Joe Dauer: To know how students learn, we must first know how they think 

At the University of Nebraska stands a brain scanner whose primary purpose is to study American football players and map out how hard tackles and collisions affect their brains. 

However, in the free moments when the machine is not occupied by athletes with potential concussions, it has been used to investigate a far more peaceful and subtle activity – namely, how students learn biology. 

Together with cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Caron Clark and others, Professor Joe Dauer has examined brain activity in university biology students tasked with finding errors in biological models. 

”Organizing knowledge in models is essential for learning a subject like biology. Therefore, it is extremely interesting to figure out how students develop those abilities and evaluate their knowledge of the systems,” Joe Dauer explains. 

”Yet we know remarkably little about the connection between neurological processes and learning within specific disciplines.” 

How learning occurs 

For Joe Dauer, the question of how learning occurs arose in his own biology classes. Here, he experienced that the material he tried to teach the students didn't stick. 

"Why is some information retained while other information is not, and why can they not always recall or apply that information later?" he asks. 

"It made me curious about what I needed to do as a teacher so that they could learn it." 

Brain activity predicts retention

In the brain scanner in Nebraska, students were asked to evaluate a series of biological models with and without errors and within a short timeframe indicate whether the model was correct. One year later, the students were asked to complete the test again, this time outside the scanner. 

The study showed, among other things, that the measured brain activity is better at predicting whether students can remember the information one year later than the student's grade is. 

"We cannot always look at students' behavior and conclude what is happening inside their heads. But we can see that our tests and exams fail to assess whether the concepts have truly settled," says Joe Dauer. 

Assumptions about learning

What all this means for the biology teacher remains up in the air, Joe Dauer acknowledges. 

“I would like to see the field of education move closer to cognitive psychology. There are assumptions about the cognitive processes associated with learning, for example learning styles and misconceptions, that do not align with what we know from cognitive psychology,” he says. 

Joe Dauer draws on this knowledge in his own biology classes. 

"I use neuroscience to explain to students why I do what I do in my teaching," he explains. 

Science has shown that experts have blocks of knowledge, not just isolated pieces of information disconnected from other information. 

We can see that our tests and exams fail to assess whether the concepts have truly settled.

“I explain to the students that they have a model of knowledge in their heads. That model contains errors, and that is completely normal, but it means they must learn how to find those errors and how to store new knowledge that outcompetes the knowledge with errors.” 

This form of metacognitive ability is important for learning, Joe Dauer emphasizes. 

"The cognitive and the metacognitive interact with each other and with the social and the emotional," Joe Dauer explains. 

"If we as educators solely focus on the subject content, we miss a large part of how students actually learn. We miss their starting points and the mental models they already bring through the door. We must focus on that if we are truly going to move a class forward."