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TEDx Talks
Title: Disruption in EdTech with Targeted Cognitive Intervention | Steve Wilkins | TEDxBabsonCollege
Published: 2017-09-18
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVyAg8PT4S4
just this past week you on Moscow announced the formation of a new company called Nora link designed to put artificial intelligence into our brains my talk is somewhat similar to that in that I'm gonna talk about using technology to improve human cognitive function but I'm not talking about him putting anything into a child's brain except for knowledge skills and capacity so this talk is a little
less invasive than what you want is considering and perhaps a little less hyper bored like I would like to nominate the invention of the written word of reading and writing as possibly one of the greatest achievements in human history it is truly amazing that the human brain can turn abstract squiggles on a page into a meaningful form of communication we look up my handwriting here our
brain is able to look at the U. in truly the UN Human they they're actually not even close to this the way I write and our brain through an intricate process cognitive activities is able to determine that those are both the letter you likewise towards the bottom of my scroll my %HESITATION in into my %HESITATION inform might owe in communication dramatically different shapes how is it
possible the human brain can do this turn it into a meaningful form of communication reading one could argue it's one of the most important skills in disruption it is actually necessary to be able to read to be a disruptor in a technological world really connects our ideas to other people's ideas he gives us access to education to income to health it helps us explore the boundaries
of what it means to be human how this happens is incredible we are born we are pre wired to speak we're not pre wired to read what has to happen for us to read is we develop neural systems grain networks that enable this to happen visual auditory memory tension decision making organizations we all have to develop together in this miracle of neuroplasticity but the human brain
through experience through repetition repetition through repetition builds neural network in so doing we create a reading machine problem is one in five of us fails to learn to be I'm good readers it is a staggering number illiterate spite temps in school spoke through the alphabet exposure to phonics one in five of this does not learn how to read this population includes children with language based learning
difficulties such as dyslexia to which I will refer in a bit people who grow up in impoverished environments where the amount of language scores in reading and vocabulary is minimal people who grow up intermarriage situations where survival is the goal rather than anything grandiose is reading when we look at the neuro images our brains industry populations we realize that the systems the neuro plastic system have
not developed properly cost is enormous to the individual who does not learn how to read she or he becomes hounded with the message slow or lazy dumb because read and one begins to believe that for our schools special education is probably expensive the amount of individual educational planning required small group maybe even tutorial classes highly trained teachers best efforts have only been marginally successful and to
society when we look at the cost of illiteracy prisons are full of people who cannot read do not read and particularly in incarcerated use estimates are the numbers as high as seventy to eighty percent of young people in prison are illiterate we begin to look at this issue at the school I run the Carroll school only can Massachusetts we want to understand if we could do
better if we could disrupt traditional approaches to reading instruction looking at the neuro images of Branson dyslexics trying to read we realize the activation patterns are not typical see this on an fMRI there are cognitive process sees that we can identify as the culprits why is this not a good reading machine why does this brain not learn how to read possibly because of deficits in reaction
time I'll talk about in a bit or processing speed how much information can a brain take him and make sense of looking at my scribble Zedillo is that no back and forth back and forth back and forth constant decision making looking at executive functions such as organization and planning and decision making looking at a variety of memory factors working memory and short term memory we hypothesized
that we could build a better approach to addressing illiteracy then common practice and we began doing that we looked at the population of children at the Carroll school four hundred fourteen beautifully diagnose children with language based learning difficulties such as dyslexia these children have incredible gifts super powers dyslexic advantages in many many areas becoming better some creators and designers of our world but their brains are
not good reading machine in reading gives so we started looking at the clock and a profile of these children and realized there were some commonalities there were some neural systems it did not develop we wonder if we could encourage stimulate era plastic response dyslexic children we looked at the profile of our students sixty percent of them had a significant deficit skill called reaction to reaction times
this front of a computer screen child sees a stimulus come up on the screen hit the space bar if the space bar every time you see any stimulus at all hit the space bar then the task to become more complicated anytime you see a red circle space bar see a Red Square do not hit the spacebar red triangle space per red circle hit the space bar
blue circle sixty percent of our children are very poor at this task is that a coincidence that in a population of children with dyslexia we have this high level of reaction time difficulty we thought it was not a quince we thought there was probably correlation so again pursuing our hypothesis could we build the technology that addressed the lack of neuro plastic developed of particular neural channel
