Desire to Learn Measurability02/17

Students’ desire to learn is measurable (Willis, 2014). Position Emission Tomography (PET) scans, neuroimaging, and brain mapping show–when students experience encouraging and engaging classroom learning environments–dopamine (an emotional neurotransmitter) is released in the brain and increases your desire to learn and enhances your long-term learning ability.

To realize the embracing and gratifying classroom learning environments that release the neurotransmitters bringing about your natural desire to learn, you have to actuate the following classroom learning variables:

• Relevant course content
• Reinforcing-teacher feedback
• Student-centered classroom learning environments
• Student portfolios and self-learning experiences
• Student-determined reading choices
• Adherence to Morgan’s Multiple Intelligence axiom
• Scheduled musically-scored, resonantly-narrated, and professionally-enacted documentary-education videos that captivate student interest
• Establish positive support cultures that are impervious to prevailing negative counter-cultures

Offering these promising classroom learning experiences will release dopamine in the brain, enhance your desire to learn, and increase your long-time learning abilities.

Contrarily! Cortisol essays show when students experience discouraging and disengaging classroom learning experiences, this stress hormone is secreted into the body; and that extremely high or low levels of cortisol compromise cognitive functioning by reducing blood flow to the brain and inhibiting the growth of neurons contributing to the learning process.

And to avoid the stressful classroom environments that produce the high and low levels of cortisol that compromise student learning, you need to eliminate the following:

• Irrelevant course content, restrictive reading list, lists, redundant home ‘work’ and unrealistic reading assignments, pedantic lectures, robotic memorization drills, and inculcating protocols
• Invalid, time-based, culturally-biased standardized test items designed to produce the differential scores needed to rank and compare students’ learning achievement levels throughout the nation.
• Unsafe environments: bullying, gangs, violence; substance abuse, smoking, alcohol; unethical, immoral, prejudicial, hateful, and radically-extreme cultures
• Ignoring Thorndyke’s statistically-significant proven hypothesis: “Only identical elements are transferable from one subject to another,” and spuriously trying to “train the mind” by requiring Algebra I and other rigorously-ramped-up onerous courses promising to increase the high-school dropout/non-graduate rates
• Failure to recognize loner student outliers that may need counseling or even mental health referring

Eliminating these cortisol-distress related variables will encourage the positive- reinforcing classroom learning environments that will enhance the students’ desire to learn, inspire the understanding and appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge, and perpetuate the long-term learning process.

Summary

Consummating the encouraging and engaging classroom learning environments needed to stimulate the release of dopamine and suppress the release of extremely high and low levels of cortisol will enhance students’ natural desire to learn.

Postulatum

The endowed desire to learn is inhibited by undesirable classroom learning environments