Raising Smarter Children

     Part 1 of our series on visual strategies for test taking success, excerpted from Learning vs. Testing,  Strategies That Bridge The Gap Between Learning Styles and Test Taking Success, talked about how my students revealed their own visual learning and recall strategies to get higher grades on their tests.

Today, we continue with how your child’s eye movements are a clue to creating mental snapshots, which enhance their memory during tests.  While I didn’t understand why when I first noticed the eye movements, the physical act of looking up helped my students created and recall nearly everything they read…

Eyes And Their Signals

Although I did not understand why at the time, the physical act of looking up, above eye level, helped my students create and recall a kind of mental snapshot.  They found that they could easily rely on these images, movies, or snapshots when they wanted to recall information.

They actually used their upward eye movements to imagine a screen with an image or movie on it.

As I looked for more information, I found that some classic research done in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s by A. Pavio and others held answers.  They concluded that students using imagery  had significantly better recall and faster response times to questions than those who did not.

In one of Pavio’s studies (1969), students given long lists of pictures and long lists of words to remember, scored far higher on recall of lists with pictures, thus supporting the power of visual memory.  This classic research further noted that recall is enhanced by presenting information in both visual and verbal form together, and has been supported by more recent work.

A few years after this research appeared, others expanded on it by observing that various eye movements appear to be tied to the visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning modalities.

A field outside education developed, known as neurolinguistics, and has been reported on by people like one of our HowToLearn.com experts, Bobbi DePorter.

In addition, neew psychological therapies to overcome stress and trauma make extensive use of eye movements to help patients successfully reprocess a traumatic event.  In a therapy known as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitication and Reprocessing, patterned eye movements are used to remove or clear emotional, cognitive, and physical blockages.

Eye Brain Connection

Studies definitely show that eye movements trigger certain brain functions.  They can even help relieve pain. In other words, there is an eye-brain connection.

When people are asked to recall pictures or recall words, their eyes move to various positions during the process.  As we create and store visual images in our minds, the eyes move to a specific location (often to an upward left or upward right direction), activating certain areas of the brain at the same time.

You can observe the same thing in relation to other learning modalities.  For example, notice what people do with their eyes when they recall sounds or access their feelings about something.  Eye movements to the side, by the ear, will be used when recalling something that was said, and people generally look down when accessing feelings.

Without realizing it, my students helped me understand why children get such different grades on written tests even when they have all prepared in the same way beforehand.  Those students who had problems during the test simply needed to learn how to make pictures as they took their written tests.  Since exams are mostly given in the visual, written learning style, visual input, storage and output work best for those types of exams.

Parents and teachers can now use this eye-movement research to show kids how to create the mental images they need to reinforce and easily recall what they have learned.

Next post:  How To Use The Visual Eye-Brain Connection For Written Tests – you will definitely want to read this one – it will tell you HOW to help your child or student get more visual for written test success.

If you’re looking for specific strategies in math, science, study skills, spelling, reading or any other subject, they are all in the Learning vs. Testing book.

Remember, every child is smart!  Thanks for sending us your comments and hitting the ’share this’ button to send this information to the social media community.

Warmly,

Pat Wyman and Erin Mavredakis, M.D.

Visit our sister site at http://www.HowToLearn.com for more tips and resources to help your child succeed in school and raise a smarter child in every way.