CHILDREN'S LEARNING AND BRAIN DEVELOPMENT: DESIGNS THAT ENCOURAGE LEARNING
Keynote Speaker: Patricia K. Kuhl, PhD
Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and of the NSF Science of Learning Center at the University of Washington.

We know there are critical periods when children learn things better. For language, it's from birth to age seven. Wouldn't it be wonderful if schools understood critical periods? When we teach a second language to high school students, we're fighting biology: students resist learning because it is much harder. Learning happens automatically when children are in the right settings at the right time.

We need to understand learning in both formal and informal environments. Children spend only 21 percent of their waking time in the classroom. What do they do when they're not in the classroom? How do they learn? Often kids who learn poorly in the classroom are smarter out of school. What is it about the school environment that prevents students from doing well there?

The social foundations of learning are more important than we once thought. Children learn better in social environments, such as an interactive peer group, than when they're talked at—whatever the subject area. There is something about the brain that makes this true: people are driven to communicate with other human beings.

A recent article in the New York Times asked: should all learning be fun and games? Not really. Children can't learn all they need to know from games, but we should try to understand their fascination with them because gaming has learned how to be social—the avatars interact with each other.

We are trying to understand how babies learn language—how they come to know which sounds are used in their language. Up to the age of six months, they can discriminate all vowel sounds; they are citizens of the world. Adults are culture-bound; we can't hear sounds outside our own language. At six months, American and Japanese babies are equally good at perceiving "ra" and "la," sounds that do not occur in Japanese. By 10 to 12 months old, the American babies are much better than the Japanese babies are. Both are preparing for their own language.

We learn by our eyes and our ears at the same time. In an experiment, what adults heard was affected by what they saw. They were presented with an audio recording of "baba" synced with a silent video of a human face saying "gaga." The brain blends the visual and auditory information; baba sounds more like gaga when you see the lips move. Other experiments show babies are also visual as well as auditory learners; at the age of 18 weeks, they are already lip-reading, able to distinguish the open mouth of "ah" from the retracted lips of "eee."

Our research has identified two fundamental principles about learning. One is that it is computational. Babies are computational machines whose brains compute statistics on the language they hear, recording the number of times different sounds are produced by the speakers they're listening to; and they start discriminating only the vowel sounds in their own language. That computational principle operates in all learning; so environment matters, because what we hear sculpts our brain.

The brain is computational, but it is also social. An earlier study had shown that American nine-month-olds who were "bathed" in Mandarin (12 sessions with a native speaker over a month) learned those sounds as well as Taiwanese babies did. We wanted to know whether the human being was critical to this learning. Three other groups of babies were exposed to Mandarin in different ways: in person, through audio recording and through video recording. Is the computational brain so like an automaton that it will record statistics however they are presented? The babies exposed only to audio or video language did no better than the babies who weren't exposed to Mandarin at all. Brain imaging showed they were listening, but that nothing was going on in the brain.

This underscores the importance of the social setting. Babies' eyes follow the speaker's eye gaze, which might help them acquire information and make connections, such as linking a sound and an object. High-pitched "parentese" is riveting for babies. Social cues tell them when it matters, when they should be engaged in taking statistics; if they took it all in, the brain would be too busy.

Are the classrooms of the 1950s, with the kids all in their desks facing forward, best for learning—or is it something more like this [photo], where children interact with their neighbors in a more social setting, working together?

At the same time they are social, classrooms must be noiseless, in a sense. There are new classroom acoustics standards, set by the Acoustics Society of America, which did careful measurements in classrooms. We know noise, such as a plane overhead, disrupts learning. While social learning creates a kind of buzz, there are now clear standards. Kids need a better signal-to-noise ratio than adults do; once the brain is mapped, it takes less energy to get a signal into the brain.

Children's learning is computational; it matters what you put in front of children because they seem to take statistics automatically on what they perceive. But they aren't automatons. They don't record statistics mindlessly; they appear to gate their computational learning through social interaction. There may be other factors, but the social context—especially when there's a human being in front of them—seems to be very important.

We also know that informal, interactive learning is highly effective. Children learn better when they are actively engaged in developing ideas—and verbalizing ideas. The verbalization itself seems to solidify knowledge in the brain. Students need classrooms that have spaces for both private and social learning.

New neuroscience tools will greatly affect what we know about learning over the next decade. We now have a brain-imaging machine that can be can used with children who are engaged in live learning, which will tell us how learning engages different areas of the brain and how those areas of the brain talk to each other, because it isn't only one area of the brain that's active in learning, but several.

Additional Information

Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences: http://ilabs.washington.edu/about

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