The Brain and Learning
Lisa discusses the “Mozart effect in the proceeding link.”
http://brainconnection.positscience.com/topics/?main=fa/music-educationTen minutes of listening to Mozart can boost one’s spatial-temporal intelligence.
The reason for this being true has to do with how our brain transmits neural messages.
This research was conducted by Gordon Shaw and Francis Rauscher. With the use of technology, Shaw was able to view the brain’s natural firing pattern and concluded that the patterns were spatial temporal and that listening to Mozart might stimulate a person’s spatial-temporal reasoning. Results from his studies and working with individuals in the education realm demonstrated that listening to Mozart gave individuals a distinct advantage in terms of spatial task performance.
Specifically, Shaw concluded the following :
"The enhancing effect of the music condition is temporal, and does not extend beyond the 10-15 minute period during which subjects were engaged in each spatial task."
"..there are correlational, historical, and anecdotal relationships between music cognition and cognitions pertaining to abstract operations such as mathematical or spatial reasoning.."
There are more studies that reveal a link between music training and the brain within the article.
This article caught my interests primarily because when my students are able to combine classroom concepts into music (songs), they are able to grasp the concept with almost perfection. Without music, my students struggle to remember concepts, such as PEMDAS (order of operations). This article did not provide me with exactly what I was looking for, but it did support that learning and music are closely correlated.
On a scale from 1-10; I’d rate this article an 8 until am able to conduct a study of my own and within my classroom. Being a mathematics teacher, spatial reasoning is very important. Not only does this article relate to this week’s resources but also to my field. I would probably give it a 10 once I see it works for my particular audiences (9th grade students versus college students). However, since the effects are short-term, this project may actually be more for leisure (fun) than practice. With the last week of school approaching I will have many enrichment lessons and this one will be one of them! (I will provide feedback when this time comes!)
Chipongian, C. Can music education really enhance brain functioning and academic learning? (2000). Scientific Learning. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from http://brainconnection.positscience.com/topics/?main=fa/music-education
Mozart
Mozart - Symphony #40 in G Minor (Darkman2023, 2008).
YouTube. (September 12, 2008) Retrieved May 15, 2011, from http://youtu.be/Cf6lwFcsKao
Ricahrd Hall discusses "Informational Processing Theory" in the following link:
“The cognitive or information processing model became much more popular with the advent of computers. At this point psychologists actually had a tool that represented non-observable processes in an observable fashion (Hall, 2011).”
Hall discusses information processing theory; it’s history, evolvement, and compares cognition with artificial intelligence.
“The reason is that we are efficient, we can make inferences quickly with incomplete data (Hall, 2011).”
Hall distinguishes why in the end a being is more reliable for making decisions; we are reliable and efficient. Hall gives excellent examples for why this is so. This article supports what Ormrod was stating in the week’s resource:
People encode the problem, what they decide it's a problem about, which includes what the end point would be, what the solution would look like.
Sometimes, simplistic tasks are not as easy for a computer compared to a human (ex, recognizing a face).
I especially enjoyed this article because alike the last article above, the use of technology was mentioned. Hall said the computer program, a clearly reliable measure, could serve to represent what was going on "internally" in the human brain. He also stated that the traditional information processing model of memory is similar to that of a computer. He noted that even thought the lingo is similar, computers and the brain do not necessarily have the same functionality.
Information Processing Theory. (n.d.). Retrieved May 15, 2011, from http://web.mst.edu/~rhall/ed_psych/info.html
Both of these articles add to the week's topic "the brain and learning."
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