Video Game Smarts


How You Can Use Video Game Techniques to Improve Smarts and Test Scores

As CNN recently reported, studies show that playing video games increases children's attention span and brain development.  But how can that benefit their school work?  Do you really want your child to spend more time playing  video games, hoping it turns into better SAT scores?   

The key to taking advantage of the increased brain development from video games is understanding how the brain benefits work.  The brain pay-off from video gaming is in the amount of visual information the brain can take in, how much visual stress it takes to distract focus, and in how rapidly the brain can refocus in moving attention from object to object.  "Clearly, these individuals have an increased ability to process information over time..." reports the study's authors C. Shawn Green & Daphne Bavelier.  "Great," you ask, "how does that translate to grades?" So to truly benefit your child's grades, test scores and intellect, let's break down exactly how these increased abilities can be used outside of video game play.

Gamers have an increased ability to focus and a higher threshold for distraction.  But what school teacher doesn't constantly have to remind her young students to pay attention?   In most school classrooms, the activity is slower and less of it is visual. It's also not near as interactive for the student.   The video game captures and holds the players attention because the action is constantly moving and the scoring requires a player to keep track of all the moving stuff.  So here's how to keep those unfocused youngsters on target outside of the video game and during their homework. 

* Rapid-fire repetition:  How many times can they spell a tough word correctly in 1 minute?  You keep time while they keep track.

The repetition of the spelling word will have them memorize it completely, but since they are also keeping count of how many times they spell it correctly, their attention is shifted to the count.  Repetition is one of the most effective methods for learning things like times tables or spelling words in a short amount of time, and does not require thought, only recall.  The process uses their focusing ability and is very interactive.  This allows the brain to alleviate the tedium of the repetition, while still allowing the memory to get the spelling completely stored.  Since the child's focus is more on the counting task and the speed, they will not get bored from doing the task over and over. 

* Speed Is Exciting: Use flash cards to for memorizing facts, like times tables or state capitals, but keep a quick pace for changing from card to card.  Don't linger on a card longer than three seconds. 

Video games increase the threshold for distraction, meaning it takes more chaos and information to throw the game players off or make their performance suffer.  By only exposing the flash card for up to three seconds, you keep the student focused on the answer.  Since they know the card is going to change fast, they will give answers more from an automatic recall, which is good.  If they really know the answer, they will give it immediately.  If they don't really know it, they will linger before trying to answer.  This will show what they really know, and what they need to work on (great for increasing efficiency in homework!).  The fast time pace will not feel chaotic, because it's a slower pace than they are used to in the video game.  The flash card method also provides the repetition that is needed to learn facts or memorize lists, but because it moves at a fast pace, it will hold their attention.

* Focus on Visuals:   For items like math word problems, have your child draw the problem and use their visual skills.  When they see it, they can solve it.

Although most people have the ability to conjure up real or imagined images in their mind, some people do have difficulty with this.  Math word problems really tweak this weakness in some people.  For others, the difficulty in solving the problem lies in the amount of fact accumulation and distraction in the words.  If students like hearing and seeing better than reading, word problems drive them absolutely nuts!  By learning to focus their attention back onto the visual aspect of the word problem, our video game players get back into their field of advantage.  Drawing a picture of the word problem scenario will get them seeing it, and convert the word distractions to a visual aspect they can predict and respond to effectively.  It may take reading the word problem to them out loud to allow them to refocus on their mental image for them to draw a picture or solve the problem, but the more they work at this, the better they will get at being able to to solve the whole problem unaided.

* More Chaos Is No Problem:  For tasks like memorizing maps, let your student look at the map for short ten to twenty-second bursts.  They'll memorize more accurately than looking for a long time. 

