BERITIN EMPAWI (M.

Princ) 2009

Brain-based Learning

Definition
This learning theory is based on the structure and function of the brain. As
long as the brain is not prohibited from fulfilling its normal processes,
learning will occur.
Discussion
People often say that everyone can learn. Yet the reality is that everyone
does learn. Every person is born with a brain that functions as an
immensely powerful processor. Traditional schooling, however,
often inhibits learning by discouraging, ignoring, or punishing the
brain's natural learning processes.
The core principles of brain-based learning state that:
1. The brain is a parallel processor, meaning it can perform several
activities at once, like tasting and smelling.
2. Learning engages the whole physiology.
3. The search for meaning is innate.
4. The search for meaning comes through patterning.
5. Emotions are critical to patterning.
6. The brain processes wholes and parts simultaneously.
7. Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral
perception.
8. Learning involves both conscious and unconscious processes.
9. We have two types of memory: spatial and rote.
10.We understand best when facts are embedded in natural, spatial
memory.
11.Learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat.
12.Each brain is unique.
The three instructional techniques associated with brain-based learning are:

1. Orchestrated immersion--Creating learning environments that

fully immerse students in an educational experience
2. Relaxed alertness--Trying to eliminate fear in learners, while
maintaining a highly challenging environment
 3. Active processing--Allowing the learner to consolidate and
internalize information by actively processing it

How Brain-Based Learning Impacts Education

Curriculum--Teachers must design learning around student interests and
make learning contextual.
Instruction--Educators let students learn in teams and use peripheral
learning. Teachers structure learning around real problems, encouraging
students to also learn in settings outside the classroom and the school
building.
Assessment--Since all students are learning, their assessment should allow
them to understand their own learning styles and preferences. This way,
students monitor and enhance their own learning process.

What Brain-Based Learning Suggests

How the brain works has a significant impact on what kinds of learning
activities are most effective. Educators need to help students have
appropriate experiences and capitalize on those experiences. As Renate
Caine illustrates on p. 113 of her book Making Connections, three interactive
elements are essential to this process:
• Teachers must immerse learners in complex, interactive
experiences that are both rich and real. One excellent example is
immersing students in a foreign culture to teach them a second
language. Educators must take advantage of the brain's ability to
parallel process.

• Students must have a personally meaningful challenge. Such

challenges stimulate a student's mind to the desired state of
alertness.

• In order for a student to gain insight about a problem, there must

be intensive analysis of the different ways to approach it, and
about learning in general. This is what's known as the "active
processing of experience."
A few other tenets of brain-based learning include:
Feedback is best when it comes from reality, rather than from an authority
figure.
People learn best when solving realistic problems.
The big picture can't be separated from the details.
Because every brain is different, educators should allow learners to
customize their own environments.
The best problem solvers are those that laugh!
Designers of educational tools must be artistic in their creation of brain-
friendly environments. Instructors need to realize that the best way to learn
is not through lecture, but by participation in realistic environments that let
learners try new things safely.
Reading
Renate and Geoffrey Caine, Making Connections: Teaching and the Human
Brain.
Leslie Hart, Human Brain, Human Learning.
The content on this page was written by On Purpose Associates.

Brain-Based (Compatible) Learning

What is brain-based or brain-compatible learning?

How can brain research be integrated into the classroom?

How does brain research relate to technology integration?

Brain-based learning has been called a combination of brain
science and common sense. Hart (1983) called the brain
"the organ of learning." He advocated learning more about
the brain in order to design effective learning environments.
Caine and Caine (1991) developed twelve principles that
apply what we know about the function of the brain to
teaching and learning. These principles were derived from an
exploration of many disciplines and are viewed as a
framework for thinking about teaching methodology. Read
Caine and Caine's (1994) Mind/Brain Learning Principles for the
principles with brief descriptions, the longer descriptions, or to Caine's
Website for a diagram. The principles are:
1. The brain is a complex adaptive system.
2. The brain is a social brain.
3. The search for meaning is innate.
4. The search for meaning occurs through patterning.
5. Emotions are critical to patterning.
6. Every brain simultaneously perceives and creates parts and wholes.
7. Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral attention.
 8. Learning always involves conscious and unconscious processes.
9. We have at least two ways of organizing memory.
10.Learning is developmental.
11.Complex learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat.
12.Every brain is uniquely organized.
For complex learning to occur, Caine and Caine have identified three
conditions:
1. Relaxed alertness - a low threat, high challenge state of mind
2. Orchestrated immersion - an multiple, complex, authentic
experience
3. Active processing - making meaning through experience processing
The nine brain-compatible elements identified in the ITI (Integrated Thematic
Instruction) model designed by Susan Kovalik include: Absence of Threat,
Meaningful Content, Choices, Movement to Enhance Learning, Enriched
Environment, Adequate Time, Collaboration, Immediate Feedback, and
Mastery (application level).

