Students whose brain waves are more in sync with those of their peers and teachers are likely to learn better than those who lack this “brain-to-brain synchrony,” a new study by a team of psychology and educational researchers shows. The findings, which appear in the journal psychological scienceoffer new perspectives on the learning process.
“This is the first study to show that the extent to which students’ and teachers’ brain waves are in sync during real-world learning can predict how well students retain information in class,” says lead author Ido Davidesco, assistant professor at the University. from Connecticut’s Neag School of Education and a former postdoctoral fellow at New York University, where the study was conducted.
“Much of human learning occurs when we interact with others, but very little is known about how this process is reflected in the brain activity of students and teachers,” adds Suzanne Dikker, a research professor in the Department of Psychology at New York University. and one of the participants of the article. older authors. “This work reveals that students whose brain waves are more in sync with their peers and teachers are likely to learn better.”
Our understanding of how the brain supports learning in a social setting is limited because learning is typically studied in individual participants in controlled laboratory settings. In it psychological science article, the team sought to study brain function in a real-world group setting.
To do this, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a commonly used method in which a cap with electrodes is placed on the head. This method allowed the researchers to track the electrical brain activity of small groups of college students and one instructor; none of the participants knew each other before the study.
In these sessions, the instructors gave short lectures on a variety of scientific topics; During the reading period, the brain waves of both students and instructors were monitored.
Subsequently, the students took multiple-choice tests to measure what they had learned.
The researchers found that while the students listened to the lecture, their brain waves were in sync with each other. In addition, the researchers observed such “brain-to-brain synchrony” (similar patterns of brain activity over time) between the students’ brain waves. and by comparing the brain waves of the students with the brain waves of the teacher. Critically, the students whose brain activity was further in tune with their peers and with the teacher they learned better, as shown by higher scores on post-lesson tests. In fact, the researchers were able to effectively predict which test questions students would answer correctly based on how synchronized their brain waves were during the moments of the lecture that corresponded to each question.
The authors emphasize that it is the connection between students and their instructor who is talking about the learning process. In fact, the researchers could not determine how well the students retained the information by looking at individual Students’ brain waves: Only synchrony in brain waves between students and teachers predicted how well students learned.
“Brain data collected simultaneously from groups of students may be more informative than data collected from individual students,” Davidesco observes.
The other authors on the paper were Emma Laurent, a doctoral student at Harvard University, Henry Valk, a data scientist at Pison Technology, Inc., Tessa West, a professor in the NYU Department of Psychology, Catherine Milne, a professor at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture. , Education and Human Development, and David Poeppel, a professor in the Department of Psychology at New York University and managing director of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience in Frankfurt, Germany.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (ECR-1661016).