Habit formation limits growth in teacher effectiveness: A review of converging evidence from neuroscience and social science

Teachers become rapidly more effective during the early years of their career but tend to improve increasingly slowly thereafter. This article reviews and synthesises converging evidence from neuroscience, psychology, economics and education suggesting that teachers’ rate of growth slows because their practice becomes habitual. First, we review evidence suggesting that teaching is highly conducive to habit formation and that teachers display characteristic features of habitual behaviour. Next, we review empirical findings that performance asymptotes, as seen in teachers’ learning curves, coincide with the reallocation of behaviour regulation to neural circuits governing habitual behaviour. Finally, original data is presented showing that teachers’ behaviour becomes automatic around the time that teacher effectiveness begins to level off. Collectively, this evidence implies that professional development should involve repeated practice in realistic settings in order to overwrite and upgrade existing habits

Sustained selective attention in adolescence: Cognitive development and predictors of distractibility at school

Despite much research into the development of attention in adolescence, mixed results and between-task differences have precluded clear conclusions regarding the relative early or late maturation of attention abilities. Moreover, although adolescents constantly face the need to pay attention at school, it remains unclear whether laboratory measures of attention can predict their ability to sustain attention focus during lessons. Therefore, here we devised a task that was sensitive to measure both sustained and selective attention and tested whether task measures could predict adolescents’ levels of inattention during lessons. In total, 166 adolescents (aged 12–17 years) and 50 adults performed a sustained selective attention task, searching for letter targets while ignoring salient yet entirely irrelevant distractor faces, under different levels of perceptual load—an established determinant of attention in adults. Inattention levels during a just preceding classroom lesson were measured using a novel self-report classroom distractibility checklist. The results established that sustained attention (measured with response variability) continued to develop throughout adolescence across perceptual load levels. In contrast, there was an earlier maturation of the effect of perceptual load on selective attention; load modulation of distractor interference was larger in the early adolescence period compared with later periods. Both distractor interference and response variability were significant unique predictors of distractibility in the classroom, including when controlling for interest in the lesson and cognitive aptitude. Overall, the results demonstrate divergence of development of sustained and selective attention in adolescence and establish both as significant predictors of attention in the important educational setting of school lessons

An audit on general surgical readmissions

Introduction: The objective of this study was to investigate general surgical readmissions at Salford Royal Foundation Trust (SRFT) and to assess the patterns of readmission in pathology and patient group characteristics. Methods: We performed a retrospective audit of patients re-admitted as an emergency within 30 days of being discharged by the general surgery team at SRFT over seven months from April 2018 to October 2018. Patient NHS numbers were provided by Hospital Episode Statistics via the Information Business Team at SRFT. Data was input into Microsoft Excel and statistical analysis was performed using StatsDirect 2018. Results: During this period, 171 patients were coded as general surgery emergency readmissions. Subsequent exclusion left 91 patients in our readmissions group. We compared this with 3261 patients who had been admitted to the general surgical team over the same time period. Gallstone pathology made up 26.4% of the readmission patients, but only 9.26% of all general surgical patients. 58.5% of the surgery on the readmission group was non-elective, compared to 29.7% of all patients. In the readmission group, patients who had a previous operation cancelled had higher rates of early post-operative complications per operation (0.6 complications per operation) from their subsequent operation, than patients who had no previous cancellations (0.229). Four patients (4.4%) had no discharge summary; another seven (7.7%) did not get any patient advice. For 16.5% of patients, the written discharge advice to them, or lack of such advice, was involved in their readmission. Conclusions: Gallstone pathology was over-represented in the readmissions group. Of the patients who had surgery on index admission, the readmission group had a higher proportion of non-elective surgery than all surgery patients. Written discharge advice was varied and inconsistent, and was not present for 12.1% of patients. Clearer discharge advice with more available written advice could reduce avoidable readmissions

How Memory Conforms to Brain Development

Nature exhibits countless examples of adaptive networks, whose topology evolves constantly coupled with the activity due to its function. The brain is an illustrative example of a system in which a dynamic complex network develops by the generation and pruning of synaptic contacts between neurons while memories are acquired and consolidated. Here, we consider a recently proposed brain developing model to study how mechanisms responsible for the evolution of brain structure affect and are affected by memory storage processes. Following recent experimental observations, we assume that the basic rules for adding and removing synapses depend on local synaptic currents at the respective neurons in addition to global mechanisms depending on the mean connectivity. In this way a feedback loop between “form” and “function” spontaneously emerges that influences the ability of the system to optimally store and retrieve sensory information in patterns of brain activity or memories. In particular, we report here that, as a consequence of such a feedback-loop, oscillations in the activity of the system among the memorized patterns can occur, depending on parameters, reminding mind dynamical processes. Such oscillations have their origin in the destabilization of memory attractors due to the pruning dynamics, which induces a kind of structural disorder or noise in the system at a long-term scale. This constantly modifies the synaptic disorder induced by the interference among the many patterns of activity memorized in the system. Such new intriguing oscillatory behavior is to be associated only to long-term synaptic mechanisms during the network evolution dynamics, and it does not depend on short-term synaptic processes, as assumed in other studies, that are not present in our model.Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Agencia Española de Investigación (AEI) under grant FIS2017-84256-P (FEDER funds) and from the Obra Social La Caixa (ID 100010434, with code LCF/BQ/ES15/10360004). This study has been also partially financed by the Consejería de Conocimiento, Investigación y Universidad, Junta de Andalucía and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), with reference SOMM17/6105/UGR

Structural scaling and threshold modulation of dentritic spines driven by homeostatic plasticity

Neural networks employ homeostatic synaptic plasticity (HSP) to maintain activity within an optimal range, countering the tendencies of unchecked Hebbian LTP or LTD to saturate the network. It is manifested by synaptic scaling of all the inputs on a neuron, either upwards to increase global activity or downwards to decrease it. In this thesis we investigate the structural correlates that accompany the induction of homeostatic plasticity and then determine how this form of synaptic modulation impacts the ability of inputs to undergo Hebbian plasticity. We show that prolonged activity blockade in organotypic hippocampal slices causes structural growth of individual dendritic spines, complementing the physiological increase in synaptic strength(...)Fundação Champalimau

Managing dietary information whilst on income support Implications for government policy

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:D191353 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Attention, mindwandering, and mood

We tested the hypothesis that mindwandering and external distraction are both manifestations of a common state of reduced attention focus, and examined how both relate to reported level of happiness. We conducted real-time sampling of people’s experience of mindwandering, irrelevant distraction (e.g. by music, phone, etc.), and happiness levels, in two studies with 524 people undertaking common daily-life activities. All irrelevant external distractions were positively correlated with mindwandering. Indeed mindwandering duration could be predicted from the reported duration of external distraction, when controlling for a range of background variables. An exploratory factor analysis of mindwandering and distraction reports suggested a single underlying construct. In addition, duration of irrelevant distraction by both mobile phones and mindwandering was significantly associated with reduced reported levels of happiness. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that that a state of reduced attention focus underlies both mindwandering and distractibility and clarify the link with happiness