Research School Network: Is it time to train your brain?

Of course, it is always time to give our brain a little workout, but new research indicates that some ​‘brain training’ may do more harm than good.

Over the past decade, ​‘brain training’has emerged alongside new technologies that have seen ​‘brain training’ games and apps spawn by the dozen. Some outlandish claims to the success of brain training have been quickly quashed, but the sense that they are harmless additions to our daily lives is being drawn into question still further by emerging evidence.

An article on The British Psychological Society website, entitled ​‘Brain training may be harmful to some aspects of memory performance’, late last month, shared evidence from a systematic review that brain training did very little except, well, help you get a little better at doing brain training exercises (see the review here). Worse is yet to come however. Another study claims that brain training can actually make you perform worse in a memory test (see ​‘Practice makes imperfect: Working Memory training can harm recognition memory training’).

It proves a stark warning that any approach we take to learn may have unintended consequences and that we should be mindful of that fact.

This is perhaps no surprise, as the brain training strategies prove too specific to be applied in other areas, like students training their working memory, before then taking a mathematics test. There is a significant leap form the general training to the subject specific. Why is this useful information for teachers? Well, it should make us question any approaches to ​‘teaching students to improve working memory’ at the expense of teaching students mathematics and maths-specific memory strategies e.g. the steps to undertake to solve a problem.

More generally, working memory can prove an issue for many of our students (see Susan Gathercole’s brilliant ​‘Working Memory: A Classroom Guide’), but the evidence shows that ​‘working memory training’ is unlikely to work – see this review here.

So what are teachers to take away from all this? Well, we should be circumspect of shiny new gadgets promising to turbo-charge our brains, but, perhaps more subtly, we should take care when approaching one method of teaching and learning without considering how it may have unintended consequences. For example, if we are to undertake mathematics or literacy training on a tech device, just like brain training, do we perhaps hamper learning in unintended ways? Do we degrade our students’ capability to learn in ways we did not anticipate. Or are we Luddites, refusing to countenance how technology is changing how we learn? The evidence in unclear, but we should seek out answers before we invest in brain training or shiny new gadgets.

Evaluating our practice and taking care to assess our impact in the classroom is essential in this regard.