Why Neuroscience and I Support a Little Edu-tainment

While Edu-tainment can be a hot button for educational debates, there is some research on human memory and attention that may change the way you look at the issue. 

Inside the brain, learning happens exactly the same way for everyone—man, woman, and child.

 Learning is one of the functions of LTP (or long-term potentiation), the term for the biological process of strengthening neural connections that are used repeatedly. However, learning is not just reviewing information until it sticks. If learning was just repeated use of neural connections then learning designs would be the same for everyone as long as they facilitated LTP. If LTP was all there was to learning then late-night cram sessions would work better than they do. In the end, it's just not that simple. Fortunately, LTP may be the neurological process that powers learning, but the gateway through which all information must pass is consciousness or—as it is often called by psychologists—working memory. We learn things based on how we think about them and how long we think about them, but in order for learning to happen the information has to catch and hold our attention for a relatively long period of time.   

Research in cognitive science has shown that the attention span of human working memory is about 2 seconds or approximately 7 mental concepts. That is to say that when you focus listening to someone talk for three minutes, your brain has refreshed its attention on that task at least 90 times. Humans maintain focus by holding ideas and tasks in their consciousness for long periods of time, and that is only achieved by constantly renewing attention or shifting it slightly. After we stop focusing on a mental task, our memory of that task and what we were doing begins to deteriorate after just 2 seconds. However, our memory of that task is greatly strengthened by the amount of time we focused on it in the first place and the depth of our mental engagement in the task.

Think of the process of forming new memories like building a sandcastle, the more time you spend and the harder you work on building that sandcastle, the stronger it will be and the longer it will take to wear down. But if you walk away from it long enough, it deteriorates to the point that you have to start working on it again.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Pragmagraphr via Creative Commons

So what does this have to do with implementing entertainment strategies in education?

In traditional education settings—whether at a public school or as part of corporate training—educators have to deal with the pros and cons of what is aptly called a ‘captive audience.’ These are people who can’t leave, at least not without major consequences such as losing their job or forfeiting their diploma. In some cases, this can be a blessing for education because it keeps people from giving up on topics until they get deep enough in to them to realize the value and find their own interest. However, for several courses and educational materials it can also act as a crutch, because instructors don’t think they have to “sell” the information to the students. However, just after the cursory look at human attention, memory, and learning provided above, we can see the danger here—attending a class is fundamentally different than closely attending to a class. Put bluntly, just because the butt is in the seat doesn't mean the mind is getting anything out of it.

In order to help students or employees maintain their attention for longer periods of time, and process the information on a deeper level, instructors can implement strategies used by the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry has literally made millions of dollars from developing ways to capture people’s attention. Because they can prolong human attention and interest, which leads to stronger mental connections and more lasting long-term memory, using entertainment strategies in education is a viable and even necessary method in creating educational materials.

So, why is entertainment valuable in education? It helps hold people’s attention longer.

On top of that, using entertainment strategies is not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Instructors or instructional designers can work education into narratives, games, or puzzles. In essence, using an entertainment strategy is just designing a learning experience so that it is enjoyable to the learner. Under this model, anything that can be done to make it more enjoyable—as long as it is not at the expense of the educational experience itself—will help towards the pedagogical goal of the interaction.

There are a lot of people out there who think that entertainment doesn't have a place in education, or that the students should be enjoying learning for learning’s sake. But I think that neuroscience gives us some compelling reasons to take a second look at edu-tainment. There might be something there.

What do you think? Should there be room for more entertainment in education? Are the two compatible? Tell us in the comments below.