R3 1.19 October 19, 2023 Do Student and Teacher Brains Synchronize During Learning?
This issue of R3 considers intriguing new findings in the neuroscience of attention, directly applied to teaching and learning.
The work I’m sharing today picks up a theme from a few issues back - the neuroscience of attention and how that plays out in learning situations. The article below takes on a phenomenon called shared attention, describing what happens when different people are focused on the same thing in a teaching and learning context (in this case, a simulated face-to-face science lesson).
The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive technique for detecting and recording fluctuations in electrical activity (which, in turn, reflects shifts in patterns of activity within large, coordinated groups of brain cells). One advantage of EEG is that it can pick up changes over very small periods of time (thousandths of a second), allowing for more precise tracking compared to other methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this particular study, this enabled researchers to draw links between attention at very specific points in a lesson and what students remembered later on.
Citation:
Davidesco, I., Laurent, E., Valk, H., West, T., Milne, C., Poeppel, D., & Dikker, S. (2023). The temporal dynamics of brain-to-brain synchrony between students and teachers predict learning outcomes. Psychological Science, 34(5), 633–643.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231163872
Paywall or Open:
Paywall
Summary:
Researchers recorded brain wave patterns from young adult students and from a professional science teacher during a simulated in-class science lesson. These patterns tended to correlate, or “synchronize,” among students and teachers during instruction, and the degree of synchrony predicted achievement of learning outcomes from the lessons.
Sample:
Forty-three undergraduate student participants, 28 female; all were right-handed native English speakers between 18 and 30 without a history of neurological conditions. All were non-science majors (presumably to control variability in how much participants already knew about the test material). Participants were recruited through the psychology department research pool and from ads posted on campus.
Two professional high school science teachers also participated, playing the role of instructors in the simulated lesson.
Method/Design:
Mini-lecture style lessons were developed on science concepts (e.g., bipedalism, insulin). Participants took a pre-test, consisting of both multiple-choice and open-ended questions, on the concepts about a week prior to the study. During the study itself, simulated lecture-style lessons were presented by professional teachers. EEG measurements were gathered from everyone during the presentations, including both the volunteers playing the role of students and those playing the role of teachers. Participants playing the role of students completed post-tests on the lesson content.
EEG data were analyzed for evidence of brain-to-brain synchrony (BBS) during the lesson. BBS is measured by assessing the degree of similarity or overlap in brain wave patterns between two or more individuals during a particular period of time. The exact significance and origins of BBS is still only partially understood. However, it is thought to reflect shared attention, a distinct mental state in which two or more people are attending to the same thing in the surrounding environment.
Researchers also assessed whether students learned particular concepts within the lessons, and correlated that learning with the presence of BBS while the concept was being presented. “Learning” was defined as correctly answering a question on the post-test, but not on the pre-test.
Key Findings:
Evidence of BBS was found during the simulated lessons, both with respect to synchronized brain activity between students and also between students and the instructor. When compared across different groups of students, EEG activity was more synchronized when they were experiencing the identical lesson than when they were experiencing different lessons. Notably, those students displaying more BBS learned more of the lesson material overall. Furthermore, with respect to specific concepts within the lessons, greater BBS during particular points of the lesson predicted learning. In other words, if a student showed higher BBS while a concept was presented, they were more likely to remember that concept later on. Lastly, students learned more in general when overall group BBS was higher during the lesson.
Choice Quote from the Article:
In this study, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to track the brain activity of small groups of students and their teacher during a lecture. We found that the level of brain-to-brain synchrony between students and teachers predicted student learning: Students with more similar brain responses to other students and to the teacher showed better learning outcomes. Further, brain-to-brain synchrony during specific segments of the lecture predicted how students answered individual test questions.
Why it Matters:
This study is just plain fascinating, raising new questions about how our brains transcend space and physical separation to enable us to communicate, connect, and learn. It illustrates the power of focusing together on a lesson in a common space. Fans of the idea that learning is fundamentally a social endeavor are going to like having some new, concrete evidence of the social context at work.
It's also a demonstration of a principle I talk about a lot in my own work – that memory and attention are so tightly interlinked that they can’t be separated. There’s lots of older work demonstrating that for all practical purposes, we remember virtually nothing we weren’t paying attention to when we first encountered it. This study adds a brand new perspective on the link between those two cognitive processes.
Speaking of practical purposes, it’s true that this is not the sort of study that culminates in a set of recommendations for practice. However, I think it is not too much of a stretch to say that it should encourage teachers to think deliberately about how student focus is captured and cultivated in face-to-face learning situations (a topic that you can explore to your heart’s content in this book).
If teachers were to push just a bit more to get students to focus together as a group, it wouldn’t hurt and might help. Perhaps telling students about brain to brain synchrony could encourage them to do just that.
Most Relevant For:
Instructional designers; those interested in the neuroscience of learning; faculty and leaders involved in STEM education; secondary-education or high-school STEM teachers
Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:
The wow-factor of brain-to-brain synchrony could be a liability as well. We wouldn’t want to run away with overly fantastical interpretations - like the idea that synchrony in EEG pattern means that people are thinking about the same thing. EEG has been incredibly useful as a way to explore various topics in the neuroscience of consciousness, attention, and many other things – but we can’t draw a line between those data and the contents of thought. Especially if we were to share this work with students, we’d want to stress that what is happening here is not telepathy, mind-reading or anything like that.
I also want to make what has become, for me, a kind of a standard disclaimer about memory. Like many studies in learning sciences, this one uses retention of knowledge – i.e., memory – as a stand-in for learning in general. Yet I doubt that these authors would claim that memory for content is all we’re aiming for in teaching, or that their measures cover all meaningful facets of learning. I certainly wouldn’t. That said, memory for content is an important component of learning, even in advanced college-level courses, and there are many good reasons to emphasize it, even in an age where technology puts facts at our fingertips. These are all themes that I go into in a lot more depth in my recent book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World .
Like some other studies in this space, this one focuses on one age group but suggests that findings would generalize to others. In this case, the study gathers data from young adult learners, yet in a few places it discusses how the BBS concept might apply to teaching younger kids. This seems to me to be a reasonable extension of their findings, but it’s a point of caution for readers who are specifically interested in K-12 learning.
Lastly, although the paradigm did engage the students in some active application of lesson concepts, the data of interest were gathered during the lecture portion only. One major reason for this is that while you can physically move around (to an extent) while hooked up to EEG sensors, physical activities like speaking or moving your head will throw off the measurements. And so, strictly speaking, these findings don’t directly say much about what might be going on during labs, think-pair-share, or other active learning components where shared attention would be coming into play.
If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:
Babiloni, F., & Astolfi, L. (2014). Social neuroscience and hyperscanning techniques: Past, present and future. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 44, 76–93.
Hamilton, A. F. (2021). Hyperscanning: Beyond the hype. Neuron, 109(3), 404–407.
Lang., J. (2020). Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It. Basic Books.
Miller, M. (2022). Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. West Virginia University Press.
Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., Saporta, N., Marton-Alper, I. Z., & Gvirts, H. Z. (2019). Herding brains: A core neural mechanism for social alignment. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(3), 174–186.
File under: neuroscience; attention; STEM teaching and learning; social contexts for learning