The University’s Brain Biology and Machine Initiative is sponsoring a conference today and Saturday on what educators need to know about brain development in order to teach effectively. The Brain and Education Workshop is in 243 Lillis.
Psychology professor emeritus Michael Posner, who organized the conference, said the focus is on brain imaging and early-childhood education.
“People always knew the brain was involved in education but couldn’t ask how,” Posner said. “Now they have the tools to ask how.”
Posner said that through modern brain research, researchers are beginning to understand the mechanisms involved in reading, the brain parts involved in synthesizing letters into words and how
children and animals develop concepts of numbers. This knowledge can help
teachers develop more effective methods of instruction.
Today at 7 p.m., University psychology professor Helen Neville will give a speech entitled “Experience Shapes Human Brain Development and Function.” Neville, who is the Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair of Psychology and Neuroscience, was one of five scientists from around
the world who spoke at a conference on brain plasticity hosted by the Dalai Lama in October.
Brain plasticity refers to the effects of the environment on brain development. Neville said 2-year-old children have twice as many brain connections as adults. The growth of the brain, which continues
until 20 years after birth, proceeds in a way similar to a sculptor chiseling a piece of material.
“Experience acts the same way in deciding which of these connections will be maintained and which will be lost,” Neville said. Neville said neuroscientists’ work is especially important for educators, who provide children with experiences that influence brain development.
“Your teachers are playing a big part in shaping your brain,” Neville said.
Neville recently conducted a study with preschool students, 3 to 5 years of age, in the Head Start program. The students were tested before and after eight weeks during which they received one of four interventions: 40 minutes a day of music, language or attention-skills training, or parenting-skills training for their parents. While students in all groups improved in some
areas, the group that received attention-skills training showed improvement in all areas tested.
Neville said that while a person can function with only one brain hemisphere, people with poor attention capabilities are at an extreme disadvantage.
“People who can’t focus their attention, they can’t read, they can’t play music, they can’t paint a painting because they don’t have the focus,” she said.
Neville said that unlike most other fields today, educators are not required to provide empirical support for their methods. She said that for a time, California used the whole-word method as opposed to the phonetics method to teach reading, although studies showed that the whole-word method hinders literacy. Neville said she now gets students from California coming to the University who tell her they can’t read.
At 9 a.m. Saturday, Michael Merzenich, a neuroscience professor from the University of California, San Francisco, will present “Neuroscience of Brain Plasticity as a Foundation Science for Educators.” Merzenich’s laboratory studies the “neural bases of learning, recognition and memory”; “mechanisms underlying the origins of functional brain illnesses and disabilities”; and “strategies for remediating learning-disabled and movement-disabled adults and children,” according to the laboratory’s Web site.
At 11 a.m. Saturday, Harvard University psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke will present “Origins of Knowledge of Number.” Spelke researches the origins and development of concepts of objects, people, space and numbers at Harvard University’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies. She said in an e-mail that most of her work focuses on human infants and preschool children but that she also occasionally studies cognition in adult non-human primates and in human adults.
People at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Eastern Oregon University in La Grande and the University’s Central Oregon Programs office in Bend will participate in Saturday’s lectures via simulcast, which allows them to watch the presentations on a TV screen as well as ask questions.
Neville said recordings of the lectures can be downloaded for free from the University Brain Development Lab’s Web site, bdl.uoregon.edu.

[email protected]