Learning relies on emotions

This week's rabbit warren of reading led me to the research of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, EdD about the role of emotions in learning. This article is a work-in-progress (a half-baked idea or part of a perpetual beta, as Harold Jarche might describe it) where I'm trying to connect the dots in some of the things I read, watched and listened to over the last week.

I began reading the first chapter of How People Learn by Nick Shackleton-Jones , where he discredits ideas about the model of the limbic regions of the brain being involved with emotions and the prefrontal cortex being involved with logic and thinking. This is a model that is discussed a lot in the area of learning, education and behaviour change, including through Plato's allegory of the charioteer steering two horses, or Jonathan Haidt 's rider and elephant analogy, and through the hand model of the brain*, so I was keen to investigate more about this contradiction.

* (It is worth noting that Daniel Siegel uses the hand model to talk about the importance of the areas of the brain being integrated. But the model is often simplified to suggest that each is working in isolation.)

I'm currently listening to Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari, which draws upon the same information about the importance to human development of storytelling for sharing experiences and about the usefulness of studies into animal cognition for learning about human cognition. Nick Shackleton-Jones takes this a step further and suggests testing learning theories by asking whether you can apply the theory to non-human animals.

Nick Shackleton-Jones draws upon research by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, where she describes all cognitive function as being "profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion." She cites studies by Antonio Damasio of people who had sustained damage to their prefrontal cortex and subsequently displayed difficulties with social behaviour and decision making, despite being able to still reason logically about these areas. Immordino-Yang's research hypothesises that "emotion-related processes are required for skills and knowledge to be transferred from the structured school environment to real-world decision making because they provide an emotional rudder to guide judgment and action."

In her book, Emotions, Learning and the Brain she also talks about the importance of intrinsic motivation for learning. This is also an important component of andragogy, which is based on a humanistic conception of teachers facilitating the learning of self-directed and autonomous learners.

Immordino-Yang suggests that the purpose of education should be "to cultivate children’s building of repertoires of cognitive and behavioral strategies and options, helping them to recognize the complexity of situations and to respond in increasingly flexible, sophisticated, and creative ways."

This also links with a video I watched earlier in the week by Dave Cormier about rhizomatic learning and embracing uncertainty. He draws upon the Cynefin framework developed by Dave Snowden and discusses how the current education system is based on definitive answers not decision making and how rhizomatic learning could serve as a model for learning in the complex domain, where there are uncertainties and multiple possibilities. Dave Cormier is credited with coining the term MOOC (massive open online course) and also has some helpful information in another video about getting the most out of participation in a MOOC.

Both Dave Cormier and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang describe how being able to reproduce answers in a test does not demonstrate the ability to apply skills and knowledge in the real world, which is also something that I've been thinking about in relation to assessing learning in online training courses. As Immordino-Yang says:

"Knowledge and reasoning divorced from emotional implications and learning lack meaning and motivation and are of little use in the real world. Simply having the knowledge does not imply that a student will be able to use it advantageously outside of school."

Simon Howson-Baggott also highlights this in his article about whether completing 100 hours of LinkedIn learning made him better at his job. He discusses how merely watching the content without making notes, completing the exercises or doing additional research, did not necessarily result in learning and application.

Stella Collins highlights in her LinkedIn course, Using Neuroscience for More Effective L&D that open questions are more effective for the recall of information than multiple-choice quizzes that rely upon mere recognition. And yet assessment in online learning is too often based on multiple-choice quizzes, mainly because these are easy for a computer to score. (I also used Stella Collins' questions to ask about research, from the same course, to structure my summary of Immordino-Yang's research in the image).

Training courses with a more practical portfolio or project approach to assessment go someway to addressing some of the difficulties described above in the context of work-related learning. A good example of this was the Eduflow course, Instructional Design Principles for Course Creation, which is a cohort-based course where participants apply theories about instructional design to the development of their own project and are involved in peer-review of these projects. Scenario-based learning also helps to apply information to a context closer to that of the real world.

But there is still work to be done with many training courses to improve how learners are able to apply the knowledge to real-world contexts, and this is an area which I intend to continue learning about.