Case Study

Research Ideas

I have my thesis coming up next year, and I’ve been having a creative tidal wave in the last few days about research ideas for the classroom.  This is more for me than for anyone else, so please feel free to disregard this unless you’re really interested in education research.

• Exploring the correlation between minor applied synesthesia and reading/math scores.  It’s been suggested that there is a certain link between our ability to translate auditory cues into visual cues that might be necessary for advanced learning skills and interpretation skills.  What I would be exploring would be the numbers of kids in low SES schools who are applying auditory/visual synesthesia techniques as opposed to numbers of kids in other schools using the same techniques and whether or not that could have an impact on math and reading scores.
• Researching and reporting for myself how doodling within advanced science courses can increase retention of knowledge and HOW one teaches these visual interpretation skills.  If doodling in a lecture class is essentially the ability to interpret auditory cues as visual representations, that’s actually a higher order synthesis skill, because students are constantly forced to interpret the cues in their own language (visual or otherwise).  It’s all an act of engaging multiple learning modalities while also combining a summarizing and interpreting skill. 

I’ll probably add to this over the year, but I’m excited to run some neuroscience research techniques in the classroom.