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In class, on camera
Observational classroom will provide data for study in field of educational neuroscience.
David Clarke
A new classroom fitted with high-tech cameras to track students’ every move is now open at the University of Melbourne.
The Science of Learning classroom is part of a nationwide $ 16 million project to help researchers better understand how learning takes place in the brain and improve teaching.
The facility is structured like a conventional classroom but it allows researchers to observe students behind a large one-way observation mirror and record and analyse the wide range of actions and interactions without disruption.
“ The visible presence of tripods in the classroom and the number of necessary personnel can be distracting,” said chief investigator professor David Clarke, from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.“ The conventional classroom is enormously complex and our understanding of learning as a social activity is fairly limited.
“ Lessons given in our state-of-the-art classroom can be recorded through up to 16 high-definition video cameras and up to 32 fixed and portable microphones, which can be controlled by a technical team to capture everything the researchers need.”
The experimental facility will provide an essential research link for education, neuroscience and psychology experts to determine how the new area of educational neuroscience might inform classroom learning.
“ Our difficulty has been to capture in an authentic fashion, and at a level of significant detail, the to and fro of classroom interaction, in particular the way different students within the same class interact in different ways in response to what might have been crafted by us to be the perfect stimulus,” Clarke explained.“ We can document in this classroom the variation in response and look at, in particular, the social nature of learning, which has been the subject of multiple theoretical speculations over time.
“ We can also live stream this to anywhere in the world. We will build a rich database of classroom interactions that will be an enduring research resource and evidence base.
“ These outcomes will make a very real impact on how teachers teach and how students learn.” n
Locals earn Michael J. Fox Foundation grant
Queensland researchers receive $ 300,000 to aid development of drugs to treat Parkinson’ s.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation, the organisation established by the high-profile actor with Parkinson’ s disease, has awarded a $ 300,000 research grant to the University of Queensland for the exploration of brain inflammation in those battling the condition.
The grant was the only one awarded to Australian researchers in the latest round of funding the foundation has allocated in collaboration with its local partner, the Shake It Up Australia Foundation.
The research centres on the development and testing of new drugs to reduce brain cell death in people with Parkinson’ s. It will be led by associate professor Trent Woodruff from the university’ s School of Biomedical Sciences.
Whilst some testing of this type is already underway, human trials have not begun.
Woodruff said there was already mounting evidence that people with Parkinson’ s developed brain inflammation, which accompanies the loss of dopamineproducing brain cells seen in the disease.
“ Our aim is to find a medication that will target the immune response that causes inflammation in the brain, to slow down and hopefully halt disease progression,” Woodruff said.“ Our hope for the future is to take these drugs into human clinical trials … and we are very grateful to The Michael J. Fox and Shake It Up Australia foundations for funding our research.”
Shake it Up Australia chief executive Ben Young said the latest grant was“ further affirmation of the world-class Parkinson’ s research being done in Australia” and that he was confident local researchers – such as Woodruff and his team – would play a vital role in achieving major breakthroughs in the treatment of the disease. n
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