The Effect of a Limbic System and Emotions Educational Program on Elementary and Middle School Learning

Abstract

The effectiveness of scientific educational outreach among children has been difficult to measure because of many confounding variables such as teaching style, material taught and many other factors. To find clarity with this, an experiment was designed involving two 5th grade classes from Martinez, CA, John Swett Elementary and Las Juntas Elementary, and one 7th grade class from Pleasant Hill, CA, Sequoia Middle School. The experiment entailed using an educational poster with characters from a well‐known Disney movie, Inside Out, to teach students about emotional regulation and control guided by the Limbic system and its main components (hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus and thalamus). All three schools were approached using the same protocol: a pre‐test, an educational portion with the poster, a hands‐on activity, and then a post‐test. The hands‐on activity, creating emotion stress balls, was specifically meant to reinforce the material to the children and give them a broader understanding of how to positively deal with their own emotions. In addition to the quantitative pre‐and‐post‐test, a qualitative survey was also administered using the Likert scale to assess how the poster was perceived, the ease of understanding and other factors. The 5th grade students showed a statistically significant quantitative improvement between their pre‐and‐post‐test average results and the 7th graders showed a higher qualitative mean score, indicating they had a better appreciation of the outreach.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.