Joi Ito has this amazing photo posted over on his flickr stream.
It shows the brainwaves of a student over a week. It is labelled with the activity that the person was involved with over time.
Look at the times where the student listed their main activity as school. The brainwaves are almost flat. They are uninvolved.
Obviously, we’ve got issues that need looking at.
Full rights to Joi Ito.
Interesting. How much of a relationship is there between brain activity and how much the student is learning? In other words, does more brain activity, as measured by this machine, correspond to more learning?
I wondered the same thing since the correlation between activity and learning is of course not absolute. You would presume that the waves do equate with engagement and interest though and that these things would lead to higher levels of thinking and therefore (hopefully) learning.
Something interesting to note. I read the research study this graph is from (available here: http://affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/10.Poh-etal-TBME-EDA-tests.pdf) which says that this graph is of EDA (“Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a sensitive index of sympathetic nervous system activity” quoted from the study) so that this isn’t a graph of brain waves at all, but instead a measure of stresses experienced by the nervous system. Still, one wonders if there is a relationship between the two. It is not at all surprising to me that students experience somewhat more EDA during activities that they do more on their own.