That Neuroscience Guy - Using Neuroscience to Improve Education

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

We've talked plenty about the neuroscience of learning as well as moving neuroscience into the real world. In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss how we can use neuroscience to improve education from elementary schools to universities. 

Hi, my name is Olav Krogolson and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So we've talked a lot about the neuroscience of learning and how we learn. But as a teacher myself, I've thought a lot about how to use neuroscience to improve teaching. So how can I use neuroscience to teach better and therefore hopefully students will learn more.

So on today's podcast, I'm gonna tell you what I learned. Now, I'll start at the outset by saying, I think this applies to any teaching situation. So it could be coaching a team, it could be working on one-on-one with someone, it could be a teacher in the classroom. But if you're teaching someone something, then all of this should apply to you. All right, first and foremost, repetition is crucial. Now before I get into that, let's just say that for a while in education there was a push away from repetition. It was seen

as a bad thing, but from a neuroscience perspective that's completely nuts. So think about Hebbian learning. We've talked about it in the past, but the old proposition that neurons that fire together, wire together, holds true. So what actually happens if neuron A fires and it activates neuron B, and that happens over and over and over again, that neural connection will get strengthened. That's just the way the physiology works. You can't get around that. that neural connection will get strengthened.

That's just the way the physiology works. You can't get around that. So by repeating something or having your students repeat something lots and lots, they will learn more. It's just the way we're wired. You can't get around the concept of heavy learning. I'll tell you a funny story. When I went to graduate school, I wrote the graduate record exam

and I scored in the 99th percentile in mathematics. Now, I am not a math genius, but what I'd done is I'd taught high school math for five years, six blocks a day. So I had done so many math problems that when it came to the GRE it was a piece of cake because I just done those problems so many times. That is repetition through learning. Another one that I find hilarious is students push back on me when I say you know you should study every night. If you

repeat the material over and over again you will learn it better. Yet they'll go home and play video games and get good at video games through repetition. You know in a lot of instances anyone that's good at anything has repeated it a lot. Musicians, athletes, you name it and yes students. So get your students to repeat things over and over again. You know, at the university level, I feel like there's this push that we have to cover this vast amount of material, but we all know that our students don't retain a lot of it.

So we should actually teach less, but repeat more and make sure they get it over and over again. And to emphasize this point, think about the way we learned to add and subtract. We did lots of addition and subtraction and we got good at it because we repeated it. But with calculus, we don't do that.

You get one crack to learn it and then it's sort of gone. So as teachers, repetition is important because of the concept of heavy and learning. Reward. Rewarding students. But I'm going to make a point here that might upset some people. You can give both positive and negative feedback. I feel like over my teaching career we've shied away from negative feedback. But the reality is, again, it's how we're hardwired. We all talked a lot about dopamine and reward systems and how it all works, so I'm not gonna go

into too much depth there. But the reality is there's more than one dopamine receptor. There's D1 and D2 receptors, and people have different proportions of these. Now, I read a paper a long time ago that was really interesting because it showed that some people, the people with a higher number of,

higher proportion, sorry, of D1 receptors, learned more from positive feedback than people with a higher proportion of D2 receptors learned more from negative feedback. Now, that was a lab-based study, but I've always thought if you draw that out to the classroom, given that the population is roughly split on whether you have more D1 or D2 receptors, about half of the students we teach might actually benefit from negative feedback, more than positive feedback. Now I know in this day and age that's like a woo,

but it's important to realize negative feedback is not negativity, all right? Negative feedback is explaining to someone what they did wrong, and this can be done in a pleasant manner with a smile on your face. It is not the same thing as negativity. And I'll be honest, we have to train our students to accept this because in my experience,

again, a lot of students, they've almost gotten to a point where they can't accept negative feedback. But negative feedback is not negativity. And again, this is grounded in neuroscience, right? This has literally got to do with the way you're hardwired. Now, another one that we've talked about before, but I'm gonna put it in a teaching context, is the concept of ownership or agency.

Now, the research here, if you remember, I'll just give you a simple example of this, but years ago I was working with a colleague and we ran a very simple study. And what we did is we had people see a list of items. And these were fictional items. They were things that they knew that they weren't going to be given them or anything. It was like pictures of cars and forks and apples. And all we did was cue them with a very simple cue

saying this belongs to you or this belongs to someone else. Now what's great about this study is the students knew these things didn't belong to them or someone else, but we were just telling them that they did. Then it was a classic memory paradigm. We made them read a magazine for 20 minutes and then we tested them on

memory recall and lo and behold, the stuff that they'd been prompted was theirs. They remembered to a far greater extent than to the stuff that they've been prompted to that, you know, wasn't theirs or belong to someone else. Now, what does this mean in a classroom context? Well, basically what it means is when you're teaching or coaching or whatever, you have to make it relevant to them. Why is it important that you know this, right?

