Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas

Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache.

Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to match graphs to equations, dozens upon dozens of them, and fast, often before he has time to work out the correct answer. An equation appears on the screen, and below it three graphs (or vice versa, a graph with three equations). He clicks on one and the screen flashes to tell him whether he’s right or wrong and jumps to the next problem.

“I’m much better at it,” he said, in a phone interview from his school, New Roads in Santa Monica, Calif. “In the beginning it was difficult, having to work so quickly; but you sort of get used to it, and in the end it’s more intuitive. It becomes more effortless.”

For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first — the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws — then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter. Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against. Like the ballplayer who can “read” pitches early, or the chess master who “sees” the best move, they’ve developed a great eye.

Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest. Better yet, perceptual knowledge builds automatically: There’s no reason someone with a good eye for fashion or wordplay cannot develop an intuition for classifying rocks or mammals or algebraic equations, given a little interest or motivation.

“When facing problems in real-life situations, the first question is always, ‘What am I looking at? What kind of problem is this?’ ” said Philip J. Kellman, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Any theory of how we learn presupposes perceptual knowledge — that we know which facts are relevant, that we know what to look for.”

The challenge for education, Dr. Kellman added, “is what do we need to do to make this happen efficiently?”

Scientists have long known that the brain registers subtle patterns subconsciously, well before a person knows he or she is learning. In a landmark 1997 experiment, researchers at the University of Iowa found that people playing a simple gambling game with decks of cards reported “liking” some decks better than others long before they realized that those decks had cards that caused greater losses.. Some participants picked up the differences among decks after just 10 cards.
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Why you want to study Abroad

LOOK around the average university library in the West, and among the faces fixed in concentration over their books and laptops, you will see globalisation in action. The students who have come from India, or a myriad other nations, are among what UNESCO estimated, in 2009, to be 2.8 million people studying on higher education courses outside their home countries. UNESCO predicts that number will rise to 8 million by 2020, with many experts seeing such students as part of a global circulation of knowledge through universities that brings benefits to all countries.

So what prompts millions of students to leave their home nations and their loved ones to live in a country they may never have seen before? And how do students and parents deal with the potentially frightening challenge of choosing a foreign university, a decision that could shape a student’s whole life?

As with other migrants, one of the main factors driving students abroad is the search for a better life. Getting a degree from a foreign university will boost their chances of getting a good job, students believe. And there is also the advantage of gaining a qualification in English, the language for so much of the international business, media and education worlds.

But there is so much more beyond the formal qualification. Wherever a student takes their degree, studying abroad gives them a golden chance to build confidence and initiative, set their own life experiences in a fuller context, and learn to deal with the differences that otherwise create barriers between people. In the UK, that could include experiencing life in cosmopolitan, historic and dynamic cities such as London, Manchester or Edinburgh, or the more traditional life of a smaller town. Or it could include learning to love British food – hard to do for some – and sampling famous delicacies such as fish and chips. After all that, there is the chance to start a career in your adopted country, or return home with a qualification that makes you stand out from your peers.

But how do students and their parents choose a university that will deliver good teaching and a degree with a decent reputation? They obviously need to beware of the small number of institutions in the world that focus on the money brought by overseas students, offering only poor standards in return.

One of the aims of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, published last month, is to help undergraduate and postgraduate students around the world in choosing their university. Teaching accounts for 30 per cent of a university’s score, including the judgments of leading academics on which institutions offer the best teaching for their subject. There is also a score for each university’s staff-student ratio, and its international mix of students and staff.

Experts point to the fact that the fees paid by students, increasingly a fact given declining public investment in higher education in so many nations, will produce a more demanding consumer and more competition among universities to attract students.

If you come with deep pockets, and are willing to spend you have plenty of power to make sure you get the education you expect.
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