4th March 2015 9:00
By Blue Tutors
New research into neural processes has revealed the part of the brain that teachers use to detect when their students do not understand their lessons. The area of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex has been shown the play a significant role in detecting how mistaken a student is. The research team at Royal Holloway, University of London, used MRIs to study the responses of volunteers watching other volunteers playing computer games. The scan showed that there was increased activity in certain areas of the brain when the volunteers made mistakes. The research has identified some of the key structures in the brain which are important for the teaching process,
The study also highlighted other regions of the frontal lobe that were engaged when teachers are thinking about students’ determinations, or thinking about whether a student has given the correct response. Combining mathematical modelling with MRI data, researchers were able to see which areas of the volunteers’ brains tracked the degree to which students’ had miscalculated their responses. The study has revealed that there is a specific signal in the brain which tells us that a person is wrong about something, and what about their beliefs are incorrect. Understanding these processes could have significant implications for helping to improve teaching.
The study is potentially a pivotal step forward in understanding how the teaching process works. The department of Psychology at Royal Holloway have said that understanding not only that a person is wrong, but identifying the processes a student has gone through to reach their conclusions is a vital part of the teaching process which is becoming better understood. The more developed these brain functions in teachers, the more they are able to help their students. The research findings could help develop more sophisticated teaching and learning tools based on what we now know about the way the brain responds during the teaching process.