Giving Compass' Take:

• Getting Smart profiles neuroscientist Melina Ucapher and lists what she learned about the brain that can apply to education, including the benefits of social learning and how stress hinders expression.

• It's always a good idea to know how our brains work in order to direct more effective programs for students, and these nine lessons can go a long way for funders interested in evidence-based learning.

• Don't forget the social aspect, too. Here's how growing up poor rewires a child's brain.

A high school chemistry teacher and a grandmother with Parkinson’s disease spurred Melina Uncapher’s interest in science. She earned her Ph.D. in neurobiology at UC Irvine. Her doctoral work, completed a decade ago at the beginning of the smartphone revolution, was on learning when attention is divided.

After postdoctoral studies at Stanford, Uncapher accepted a faculty position in Neurology at UC San Francisco, a medical school with a strong outreach mission. As cofounder and CEO of the Institute for Applied Neuroscience, Dr. Uncapher arms educators with information on how the brain works, and how an understanding of the science of learning can guide education practices. Her UCSF lab conducts research on how executive functioning (particularly attention, goal management, and working memory) contributes to academic achievement.

There are three stages of learning: encoding, storage, and retrieval, according to Dr. Uncapher. As a leading translator of what is known about the brain and how humans learn, she cites nine research-based lessons:

  1. Paying undivided attention helps encode new learning into a stronger memory, making information meaningful and relevant.
  2. Making learning socially or self-relevant helps boost the signal and encodes a stronger memory.
  3. Learning at the edge of mastery provides challenge and boosts encoding.
  4. Sleep helps storage — it solidifies and consolidates memory.
  5. Blue light from our screens interferes with sleep. Avoid reading on a screen before bed.
  6. Aerobic exercise can make the brain more plastic and ready to learn.
  7. Stress and adversity can hinder the expression of executive function.
  8. Practice brings knowledge out of long-term memory, and reshapes and restores it.
  9. Activities that build agency (factors under learner control) boosts attention.

Read the full article about brain science by Tom Vander Ark at Getting Smart