Blog Post 1 (Deep Reading of Module 6)

The big picture in Module six is the debate of whether or not brain research is still too new and too different from educational framework to even be considered as valuable to teachers. It discusses how decisions made in education can achieve the best results by combining research methods, scientific data from education, psychology and neuroscience. It also talks about the factors that go into the differences in each individual's brain structure and development. The five main factors are genetics, the environment, plasticity which is when the nerve cells in the brain respond to new situations or changes in the environment, nutrition and teratogens that are foreign substances that have the power to create abnormalities in a developing fetus.

One thing that does not make sense to me is the fact people have argued that neuroscience data is still too new and too inconclusive to be of any value to educators. This really surprised me because I feel it is so important for teachers to have some sort of understanding of what is neurologically going on with their students. I really liked the part of Module six that discussed myths about the brain. The three myths that I personally thought were true happened to be false. The one that I was most surprised about is that people are not really left-brained or right-brained. Although the brain has left and right hemispheres, both sides of the brain do in fact work together in almost every situation. A lot of this module was a good refresher to me because I have taken a few psychology classes in both high school and college.

This picture shows the synaptic density in the human brain from birth to six years old and from six years old to fourteen years old. The number of connections between brain cells reaches its highest point during early childhood. Over some time, the connection between neurons are "pruned" to allow the brain to have more efficient and direct functioning.