Abstract
Some parts of the brain handle some tasks better than others, just like some parts of the body handle some tasks better than others. It’s possible to write with our feet, but don’t you find that it’s easier with your hands? And don’t most of us find it easier with one hand than the other? And once the best hand is found, don’t we find some writing utensils easier to use? And once the best utensil is found, have you ever discovered a slightly better way to use it that makes it easier, or makes you able to write faster or longer? So it is with learning, and that is Cognitive Ergonomics.
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Notes
- 1.
(Names for senses vary) 1. Sight, 2. Taste (in 5 subcategories: 2.1: Sweet, 2.2: Salty, 2.3: Sour, 2.4: Bitter, 2.5: Umami) 3. Touch, Pressure, 4. Touch, Pain, 5. Touch, Itch, 6. Temperature, External Heat and Cold, 7, Temperature, Internal Body Temperature, 8. Sound, 9. Smell (possessing, by some estimates, 388 different receptors), 10. Pain, Skin, 11. Pain, Bones and Joints, 12. Pain, Organs, 13. Proprioception (sense of limbs in physical space), 14. Tension Sensors (allow the body to detect tension in places such as muscles) 15. Equilibrioception, 16. Stretch Receptors (detects dilation of blood vessels or stretching of organs such as the stomach or lungs), 17. Chemoreceptors (detects hormones and drugs), 18. Thirst, 19. Hunger, and the most controversial: 20. Magnetoception (ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field) and, 21. Time.
- 2.
Horman, William. Vulgaria uiri doctissimi Guil. Hormani Caesariburgensis (1519).
- 3.
Ascham, Roger. The Schoolmaster (1570).
- 4.
If the case seems extreme, consider how many hours of education in Teacher Certification programs are spent working with students in the form of teaching or observing teaching.
- 5.
This discussion is dangerous because it verges on opening Pandora’s Box, which spilled every evil into the world and retained, in the end, only hope; When an amount of new information is presented to a student that is beyond their capacity to process, it’s a waste of time to the teacher and the student. What good could it do to present more new information than your student’s mind can consciously process? This isn’t to say that there’s no purpose in such a decision, but be deliberate and purposeful about it, lest the only thing that remains from such an endeavor is, like Pandora’s Box, hope for learning. Short-Term Memory is the primary building block for shifting datum of any sort into more permanent states of memory—first the Working Memory (which is theoretically infinite), then through successive repetitions of varying frequency and intensity, into Long-Term Memory. These are the dynamics which become increasingly important as we approach educational ergonomics pertaining directly to The Student.
- 6.
Sousa, David A. How the Brain Learns. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Corwin Press (2006).
- 7.
“Forgotten” is usually used loosely. Most sensory perceptions, whether temperature or sound or whatever, once perceived by the brain, affect its biological tissue somewhat. When it affects the tissue in such a miniscule way that distinct recall isn’t possible, we usually say it’s been forgotten. A culture of test-makers and test-takers might think that not being able to recall the right information at the right time means you didn’t learn it, but that’s not exactly a cognitive neuroscientific perspective. Alas, this essay is more concerned with how to remember something well than defining the parameters of forgetting, so let’s all agree to concentrate on defining the parameters of remembering well.
- 8.
Don’t fear the variations; students aren’t as variable as they might seem. While every student is a unique little snowflake, remember that snowflakes are quite similar in composition, and being similar in composition, share predictably uniform properties: Although the shape of their crystallization is always unique, they all crystallize at zero degrees Celsius.
- 9.
I choose a random set of ten numbers because it is beyond the short-term memory capacity of most young students, is comparable to the length of a phone number, and because most of us have childhood phone numbers that we memorized and can still remember after more than 1000 days of non-use. Also, the set of ten numbers might be partially recalled, where some students remember only the first few or the last few, which can also be used to estimate overall efficacy.
- 10.
If the quality of long-term recollection was evaluated 1000 days after the student’s first exposure, and if we are testing true long-term memory formation, it would be unfair, for example, to reserve some of the 100 allowable engagements for the day before assessment, so assessment must occur 1000 days after their final engagement.
- 11.
The nature of the experiment requires that different students use different distributions of repetitions, and the natural argument for explaining the results might be that their different aptitudes will be more influential in determining their long-term results than the pattern of repetitions. While this is true to a degree, reliable results can be obtained by assigning large numbers of students to each pattern and averaging their outcomes.
- 12.
Interval could be divided into long-term intervals, such as we have described as occurring over multiple days, or could be described in the short-term as how many hours, minutes, or seconds occur between repetitions. I have often observed students exhibit less proficiency between repetitions when interrupted between, even for just enough time to make or listen to a comment. So it might make a difference for long-term results whether the repetitions occur in uninterrupted succession, or spaced out in a pattern such as once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. I personally lean toward quick, uninterrupted succession as more effective, but verification would require scientific investigation.
- 13.
The human lifespan is inherently prohibitive to extreme examples, such as one repetition each year for 100 years; even if it yielded the best result (and I don’t think it would), education must prepare the student for more practical outcomes. Although 100 years is far-fetched for most desirably practical learning outcomes, a very real practical timeframe for most students isn’t a semester, or a year, but from childhood to adulthood, or by today’s standards, 18–22 years. When considering truly ideal distributions of repetition for content mastery, examples such as language acquisition (especially foreign language acquisition), mathematical ability, and physical motor skills are examples which we already acknowledge require and deserve regular repetition over more than a decade.
- 14.
Cite Russian ballet curriculum.
References
Sousa, David A. How the Brain Learns. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Corwin Press (2006)
Mattes, Richard D. “Hunger and Thirst: Issues in Measurement and Prediction of Eating and Drinking.” Physiology & behavior 100.1 (2010): 22–32. PMC. Web. 8 Feb. 2016.
Einstein, Albert. The World as I See it. Abridg ed. Secaucus, N. J;New York;: Wisdom Library, 1979
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Tolan, Z.R. (2016). Educational Ergonomics and the Future of the Mind. In: Lee, N. (eds) Google It. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6415-4_16
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