Initiative, is confined to mice for now, the results could one day help researchers better understand how humans learn or even help treat drug addiction, said senior author Xiaoke Chen, an assistant professor of biology. In its most basic form, learning comes down to feedback. For example, if you have a headache and take a drug, you expect the drug will make your headache go away. If you're right, you'll take that drug the next time you have a headache. If you're wrong, you'll try something else. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied this aspect of learning extensively and even traced it to specific parts of the brain that process feedback and drive learning.

CAN YOU LEARN WHILE YOU SLEEP?
Hypnopedia, or the ability to learn during sleep, was popularized in the '60s, with for example the dystopia Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, in which individuals are conditioned to their future tasks during sleep. This concept has been progressively abandoned due to a lack of reliable scientific evidence supporting in-sleep learning abilities. Recently however, few studies showed that the acquisition of elementary associations such as stimulus-reflex response is possible during sleep, both in humans and in animals. Nevertheless, it is not clear if sleep allows for more sophisticated forms of learning. A study published this August 6 in the journal Scientific Reports by researchers from the ULB Neuroscience Institute shows that while our brain is able to continue perceiving sounds during sleep like at wake, the ability to group these sounds according to their organization in a sequence is only present at wakefulness, and completely disappears during sleep.


INTEGRATING ACTIVE LEARNING
James Salsich, writes, "During my career, I have at times struggled with the effectiveness of active learning in my classroom. But after reflecting and planning over the summer, I have always returned to school convinced more than ever of the dire need for our students to claim ownership of their learning. Active learning is student-driven, teaches students how to learn in collaboration with their peers, and asks teachers to give some portion of the authority that has traditionally been theirs over to students. Students, on the other hand, take increased ownership for the direction and progress of their learning. However, when we take a step toward this student-centered approach to teaching, we must first help our students to unlearn some problematic ideas. When we ask our students to adapt to a more complex, self-directed, self-regulated approach, we are often going against their very beliefs about how people learn. It is a process that is most successful when implemented gradually and purposefully." Continue reading here.

TEACHING THE ART OF ARGUMENT
David J. Kujawski has written a good article explaining the basics of Present, Critique, Reflect, and Refine (PCRR) as a teaching strategy. Although he writes from a science background, the pedagogy of PCRR can be altered to accommodate any type of class. The method is especially useful for creating a culture of learning through argumentation. Kujawski writes, “The PCRR strategy promotes conceptual understanding of scientific phenomena in various disciplinary core ideas through the development of explanatory models that can later be applied to enrich student understanding and help explain other phenomena. [It also] develops an inquiry-driven, evidence-based mindset that supports model-based science teaching and three dimensional learning and assessment.” You can read more in his article “Present, Critique, Reflect, and Refine: Supporting Evidence-Based Argumentation Through Conceptual Modeling” that appears in Science Scope’s December 2015 issue.

COMPLETION BUILDS SELF EFFICACY
Rod, Risely, executive director of Phi Theta Kappa, released an op-ed piece about community college completion that presents a compelling case. He writes, "One has to wonder why, when the first community college was established in 1901 to provide access to higher education, completing college was not seen as integral to its mission. Clearly, today completion must be seen as central to the mission of our community colleges. To continue with our automotive analogy, it is a moral imperative that our institutions take responsibility for providing its consumers the tools and knowledge to “build a car” with the appropriate features that will lead them down a road toward economic prosperity and well-being.  Community colleges must change their approach and accept responsibility for advising students upon enrollment on the importance of completing the associate degree prior to transferring to senior colleges. Studies show that community college students who transfer to senior colleges prior to earning the associate degree significantly increase their chances of never earning the baccalaureate degree."

LOOKING BACK TO PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE
David Gooblar urges us to encourage our students to be critically self-reflective about themselves and notes that the end of the semester is a great time to do it. He writes, "There are many reasons to have students complete self-evaluations at semester’s end, but perhaps the best is that the exercise encourages metacognition --- essentially “thinking about one’s thinking” — particularly in the context of getting students to consider their approach to our courses as they progress. But metacognition is a significantly valuable tool at the end of a course, when there are so many opportunities for self-reflection. At that point, students have been working on the same subject for more than three months; before they move on to other courses, and other professors, give them time and space to reflect on what they’ve done, and how they’ve done it. A self-evaluation is a great way to get students to assess how they approached the course with an eye to improving their learning strategies in the future. It can also help cement the particular skills they learned in your course — in effect, they remind themselves of the skills they’ve acquired, and may be more likely to put them to use in the future."