The Learning Success Blog

Rubin was in his first year at school (kindergarten in NSW). His teachers told his mum, Lani, that he was not concentrating, he fidgeted a lot, and he could not complete his work.

He was also having great difficulty with his early reading, struggling to sound out simple sentences like "I am Tim. Tim sits."

Because his older brother Kito* had benefited from the Fast ForWord brain training exercises a few years ago following an audiologist's recommendation for his auditory processing disorder, Lani decided to have Ruben do the exercises as well.

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• attention, 
• neurofeedback, 
• neuroscience and 
• how this is being used in schools, sport and business? 

You can access just the “nuggets of gold” on the above topics in 5 x 1 hour sessions delivered by 5 industry experts, each of whom is passionate about their subject.

Being a student can be a full-time job, and pupils from kindergarten all the way to higher education have the daunting task of keeping themselves focused and their full attention on their studies to absorb the broad range of information and knowledge day by day.  

One of the best ways for students to improve their focus and attention is to play fun and engaging brain games!

Playing games designed to activate different parts of the brain is the perfect way for younger and older students to work on their attention span and sharpen their minds!

Luckily, there are hundreds of interesting and entertaining brain games for all ages to keep students busy. Everything from basic jigsaw puzzles to online brain games can help them grow their minds for their future academic endeavours!

Australians are enamoured with video games and a recent survey has shown that more than two thirds of the population are avid gamers. While some people believe that gaming is just a shallow way to pass the time, 60 percent of those who were polled say that playing video games can be beneficial for students.

And over 50 percent said that their children use games for school purposes. Apart from being an interactive and fun way to learn, video games can also have surprising benefits for kids as they can pick up positive values and develop new skills from gaming.

Here are the valuable lessons your child can learn from playing video games.

With millions of Australian kids back in school, learning has been kicked into high gear as the country’s children try to make up for any lost time in the classroom. While experts have reiterated the importance of classroom learning in a child’s education, there is also plenty of learning opportunities beyond the traditional classroom setting.

For years, studies have shown the benefits of play to a child’s development and provide a great platform for encouraging learning and bonding at home. From developing their financial skills at home to encouraging the growth of their social skills, here is how parents can use role play and games to teach their child key life skills and support their classroom learning.

"Neuroscience now is very interested in attention disorders.", says Dr Martha Burns.

Dr Martha Burns is a neuroscientist, author of over 100 journal articles and multiple books, and a leading expert on how children learn. She explained:

"So what we were talking earlier about listening skills, that's the term teachers use. Listening skills. Can the child sit in the classroom and pay attention to me?

Listening skills is auditory attention. One of the great things about Fast ForWord is it builds auditory attention. One of the best studies that's independent, that it has a control group, is on auditory attention.

Many of the children I work with in my speech pathology clinic who have dyslexia also have additional difficulties with processing information and sustaining their attention.

They often have some or many of these challenges: 

• Difficulty following verbal instructions
• Need instructions to be repeated
• Slow to process information
• Easily overloaded with auditory information
• Difficulty sustaining attention for learning tasks
• A tendency to daydream
• Easily distracted
• Academic difficulties

These symptoms could indicate that they have one or more of the conditions known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), auditory processing disorder (APD), or specific language impairment (SLI).

Did you finish school last year?  Last decade?  Last century?

Does it matter when? 

It might, if you want to keep your brain sharp and agile.

It’s unlikely you completed school last year. Most readers of this blog are older than that. You might have finished in the 2000’s. Or last century -  in the 1990’s, 1980’s, 1970’s or even earlier (like me!).

You learnt new things almost every day when you were in school.  Your brain was very active, building new neural pathways and strengthening existing ones.

If you finished school last decade or last century, it is likely you haven’t been learning new things nearly every day since then, and it’s the new things, the novel things, are best for keeping your brain sharp.

Many children struggle with reading, but there are ways parents can help prevent reading difficulties.

Reading researcher, Dr Jennifer Buckingham estimates that as many as 1 million children in Australia are at risk of reading failure.

We know from scientific research that the ability to read is one of the most complex skills we can learn.

According to reading research organisations in Australia and overseas, including The Centre for Independent Studies in Australia, the National Reading Panel (USA), and the USA National Institute for Literacy, there are some critical skills for learning to read.  

Is it possible the neurofeedback tools elite athletes are using to lift their performance can also be used to improve learning for students? And not just for top of the class students, but for all students regardless of their current learning achievements?

You may have heard about educational neuroscience, the science of learning, but what about sports neuroscience?  What do you know about that?

Well, sports neuroscience uses brain science to investigate how to improve the performance of top professional athletes, where a very small improvement can help them stand out from the pack.  And they have discovered neurofeedback can make the difference between a gold medal or just missing it by the finest margin.