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.

DOES A BAD GRADE MOTIVATE OUR STUDENTS?
David Gooblar wrote a terrific post a while back that is filled with great information specifically about grades and motivation. He wrote, "In an exhaustive review of the literature on formative assessment, two researchers at King's College drew on a number of sources who have documented a phenomenon familiar to many faculty — that is, students’ reluctance to be drawn into a more serious engagement with learning work. Such students, for a variety of reasons, do not primarily aspire to learn as much as possible. Rather, they want to get by with minimal effort, avoiding any disasters along the way. For those students (and it's fair to say my student who wrote a poor essay falls into this category), a properly bad grade might be just such a disaster. A bad grade might be the jolt that lets those students know their current approach is not working. But if we acknowledge that grades might be able to help in our efforts to motivate students, we also have to understand that we can't rely on grades alone." Keep reading here.

MAYBE A NUDGE CAN HELP YOUR STUDENTS

A few years ago, Dr. Zoë Cohen noticed a troubling sign in her “Physiology of the Immune System” course: A larger number of students than usual had failed the first exam. Cohen had changed up the way she taught the course that year, part of a broader push toward active learning at the University of Arizona, where she is an assistant professor. The different style was probably a big adjustment for her upper-level students after years of taking lecture-based courses, she thought. Cohen wanted to help those students. But the course is a large one, with between 160 and 200 students, and she didn’t want to increase her workload. So she came up with a low-touch way to intervene: sending a personalized, supportive email. For a small investment of time, Cohen was able to signal to students that she cared. And she thinks the move even boosted recipients’ performance in the course. Read the entire post here.

HOW TO TEACH TO ALL YOUR STUDENTS
Dr. Matthew Wright has posted an article that is full of aha-moments. He writes, "Faculty members are generally happy to select out a few elite students who they are confident can make it all the way to the top. For these few bright and gifted students, the college experience becomes almost otherworldly. They do research projects with their professors, network with superstars in their field, travel to exotic locations, and give papers at major conferences. Their professors become role models and mentors who help them transition to greatness. But remember, most of the professors are elite folks themselves. You have to be to make it through the maze that a typical professor endures to get to the coveted tenure-track positions. So, essentially, you end up with the top five percent of educated elites teaching to the top five percent of elite students. That’s messed up." Keep reading here.