BRUNO is a barman. One night he works six hours and gets $66 in tips. If he takes home $81.90 in total, how much is he paid an hour?
This is a story problem: a routine device to test knowledge of maths in the classroom. Another tactic would be just to give students an equation: X x 6 + 66 = 81.90. Now, the question put to teachers in a study: which will their students find harder to solve?
Being fluent in equation-speak, most teachers think the story problem will prove difficult. But research shows them wrong. For school students, the familiar language of the story problem more readily unlocks the answer.
"We have this mantra: the student is not like me," said Kenneth Koedinger, a visiting US academic explaining this study at Australia's first meeting devoted to a field called the science of learning.
Koedinger and an impressive number of colleagues from US centres for science of learning joined Australian scientists and educators for the two-day meeting last week on the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland.
The premise of this new, multidisciplinary field is that we simply don't know enough about the innards of learning.
Sometimes, as in the equation study, educators are plain wrong about what works in learning.
Or, as education researcher Geoff Masters told the meeting at the Queensland Brain Institute: "We often know what works long before we know why it works."
One obvious question is where to look for the why.
Neuroscience is a broad and promising field of inquiry and that is why Australia's first Science of Learning Centre is hosted by the institute under neuroscientist Perry Bartlett. His preoccupation has been been the basic processes of the brain and what they might reveal about disease.
But he had a road to Damascus conversion.
Australia had been talking about an education revolution yet our school students were falling behind those in Shanghai.
And there seemed to Bartlett a gulf between education and the insights into learning offered by the fast-developing neurosciences.
An inspirational visit to the QBI by Soo-Siang Lim, director of the US science of learning centres program for the National Science Foundation, and talks with Masters led to Australia's own centre.
With ACER involved, the fruits of research can enrich practice in the field, and applied work can generate fresh ideas for research in the centre.
The hope is for insight into activities as diverse as formal classroom learning, better and early teaching of spatial skills to encourage more women into science and engineering, how infants develop focused attention, multi-tasking with digital devices, lifelong learning in informal settings, the re-learning of vital functions lost after serious injury, and the challenges of memory and learning among the elderly.
But this new field must contend with old sensitivities and blindspots, as Debbie Terry, UQ's deputy vice-chancellor (academic) acknowledged at the meeting.
She quoted William James, a father of modern psychology, who tried to disabuse teachers of the notion that psychology could tell them how to go about their work.
"Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves," James said.
And for various historical reasons, many in education do not expect the life sciences to generate truths useful for the classroom.
The use, or suspected misuse, of brain scans such as magnetic resonance imaging is a case in point. But technology of this kind is expected to be vital for the new science of learning centre.
"Imaging might help bridge the gap between basic science and educational practice," said David Reutens, who directs the centre for advanced imaging at UQ. His new building will be close to Bartlett's on UQ's St Lucia campus.
Reutens gave the famous example of London's taxi-drivers who must master all manner of routes to pass the exam known as "the knowledge". Scans showed increases in their grey matter as the hippocampus adapted to this formidable task of learning.
More generally, scans of various kinds hold out the promise of some kind of measure of the brain structures and functions that underpin learning activity.
By 2013, it is expected that Reutens's centre will commission Australia's most powerful human scanner -- a 7 Tesla MRI machine; which drew Prime Minister Julia Gillard to UQ last year to announce the funding.
As yet, the new science of learning centre itself has no specific state or federal money. It's paid for by Bartlett's institute and the university. By contrast, the six US science of learning centres have roughly $5 million each a year and funding can run for a maximum of 10 years.
Working in such a new field, Lim says time and patience are necessary. At first, there is a lot of work as scientists from a host of different disciplines grope towards a common language that can articulate a set of research questions.
Once basic research begins to produce results, there arise many other questions about how best to translate those findings into practice.
Lim wonders how teachers, whose own education rarely touches on neuroscience, will be able to make critical judgments about the use of the learning tools that her centres produce.
Bartlett, with his newfound interest in education, has found teachers very open to new insights.
"They're looking desperately for new technology to deliver learning," he says.
Koedinger, who explained at last week's meeting how experts tend to overlook the importance of familiar language in learning activities, is from the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Centre.
He has the requisite cross-disciplinary background, having worked as a high school teacher, as well as having qualifications in computer science and cognitive psychology.
At Carnegie Mellon University, he was involved in development of the Cognitive Tutor Algebra, which tries to engage the interest of students by setting real world problems: for example, they might have to build a model to analyse competing mobile phone plans.
The electronic tutor identifies errors as a student enters values, for example, and offers hints.
"It's based on computational models of student thinking and learning; it combines psychology research and computer science," Koedinger says.
Used by about 600,000 students in 3000 schools across the US, Cognitive Tutor Algebra is not just a piece of software but comes with courseware and professional development for teachers.
It's an example of the kind of real world success that the science of learning hopes to repeat.
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