Education and Brain Training

The relationship between brain training and education (or ones schooling) is very similar to the relationship between lifting weights and basketball.  The idea is that if you invest a lot of time into building up the tools used in the activity you will be better able to perform.

For example, one tool basketball player’s use is the ability to jump. The higher a player can jump the more opportunities become available to score or defend shots. To increase your ability to jump you have to strengthen certain muscles. Obviously, playing lots of basketball would no doubt slowly build up these muscles. But, if you were to augment your basketball training with a more efficient way of strengthening your jumping muscles than you would be at an advantage.  Lifting weights is a much more efficient form of exercise for making specific muscles stronger.

 Indeed, professional basketball teams take weight lifting quite seriously and the players are made to invest a good chunk of their time in the gym (http://www.nba.com/cavaliers/features/kellers_muscle_081205.html).  For professional basketball teams, it is paramount to give their players every advantage on the court that they can. One way they’ve found to do this is by taking a step off the courts and into the weight room.

As discussed in previous posts brain training is meant to be a weight room for the brain.  A weight room filled with machines to improve the tools that are used in education. Figuring out what to put in this weight room has been a much harder task than the squat machine of basketball gyms. Lots of hard work has been devoted to identifying what tools there are and the methods to augment them.

One company is not letting all of this hard work go to waste. Scientific Learning (http://www.scilearn.com/ ) is creating software to act as this weight room and they are working very closely with many different school districts around the country.

Let’s first look at some of the software being used and then take a look at how it’s being implemented.  One of their products, Fast ForWord^® Literacy (http://www.scilearn.com/products/fast-forword-literacy-series/literacy/), is designed to help students with reading.

“Fast Forward Literacy moves middle and high school students toward grade level reading skills, with a focus on listening accuracy, phonological awareness, and language structures.”

In order to accomplish this goal the software is designed to help improve the tools that are used during reading. The tools it claims to augment are memory, attention, a variety of input processing, and sequencing.

“To accelerate reading progress, Fast ForWord Literacy develops critical brain processing efficiency in four key areas:

• Improves memory by requiring holding a word or statement in short-term memory while retrieving picture-concept associations from long-term memory.
• Improves attention by making students focus on the tasks at hand.
• Strengthens processing ability through auditory, visual, and linguistic processing of orally and visually presented stories for meaning and comprehension.
• Develops sequencing through exercises that require using word order to comprehend simple and complex statements and instructions and organizing a response that follows the specified sequence of actions.“

The software uses a variety of different games to “workout the muscles” behind each tool. One of the games designed to increase auditory and visual working memory (a subject I’ll blog about later) is called Lunar Tunes. In this game there is a board divided into a grid with each cell containing either a syllable or word. The grid contains a pair of each syllable or word and the goal is to find the two matching cells. The basic idea is that the player will have to memorize which cell contains which sound or word and with practice the player will develop a better and better memory for sounds and words. This increase in memory ability can then be, hopefully, transferred over to the act of reading.

Another example of a game used in the software package is called Space Racer. In this game there are two buttons, one pointing up and the other down.  Two sounds are presented and the player must decide whether the pitch of the second sound was higher or lower than the first sound. The player responds by clicking the appropriate button.  The end goal of this game is to provide the player with improved listening accuracy and memory that can later be applied to reading.

The software package provides a number of other games that are designed to enhance the tools used in reading. In attempt to make it the games more children friendly the games are made with an outer space and alien theme in mind. Also, built into each game are rewards and difficulty progressions to try and keep the user interested and progressing.  As strange and useless as some of the games may seem there is a considerable body of work behind them that will have to be discussed another day. A demo of each of the games can be found here (http://www.scilearn.com/products/fast-forword-literacy-series/literacy/?tabs=tabSet1:5).

Now that we’ve discussed what the software is it’s only appropriate we look at who is using it and does it actually work. To answer the first questions let’s take a look at one of the case studies presented on their site (http://www.scilearn.com/results/success-stories/case-studies/liberty-public-schools-unlocks-students-potential-for-learning-improves-missouri-assessment-program-scores.php).  The story starts out in a suburban area outside of Kansas City. The characters in the story are students identified by teachers and low test grades that are struggling with reading. The hero in the story of course is Fast ForWord and with a regimen of the software at around 30 minutes a day our characters will all be saved. This seems to be the generic story and it’s not an unpopular one, since the programs introduction in 1997 to 2007 more than half a million students from over 3,500 schools have used it (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/WWC_Fast_Forword_070907.pdf).

Now for the big question, does the thing actually work? Is the thirty minutes invested in Fast ForWord software more useful than thirty minutes of just practicing reading? Should children be taken off the courts for a little while to lift some Scientific Learning weights? The Scientific Learning website provides easy access to literally hundreds of its own studies that exclaim the program as a complete success. After reading a few, I began to see a pattern of very lazy methodology and stretching conclusions. For example, in this paper (http://www.scilearn.com/alldocs/rsrch/sbr/30115annearundeledurpt.pdf) a study was done in the Anne Arundel County school district. The experimental group in the study was very poorly designed as the group consisted of differing ages, initial ability, and background wasn’t even mentioned. The result of the paper was that more kids that had got “direct instruction” and Fast ForWord made it to proficient level than kids who just got Fast ForWord. This result is very shaky as there was no real control for “direct instruction” between the groups. The papers conclusions were not very convincing.

Luckily, Scientific Learning was kind enough to offer a few independent studies that were more convincing of the actual usefulness of Fast ForWord. The U.S department of Education did a review (http://www.scilearn.com/results/scientifically-based-research/independent-reviews/) of all of Scientific Learning’s studies up to 2007. They found that out of 115 studies 5 of them met the evidence standards of the review. I believe this after reading a few of them myself.  The results of the 5 good studies as determined by the review were summarized as follows:

“The WWC reviewed 115 studies on Fast ForWord®.9 Five of these studies met WWC evidence standards, one study met WWC evidence standards with reservations, and the remaining studies did not meet WWC evidence screens. Based on these six studies, the WWC found positive effects on alphabetics and mixed effects on comprehension. The evidence presented in this report may change as new research emerges.”

Alphabetics here is a category used in the review to examine effect on letter knowledge, phonics, and phonological awareness.

The evidence presented by the education department was pretty convincing to me that Scientific Learning’s program is not quite the miracle tool that the company’s website and research makes it out to be.  This is quite an interesting result for a company that has seen a considerable amount of growth in the past few years. Although, because of the difficulty of doing good research in education it may be that the programs benefits are just not well defined at this point.

The next question to ask after finding this result is why doesn’t the program work like it’s supposed to? Is it not working out the right “tools”, is it even possible to sharpen them? Is it not given to the right kind of people at the right point in development? These questions deserve answers and I’m sure Scientific Learning and others are working hard to find them. Until some of the answers appear though I think it may be better to leave children on the playing field of the class room and wait for the machines in the weight room to be repaired.