reaction time is a fascinating topic when talking about reading two reasons one reaction time is not a linguistic tax almost all interventions designed to help children learn how to read have been linguistically based through history we were pursuing the thought that maybe this non linguistic really a decision making it's highly related I oral reading fluency the second thing that is fascinating about reaction time is it's
almost perfectly correlated with oral reading flow so if one is had exposure to the alphabet and to phonics into elementary school instruction and one has good reaction time scores one is most likely to have excellent oral reading fluency how many words can a child read correctly in a paragraph in a minute conversely if one has horrible reaction time scores it's most likely one's going to be
a war or reader so we pursue this high Pappas we developed a product called targeted cognitive intervention TCI what it does is it assesses a child's cognitive profile where's she strong where she week wears his profile like the Alps and based on the profile platform will assign civics basically individualized and sand curriculum to each individual based on profile what we're trying to do is encourage the
appropriate neural plastic response what we realized is that doing this was like going to physical therapy children did not love having us poke yeah what their weakest so like physical therapy are you go there to strengthen a component of your body that isn't working properly we were poking at what children are were not so good at cognitively so we realized we had to try to make
this fun so we borrowed %HESITATION games that are out there in the open market such as whack a mole welcome all is a reaction time every time you see the blue mole get your clicker on it and click and that can get harder and harder and harder more complicated more variables over time here's what TCI does seamless portable scalable portable it is a show you a
second affected step one assessed the child's profile where the strengths where the weaknesses second in somewhat of a recommendation engine concept although the designers tell me that's not exactly what based on your profile if you have weak reaction time scores it will deliver to you reaction time curriculum all computer based all cloud based then the child will engage in the activities we've been using six weeks
school year five days a week forty minutes session and the children interact with what they most need to learn cognitive network they most need to develop as a child does well the technology makes the tasks harder as a child struggles the technology %HESITATION moves the challenge to a lower level making sure the children stay in the flow zone then every day a platform updates the data
shares that with the teacher every morning at one AM new data on student performance because this is like physical therapy because this is a little bit pain very often teachers share those data with their students so the children can see that their efforts are paying off that they are making they are moving in that direction now reaction time is not something you can go to the
family picnic can brag about Johnny has free and past reaction there has to be some sort of a socially valid quarreling to this work and that's the fifth skill odd that the platform delivers to the educational process which is correlates the child's work in reaction time in this case two academic outcomes we've been doing this work for six years we've only had the technology platform but
this year the two thousand sixteen two thousand seventeen school year we used to do this in the old fashioned way labor intensive too much demand on the teachers data collection was tiresome in statistical analysis was done by hand platform does all this work for us now however when we started six years ago we looked at a group of fifty five children who on the left bar
appear the five percent of them had multiple cognitive weaknesses that's the red on the right hand bar green is how many children had no measurable cognitive weakness there are very few of them they did their TCI work six weeks five days a week forty minutes a day the metal bars what that same group of children look like in seventh grade so we start to see the
red diminish start see the green increase your kids with multiple problems more kids with no measurable and on the right is what they look like in eighth grade after they've done another round of TCI TCI each year so we start to believe that this was having a dramatic impact on their cognitive skills did it have dramatic impact something cited cares about such as McAlpine this chart
shows for different groups of children who have receive the very best that Carol school knows how to offer small group instruction Tencent tutorial focus areas where their weakest academically highly trained teachers groups wanting to showing a positive trajectory as they moved from fifth six it's great which is remarkable given that they hadn't done that prior to coming to our school both those groups were growing at
roughly of rates true percentiles per year so if for example a child was ten percentiles below mean beginning to take about five years close the gap catch up classmate I bet you can tell that groups three and four have dramatically more positive exactly in those lines the only difference between groups wanting to three and four is the amount of TCI they had the amount of targeted
cognitive intervention concert with with phonics instruction group three is growing at a rate of five point three percentiles per child was ten house behind about two years to catch up group for is growing at seven per less than two they three and four received TCI earlier and more often groups we are excited about this disruption %HESITATION this is taking a school that's been successful for nearly
fifty years and through the asking ourselves tough questions we've come up with something is having significantly better outcomes children we want to share TCI with the world our goal is get this out to as many children adults in this country and others as possible we're currently conducting research with neuroscientist and T. hopefully in a peer review published article will be out soon we are conducting pilots
