Aaron Wong’s Reviews > Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn > Status Update

Let the mind work — retrieval practice — but also let the mind rest, through 1h physical exercise. — p. 59-60

Procrastinators are overwhelmed when their overloaded working memory crams the material. Instead, frequent formative assessments encourage active retrieval practice over days. — p. 55-56

Brief mental refreshers:
• Think-Pair-Share
• 1min to summarise or clarify confusion
• peer teaching
• role-play
— p. 54-55

Consolidation process:
• When first learning, links are weak & disorganised; the hippocampus indexes the connections to stabilise & strengthen.
• Material is winnowed to a core, but it’s this elimination of extraneous links that consolidates understanding.
• Orginal context is erased, leaving the meaning.
— p. 53

Brain breaks can be 30s collaborative activities; student attention spans are Age+1 minutes — p. 51-52

Consolidation: During sleep, the hippocampus facilitates the offline connection between the neocortex, serving as a temporary support system. However, this process is not effective when learning new information, such as establishing index links. - p. 48-50

In the hippocampus, information passes through telegraph-line-like axons. Axons are wrapped by fatty myelin, an insulator which speeds up signals. Practising strengthens synapse links and thickens the myelin. This white matter links distant parts for complex skills. Soon, the WM can retrieve information from the neocortex without indexing via the hippocampus. - p. 45-46

Hippocampus is an index that merely links to information in the neocortex. It can link for at most a few months, which is enough time to consolidate the links in the cortex. - p. 44, 46

Declarative learning system: mostly conscious learning you can declare
• working memory
• hippocampus: above each ear, 1.5” inside, size of a big lima bean
• neocortex: ‘napkin’ few mm (6 neurons) thick, 24” X 24”, following & buried in brain’s surface folds (excludes thinner allocortex)
- p. 43

Ways of remembering:
1. Declarative memory: involving facts/events consciously recalled; in working memory, hippocampus, LTM in neocortex
2. Procedural memory: how to do something; in basal ganglia & neocortex
- p. 43