Because if it's just something where they don't see that relationship, chances are they won't learn to the same extent, at least again grounded in neuroscience and that's what research on ownership and agency tells us, the importance of relevance to self. Now this is another one we've talked about in the past. It's the idea of distribution of practice or learning. The concept is pretty straightforward. If you are going to study for two hours, you are far better to study for four 30-minute

sessions separated by something than to study for two hours straight. And this goes for teaching. If you are teaching a concept, you are far better off to cover the concept in chunks. Take breaks from it. Do something else because your students will learn more. Now as an instructor myself, I've felt the pressure that, oh my gosh, I've only got this amount of time. I've got to get through this material.

But distribution of practice theory tells us that guess what? Our brains respond better and we learn more when you distribute things as opposed to doing these long one-off lessons. Now, my own lab has produced research highlighting this. We published a paper where we basically showed that learning signals in the brain were enhanced under a distributed practice schedule, and they were reduced under a mass practice or extended schedule.

And I can see how tricky it is, but it's a great idea, and I've managed to put it into my teaching. The one thing I will say was when I share this with other instructors, the less is not more. You can't do less and learn more. The total amount of time on the topic has to be the same. It's just that you are breaking up how you spend that time. And again, I just, I love it when people violate this. It's not popular in this day and age, but there was a phase where there was something called the Copernican system for learning,

and students would just do one subject for the morning and one for the afternoon. That is nuts. All right that violates the whole idea of distribution of learning which is grounded in neuroscience like I said and is probably the most well repeated phenomenon in terms of instruction. Last but not least, I just want to mention the concept of game theory and game dynamics. It's not quite neuroscience, but parts of it are driven by neuroscience. I've built this into my teaching as well, and it's easy to do. First of all, I'm just gonna give you three classic game dynamics.

There's a whole bunch of them. I actually got these from an excellent TED Talk by a young man named Seth Prebatch. It's quite dated now, but it still works. And that's what inspired me to change how I teach. I remember watching that TED Talk and thinking to myself, why the heck am I not doing this in a classroom? All right, enough. Dynamic one, the appointment dynamic.

Basically, the appointment dynamic is simple. A good example is happy hour. Just by being at the right place at the right time, you get a reward. And that's all it is, but it's motivating because we fall for this stuff all the time. And that's all it is, but it's motivating because we fall for this stuff all the time. So can you put the appointment dynamic into a classroom? Well, of course you can. If the students are on time, there's a reward. If assignments come in on time, there's a reward. And conversely, if these things aren't met, you could even potentially come up with a punishment.

I don't do that myself, but you could. That's the appointment dynamic. The second one I'll talk about is influence and status. All right, those of us that are a bit older, we're into this one. We want gold credit cards or platinum credit cards. You know, I'm constantly looking at my Air Canada status and wanting to be at the top.

But again, you could use this in a classroom. You'd have to think about how to implement it because again, in the old days, we just would have done this. But you can give out rewards and say, well, hey, you did really well. You're the best at this. I personally do that on a one-on-one basis

as opposed to embarrassing students in front of the class. But maybe you're in a situation where you could. I know when I coach basketball, I always say who was the best player offensively and who was the best player defensively after a game. And that's influence and status. It's driven by neuroscience again, and it works. The last one I'll share with you is the progression dynamic. Progress bars, it's that simple. We've seen them everywhere, how close are you to your goal? But what's interesting about this

is students in classes rarely know where they are. They don't really know, my students struggle with figuring out the grades and how to add them up So they don't see the progress right? They don't realize that they're getting closer to this grade or to completing the class and this is really important because it's motivational Which again is driven by an element of neuroscience So there you are game theory and three good game dynamics, but also the concept of repetition, reward, ownership, distribution of practice and learning.

So that's what I have to say about using neuroscience to improve teaching or coaching. Hopefully you found that interesting and hopefully you enjoyed it. Don't forget the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. You can go there. There's links to our Etsy store and to Patreon. Of course, follow us on social media. Send us ideas at that Neurosci Guy on threads X and Instagram. Really appreciate it if you do. And of course, feel free to email us or send us messages and let us what you

want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. And last but not least, as ever, the podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe if you haven't already. My name is Olav Kriolson and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.