One of my favorite webinar presenters here at Scientific Learning, Dr. Martha Burns, recently gave a webinar called “BrainPro: Preventing Summer Brain Drain.”
Dr. Burns covered a number of points related to learning and retaining information.
- How learners can benefit from current research in 3 areas:
- Psychology – the benefits of teaching to a child’s style of learning
- Neuroscience and Technology – using neuroscience-based technology to individualize instruction to meet the needs of each individual student
- Education – providing standardized content to learners across the US
- The science of how the brain learns. The human brain has thousands of networks that work together and help us to do a lot of different things. Pathways in the brain get stronger and stronger with use. The more we do something, the better we get at that activity. The stronger the pathways in the brain, the easier it becomes for the child to learn and retain information.
- Early difficulties in reading. If a child is struggling with phonological awareness, memory, vocabulary or comprehension, it may indicate a learning difficulty. The cognitive abilities of memory, attention, processing, and sequencing that are foundational to language can be exercised with Fast ForWord Home (formerly BrainPro).
Following Dr. Burns, we heard from Jenny, a parent from Florida who had her teenage daughter use the Fast ForWord Home to help her pass the FCAT (the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test). Her daughter has a very high GPA and takes AP and Honors classes, but had difficulty in passing the FCAT reading test two years in a row. After she went through Fast ForWord she took the FCAT for the 3rd time and passed with a near perfect score on the test.
View the webinar to for more detail and visuals about how the brain learns, and find out how Fast ForWord Home can help your child stay sharp over the summer break.
Related Reading:
Antidotes to Summer Brain Drain (Part 2): 5 Ways to Pull the Plug on Learning Loss