The visual skill enhancements from video game play happen outside the level of conscious thought, that is, they use the parts of the brain that don't work by thinking in words or sentences, as we do in our conscious thought.  By only looking at the map for short bursts of time, the student uses mostly parts of the brain that don't "think" and work better for visual memorization.  After about ten to twenty seconds, once the student has had a chance to run their eyes over the map and start to register details, the thinking kicks in and actually derails most of the process.  When brain processing in this exercise switches from using visual centers to internally thinking in words and phrases, which is automatic, the benefits of the visual ability get sidetracked and memorization becomes a matter of word storage.  But to memorize a map and be able to recall things on it, we need to use the visual skill, NOT thinking or word storage skill.  By keeping the map exposed to the student for only short bursts of time, it keeps their brain in the visual, which is good for this task, and out of reducing it to words, which is bad for this task.

* The Game Doesn't Stop for Mistakes: Take advantage of their attention span by not stopping for mistakes.  Acknowledge and correct mistakes at the end of the activity, which shifts focus specifically to what they do need to learn.

Stopping to correct mistakes, rather than flowing through an activity, actually interrupts learning and performance more than it helps, especially since it is a distraction and doesn't allow focus to develop if it happens too often.  By flowing through an activity, like taking a test or playing a game or singing a song, the brain is able to follow its natural processes for taking in and utilizing information.  By looking for, finding and correcting mistakes after a thinking task is completed, it allows the student to refocus, literally shifting their modes of thought from performance to problem solving, which are different.  Here's how the video game benefit comes in:  game players are used to making mistakes and going right on with play, which is how the games is designed.  (This is also how their real life functions most of the time.)  Most players learn BY making mistakes, not by trying to avoid them.  Concentrating on avoiding mistakes log-jams the whole process of the brain and how it works visually in the video game.  If a player has a consistent problem with a task, they will be able to work on that specific task until they get it (most games have teaching and practice rounds included for such skill development).  Another benefit of isolating mistake correction to the end of an activity whenever possible, is that it then allows the student or player to concentrate fully on learning that specific thing with their full attention, and is much more efficient.

* The self-correcting Brain:  Let them guess, takes risks and be free to make mistakes in homework or study tasks.  The brain always seeks the right answer, but it needs to see, understand and use wrong answers to learn completely.

This is one of the truly great things about the brain, if we learn to use it properly.  Our brain is always seeking the "right answer" to whatever task we give it, and it will seek that answer as long as we keep our attention on the search or the unresolved state.  In a sequence of events and neural paths far too complex to detail here, the brain takes in and sorts an enormous amount of input all the time, but it filters that information to find specifically what we are looking for to arrive at the right answer.  This happens constantly throughout our lives and is our automatic way of operating in life.  We just don't see it consciously.  In video games, most players automatically play to win, or at least to score points and in some way succeed at the game.  It would actually take a lot more thought and effort to consciously work at loosing the game (without being passive and letting the game beat us, which is a different strategy.)  Since our brain is always filtering incoming information to find what it needs, it has to learn first what it needs to be able to get an answer.  The brain HAS to learn what "junk" is before it can filter it out.  This is why making mistakes is so important in the learning phase!  If we make a distinction between the learning phase, the practice phase and the performance phase, the need for making mistakes becomes obvious.  Let's define the learning phase "listening to the lesson be taught in the classroom and then using that information to do the assigned homework." Now let's further define the practice phase as "short quiz a few days later."  Ultimately the performance phase would be "test for a grade."  By making and utilizing all the mistakes along the way to the test, we have given our brain that necessary step of finding out what to filter as "good information" and "junk."  If our attention along the way is  on "avoiding making mistakes" rather than learning and observing that path to the right answer, we miss the learning most of the time.  That's why if we focus on mistakes, we only get more of them.  The brain will seek out what we focus it on.

These are just a few of the practical ways to use the brain benefits of video games.  There are many more facts about the visual aspects of the video game study and how it works in the brain in the University of Rochester study, done by the study's authors C. Shawn Green & Daphne Bavelier.   Although the original study was only conducted to find the specific brain details that result from gaming, and did not have an educational intent, the benefits of "video game brain" definitely apply to daily life outside the game.  It just takes some of that brain power to see how!
 
A pdf of the study "Action video game modifies visual selective attention" can be downloaded from http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/daphne/visual.html#video
from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. 

If you are interested in more brain development resources, I highly recommend the Learning Strategies website.  Visit them at www.learningstrategies.com for lots of information and great products. 


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