{"id":197529,"date":"2023-04-13T15:46:21","date_gmt":"2023-04-13T19:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=197529"},"modified":"2023-04-13T15:46:21","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T19:46:21","slug":"in-sync-brainwaves-predict-learning-study-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2023\/04\/in-sync-brainwaves-predict-learning-study-shows\/","title":{"rendered":"In Sync Brainwaves Predict Learning, Study Shows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Students whose brainwaves are more in sync with their classmates and teacher are likely to learn better than those lacking this \u201cbrain-to-brain synchrony,\u201d shows a new study by a team of psychology and education researchers. The findings<\/a>, which appear in the journal Psychological Science<\/i>, offer new insights into the learning process.<\/p>\n

\"Professor
Ido Davidesco, an assistant professor of learning sciences in the UConn Neag School of Education, researches the intersection of science education, the learning sciences, and cognitive neuroscience. (Submitted photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThis is the first study to show that the extent to which students\u2019 and teachers\u2019 brainwaves are in sync during real-world learning can predict how well students retain information from class,\u201d says lead author Ido Davidesco<\/a>, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut\u2019s Neag School of Education<\/a> and a former postdoctoral fellow at New York University, where the study was conducted.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuch of human learning happens when we interact with others, but very little is known about how this process is reflected in the brain activity of students and teachers,\u201d adds Suzanne Dikker<\/a>, a research professor at NYU\u2019s Department of Psychology and one of the paper\u2019s senior authors. \u201cThis work reveals that students whose brainwaves are more in sync with their peers and teacher are likely to learn better.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cThis is the first study to show that the extent to which students\u2019 and teachers\u2019 brainwaves are in sync during real-world learning can predict how well students retain information from class.\u201d — Ido Davidesco<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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 the Psychological Science paper, the team sought to study brain function in a real-world, group context.<\/p>\n

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To do so, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a commonly used method where a cap with electrodes is placed on the head. This method allowed the researchers to track the electrical brain activity of small groups of undergraduate students and an instructor \u2014 none of the participants knew each other prior to the study.<\/p>\n

In these sessions, the instructors gave short lectures on a variety of scientific topics; during the lecture period, both the students\u2019 and the instructors\u2019 brainwaves were monitored.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Afterwards, students took multiple-choice tests to gauge what they had learned.<\/p>\n

The researchers found that as students were listening to the lecture, their brainwaves became in sync with one another. Moreover, the researchers observed such \u201cbrain-to-brain synchrony\u201d \u2014 similar brain-activity patterns over time \u2014 between the students\u2019 brainwaves and when comparing students\u2019 brainwaves to the teacher\u2019s brainwaves. Critically, students whose brain activity was more in sync with their peers and with the teacher learned better \u2014 as shown in higher post-lecture test scores. In fact, the researchers were able to effectively predict which test questions students would answer correctly based on how in sync their brainwaves were during the moments of the lecture that corresponded to each question.<\/p>\n

The authors emphasize that it\u2019s the connection among students and to their instructor that is telling about the learning process. In fact, the researchers could not derive how well students retained information from looking at individual students\u2019 brainwaves \u2014 only synchrony in brainwaves between students and teachers predicted how well students learned.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrain data collected simultaneously from groups of students can be more informative than data collected from individual students,\u201d Davidesco observes.<\/p>\n

The paper\u2019s other authors were Emma Laurent, a doctoral student at Harvard University, Henry Valk, a data scientist at Pison Technology, Inc., Tessa West, a professor in NYU\u2019s Department of Psychology, Catherine Milne, a professor in NYU\u2019s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and David Poeppel, a professor in NYU\u2019s Department of Psychology and managing director of the Ernst Str\u00fcngmann Institute for Neuroscience in Frankfurt, Germany.<\/p>\n

The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (ECR-1661016).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students whose brainwaves are more in sync with their classmates and teacher are likely to learn better than those lacking this \u201cbrain-to-brain synchrony,\u201d shows a new study by a team of psychology and education researchers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":197531,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2428,1855,2076],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1879],"class_list":["post-197529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-educational-psychology","category-neag","category-research"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-02 03:01:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197529"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197538,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197529\/revisions\/197538"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/197531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197529"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=197529"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=197529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}