There's lots of research on Right Brain/Left Brain. Check out a great links
page to get you started.
Brain-based Learning Resources
Artful Minds - This project provides theoretical information and practical
applications about arts education, brain research, and technology use and
integration.
Brain-Based Learning - This page provides an introduction to brain-based
learning
Library - links to interesting articles
Brain Compatible Learning - This is an excellent article by Jane McGeehan
on brain-compatible learning including a brief history, implications, and
applications. She focuses on they key brain research findings 1) emotion is
the gatekeeper to learning; 2) intelligence is a function of experience; and 3)
the brain stores most effectively what is meaningful from the learner s
perspective.
The Brain Lab - This page within the New Horizons website links to articles
related to brain-based learning.
Brain Connection: The Brain and Learning - This website provides
resources, links, and ideas for incorporating brain-compatible learning
projects into your classroom.
Brain Research Concepts - This page explains six brain research concepts.
 Is the Fuss About Brain Research Justified? -
In this excellent article, Sousa (1998) answers
tough questions about the importance of brain The Brain - is
research in education. wider than the
Sky -
Surprising Truths: The Implications of Brain
Research - This article by Maria Almendarez For - put them
Barron provides interesting, practical implications side by side -
from brain research. The one the other
Build A Project will contain
With ease - and
What are the most critical aspects of brain-based You - beside-
learning that apply to technology-rich projects?
Integrate these elements into a project The Brain is
deeper than the
sea -
For - hold them -
Blue to Bue -
The one the other
BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR will absorb -
As sponges -
Who are you? Who are they? Buckets - do
How did you get to be that way? How did they? The Brain is just
What can you and they do about it? the weight of God
Lots of people wonder about these questions (whether they talk - about
For - Heft them -
it or not).
Pound for Pound -
And
And, over the centuries, people have thought of lots of different they will
ways
differ - if they do
to try and
-
As syllable from
answer them ... without, somehow, ever quite getting to the heart of
Sound -
the matter.
Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)

Over the past century, it has begun increasingly

to look as if the heart of the matter might be ... the brain, as Emily Dickinson
suggested nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Or, more properly, that
the heart of the matter might be the nervous system, of which the brain is a
part.

Is it possible that everything that one is, does, and experiences is a function
of the brain? that one is who one is because of what one's brain is? that
becoming something different means changing the brain? And, if so, what
are the implications of this? Do we lose something, or is the brain actually
big enough, as Dickinson suggested, to contain everything? If so, what might
we be able to do that has never before been possible? What are the risks,
the gains, the new landscapes which would be opened to explore?
The interactive exhibits and other materials collected here are intended to
make it possible for you to share some of the kinds of experiences which
suggest that indeed the nervous system may be the heart of the matter. And
to think with us about their implications, and the new questions they raise.
Have some experiences, think about them, let us and others know what new
thoughts and questions occur in your mind (brain?) in our Forum area, so we
can all think together about these issues.
Interactive Exhibits
• Time to Think?: Is brain = behavior?
an experiment using reaction times, with capability of doing your own
research, requires Shockwave plugin
• Pattern Detection and Serendipity : Can you find Serendip?
a game with different searching strategies, uses CGI programing
• Competition and Cooperation, aka Prisoners' Dilemma: Cooperate
or compete?
a game studied by people in a variety of disciplines, including biology,
sociology and public policy, uses CGI programing
• Blindsight: Seeing What You Don't See: Do you need to know you
saw it to have seen it? a blindsight experiment, requires Java capable
browser
• Seeing More Than Your Eye Does: Does your brain make up
stories?
a "blindspot" experiment
• Seeing More Than Your Eye Does, continued - Map your own
blindspot (Java applet, requires Internet Explorer)
• Tricks of the Eyes, Wisdom of the Brain: Does your brain throw
things away?
a lateral inhibition network experiment, with optical illusions, requires
Java capable browser
• Simple Networks, Simple Rules: Learning and Creating
Categories: Can simple things learn? an experiment with a perceptron
learning algorithm, requires Java capable browser
• The Free Will Problem: Can you control what you do?
an experiment with ambiguous figures
• Comparative brain organization, exhibit under development
• Ambiguous Figures, exhibit under development
 • Remember the Source: How is your memory?
an experiment in human cognition and memory, requires Flash 6 plug-
in
Resources
• Serendip, Brain, and Behavior - an article on a neural uncertainty
principle, published in The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, Volume 4
(V.S. Ramachandran, editor), Academic Press, 1994 (pp 447-458)
• Genes, Brains, Behavior - resources and discussion
• Mind and Body: René Descartes to William James - an exhibit by
Robert Wozniak
• Brain Matters, A question and answer forum for K-12 students
• Neurobiology and Behavior: A course and a conversation -
Biology 202 at Bryn Mawr College
• Multiple reviews of Descartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio I
began writing this book to propose that reason may not be as pure as
most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotion and feelings may not
be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in
its networks, for worse and for better.
Notes for Talks
• Parallel Changes in Thinking About the Brain and About
Education
• Genes, Networks, Behavior, and Beyond: Thinking Backwards
About the Brain and Education
• Brain Size and Evolution

Germinal Zones (places to look in search of new insights into brain and
behavior)
• Brain and Behavior: Index of Topics
• Buddhist Meditation and Personal Construct Psychology
• The Gift of Saturn - Creativity and Psychopathology
• Music, The Brain, and Ecstacy, by Robert Jourdain (a book
review)
• Exploring the Consciousness Problem: - a course and resource
base
• Mental Health, an evolving resource base
• The "Nature" of Desire, a senior thesis on the neurobiology of love
by Rachel Berman BMC '01
 • Measure for Measure: An Artistic Exploration of Eating
Disorders, Body Image, and the Self, by Janna Stern
• The Novelist and the Neurobiologist: A Conversation About
Story Telling
Additional Resources Elsewhere
• Neurobiology at Serendip
• National Insitutes of Mental Health has excellent online booklets
on a variety of topics including Learning Disabilities, and Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
• Neuroscience for Kids, a nice set of activities and resources
• Neuroethics at Penn
• Science and Consciousness Review
• Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest (2007)
• The Brain From Top to Bottom, McGill

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