The University of Texas at Dallas - Center for BrainHealth

The Center for BrainHealth is a renowned research and treatment institute focused exclusively on brain health for all. The Center's life-improving mission: to understand, protect, and heal the human brain.

 

Spotlight

 

Better Life in Texas: A Reasonable Goal

Current educational methods are creating brains that can cram facts but cannot think critically. The problem is not Texascentric, however: the gap in student reasoning skills across the United States is increasing rapidly, positioning the country further and further behind other developed nations in this crucial area.

Enter the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas and its continual search for hope. On November 4, the Center formally launched the Middle School Brain Years (MSBY) initiative in a ceremony celebrating Texas leading the charge to solve the crisis in teen reasoning. Preeminent national neuroscientists and educational leaders took part.

Jay Giedd, M.D., chief of adolescent brain development at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), described to the audience the whirlpool of changes the teen brain undergoes. “The brain is so adaptable at this time,” he said. “If we create the right environment, the right challenges, the brain will adapt. It’s empowering for middle schoolers to know that what they do matters in shaping their brain.” Reid Lyon, Ph.D., former chief of child development at NIH, congratulated BrainHealth for its aggressive approach. “The Center takes the best science and actually closes the gap between what we know from that science and what we do in the classroom,” he said, adding that “BrainHealth is one of the few resources in Texas and around the country that takes this crisis seriously.” Dan Branch, member of the Texas House of Representatives, agreed. “I am pleased to be a part of this. I look forward to great success,” he said.

The 81st Texas Legislature understood the merits of the MSBY program, granting $6 million to BrainHealth that will enable researchers to expand its Center-created Strategic Memory and Reasoning Training (SMART©) to 2,000 students in the Dallas area following promising results from a pilot study at Rusk Middle School.

Jacquelyn Gamino, Ph.D., SMART© program developer and MSBY program director, is thankful that “BrainHealth has the opportunity to improve the lives of middle school students throughout North Texas. Their appreciation and enthusiasm has been heartwarming. The outcome testing and changes we see in the students after only a few weeks [of SMART© intervention] often gives me goosebumps. I fight back tears of joy.”

Sandi Chapman, Ph.D., Center for BrainHealth founder and chief director, seconds that emotion. “We teach teens how to abstract information very quickly by showing them how to think critically,” she said. “It’s wonderful to witness the improvement.”

The quest to solve the pervasive crisis in teen reasoning has been joined, with the Center for BrainHealth propelling Texas onto the frontlines. Dr. Chapman sums up the challenge in these lines:

Teach a child a fact,
He can make a good grade.
Teach a child to reason,
He can build a great life.

Four lines, as well as the line of Texas students, families, and educators forming to raise the level of reasoning skills for better lives down the road, initiate at the Center for BrainHealth.