The potential for brain research to improve early learning appears to grow by the month. This morning I stumbled upon a mountain of new thinking and research about attention that may alter the way students are taught.

A University of Virginia professor, for example, suggests the thinking that children fall into distinct categories of learning styles is misguided.

“There’s not much to this notion of learning styles,” University of Virginia psychology professor and author Daniel Willingham said at a conference on attention and learning this month,” and no evidence that categorizing children by such terms as “visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners,” for example, helps them learn.” – Busting Some of the Myths of Attention.

Now Willingham wasn’t focusing on early learning, but his ideas seem relevant to the worlds of preschool and pre-kindergarten.

He suggested matching the mode of delivery (teaching) not to the learner, but to the content. “Apply the idea of styles not to students—there’s no evidence for that—but to content, and what you want them to learn from the content.”

This report highlights a lot of interesting research – it’s a summary of a summit on “Attention and Engagement in Learning” – including the idea that attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder is not a deficit but an issue of how children allocate their time.

Essentially, children diagnosed with ADHD can struggle to focus on boring tasks and are drawn to more interesting developments, said Martha Bridge Denckla, director of the developmental cognitive neurology department at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

“This form of inhibition, called effortful control or self-regulation, is a network of brain functions that develop at different speeds in different children. As the network wires up, such regulation becomes easier; until then, it takes a lot of mental effort. Some children with ADHD are slower to develop motor control than other children; it appears they are slower to develop effortful control as well.

…

“ADHD kids are using more brain power to sit still,” Denckla said; holding their movements in check while performing a school assignment is for them doubly difficult.

The summit is one element of the Neuro Development Initiative, which explores how cognitive and neuroscience findings can help teaching and learning. I am sure we will hear more from this group about early learning.