An online, interactive approach to teaching neuroscience to adolescents

Most of today's students are skilled in instant messaging, Web browsing, online games, and blogs. These have become part of the social landscape and have changed how we learn and where we learn. The question becomes how to harness the attractiveness and ubiquity of electronic venues toward the goal of teaching neuroscience. At the Rice University Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning, a central focus is the creation of innovative materials that appeal to middle school students. A recent project was undertaken through a Science Education Drug Abuse Partnership Award (R25 DA15063) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to inform adolescents about the neurobiology of substance abuse and the current research dealing with a class of drugs known as club drugs. Problem-based learning, multimedia pedagogy, and the National Science Content Standards were integrated to produce The Reconstructors, an episodic series available via the World Wide Web at http://reconstructors.rice.edu. A field test of students from five schools assessed the retention of content after "playing" The Reconstructors series titled Nothing to Rave About. Gain scores indicated that middle school students' knowledge about club drugs and the basic neuroscience concepts that explain their effects improved significantly.     

The effects of expressions of fear induced by background music on reading comprehension

Background

Research has suggested that background music can have a positive or negative effect that can influence the affective state of individuals. Although research has demonstrated that fear negatively influences our cognitive performance, there is a research gap in understanding the combined effects of different background music tempo and fear in influencing reading comprehension performance.

Methods

Data were collected from 70 participants enrolled at a public university in Canada. Participants were required to listen to background music of varying speeds with three conditions (no music, slow music and fast music). We adopted a cross-sectional multi-level modelling approach for the main analyses, and further analyses using t-test and ANOVA.

Results

Results indicated that expression of fear was not a significant predictor of participants' reading comprehension performance (Model 1). However, when music condition was added (Model 2) in addition to expression of fear, a significant relationship between reading comprehension performance and music condition was found, showing better reading comprehension performance in the slow music condition than in the no music condition. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction effect between music condition and expression of fear on reading comprehension performance (Model 3). Importantly, not all individuals were affected by the music to the same extent, with the possibility that baseline level of fear being the key issue in influencing comprehension performance.

Conclusions

Considering both expression of fear and music condition is required to understand the combined effects on cognitive performance. Expression of fear during cognitive tasks such as reading could be an essential signal that interventions should be applied. Such strategies may be especially beneficial for task performers with higher baseline levels of fear and possibly provide us with insights for best practice and research implications in the field of reading comprehension among individuals with special needs.