The Neuroscience Behind Motivation, Memory & Metacognition

How motivation, memory and metacognitive ability are often affected for children with learning disabilities.

For children with learning difficulties, challenges in learning occur not only from lesson content, but also from neurological and psychological brain immaturities and differences. As such, many of these children have learning issues associated with what ReMinds terms the “Triple M Challenges”. That is, Motivation, Memory and Metacognitive Thinking. This program will explain and address these challenges.

Motivation underpins learning for all of us throughout out lives. However, for children with learning difficulties, specific demotivators may affect learning psychologically even more than neurologically if not dealt with appropriately. These demotivators are discussed in this program and simple ways to reduce or avoid them for more productive learning outcomes.

In addition, teaching and instruction may be in vain if information is forgotten frequently due to problems with short term, working and long term memory. Discover how this is related to issues of storage and retrieval of information. Furthermore, children with learning difficulties require on average 4 times more repetition of information in order to submit to long term memory. Hence, the question in formal education becomes not how can a child with learning difficulties learn required content (which they often can), but rather, how can they learn the content in the limited time provided with a fast moving content heavy curriculum and pace.

Metacognition relates to self awareness. This course will explain how delays in metacognitive thinking impact learning and academic performance.