Matthew Taylor
speaker
407 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Matthew Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Now, this doesn't mean the early years are unimportant.
One vital unknown is the possible impact of a child's individual genetic inheritance in determining their recovery.
But the Romanian study gives us hope and poses a challenge.
Hope that the plasticity of the brain means most children can actually recover from a bad start, and a challenge to British policy, that it should focus on older children as well as early years.
The growing recognition that brain plasticity goes far beyond the early years has inspired a leading member of the new generation of Britain's young neuroscientists, Sarah-Jane Blatmore of UCL.
Using the latest scanning techniques, she's pioneered large-scale studies of the brains of teenagers.
She's found that different parts of the teenage brain have sensitive periods, times when they're changing particularly.
Again, neuroscience is shedding new light on long-running educational debates.
But it's not just that understanding the brain can help educationalists and improve teaching.
It could actually be that knowing how our brains work and how we learn can help students themselves.
It's sometimes said that what makes human beings different is that we are the only species that can think about thinking.
But can neuroscience help us do this in new and better ways?
Psychologist Carol Dweck of Stanford uses knowledge of the brain to develop experiments which seem to be yielding some powerful and practical results.
Her work began over a decade ago when she looked at what motivates children to learn.
And what she found overturned not just an educational orthodoxy, but also many of our common sense views.
The children in Dweck's experiments are given practical tasks which get harder as they go along.
Everyone agrees we want children to grow up willing to take on new challenges.
But listen to what happened when Dweck challenged the children to go outside their comfort zone and take on something that they might fail.
So children who are praised for trying hard do better than children who are told how clever they are.
At Dufferin High School in Newport, the class we met earlier in the programme were in the top set.
Showing 221–240 of 407 · page 12 of 21
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