Neuroscience meets nuclear science at Beaver Valley

Piraino discussed her work at the American Nuclear Society’s 2023 Conference on Nuclear Training and Education (CONTE 2023), held this past February, and provided further elaboration to Nuclear News. Gradually but steadily incorporating the latest neuroscientific findings of mind, brain, and educational science (MBE) into the plant’s instructor training strategies since she started working there in 2017, Piraino has focused on the application of psychology and neuroscience to generate “usable knowledge . . . taking what we know about the brain from brain research and using that to create and deliver effective instruction.”

Piraino works with operations, maintenance, and technical instructors develop course materials and select instructional methodologies. Her responsibilities in overseeing and managing the plant’s Site Instructor Program include initial and continuing training, performance evaluation, and professional development of its instructors and supervisors. She also prepares accreditation documents, self-assessment reports, and other professional documents for the department. As a specialist in cognitive and brain-based learning, in which principles of neuroscience are used to create curricula and lesson designs, Piraino said that she seeks “logical, effective, and appropriate solutions” to educational challenges and is passionate about “the development of learning environments wherein self-assessment, feedback, and data guide our approach.”

Piraino’s career path prior to Beaver Valley was wide ranging, touching on several different facets of education, learning, social interaction, and psychology. She earned her bachelor’s degree in communications media and English writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2004, and in 2008, she completed a master’s degree in secondary English education from Duquesne University. She then worked as a high school English instructor for three years while also being adjunct faculty for ITT Technical Institute in Tarentum, Pa., where she designed and produced training materials and curricula for faculty, including technological materials.

In 2012, Piraino became a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where, until she began in her current position at Beaver Valley, she designed and taught graduate and undergraduate courses in educational technology, research development and academic writing, media production, crisis communication, and other subjects. She earned her doctorate in instructional technology and communications media from that university in 2021.

Piraino’s research has covered diverse scholarly topics, including MBE (which she describes as “the blending of three fields—psychology, neuroscience, and education”) and student exam anxiety. Some of her other research topics have included mindfulness-based cognitive theory and stress reduction (in which a person tries to purposefully manage his or her awareness of events), social exchange theory (which holds that human relationships are created through a process of cost-benefit analysis), distractions caused by cell phones in the classroom, and learners’ adaptation to technology.

In all of her work, Piraino enjoys tackling problems to advance educational objectives. She said, “I thrive with troubleshooting and problem-solving.”

A slide from Piraino’s CONTE presentation displaying the three aspects of mind, brain, and education science (MBE) as psychology, neuroscience, and education.

Training strategies

After joining the training staff at Beaver Valley, Piraino began implementing findings from educational neuroscience and MBE research in the plant’s instructional practices and training program. In her approach, she said, “I work to align one, educational practice, two, workforce behaviors, and three, adult and human performance/learning theories.” The program developed by Piraino and the Beaver Valley training management team—training manager Mike Brasile, operations training superintendent Greg Pelka, and maintenance and technical training supervisor Jeremiah (Jerry) Manning—incorporates activities including instructor initial and continuing training, instructional “lunch-and-learn” sessions, practical instructional tips that can be easily integrated, and department-wide book readings. Piraino noted, “Success in something like this is impossible without the support—and buy-in—of your management.”

She added that MBE is now part of fleetwide instructor training at Energy Harbor, including at the Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear power plants in Ohio, where her efforts have received support from fleet training superintendent Shari Cook and fleet training manager Phil Norgaard. Piraino said, “Our fleet management [leaders] have been instrumental in helping us integrate MBE-sound practices, and they continue to support our efforts in every way that they can.” She continued, “More importantly, the Beaver Valley instructors are truly the ones who are responsible for the changes. They are talented lifelong learners who are open to change and ever seeking to advance their own methodologies and, thus, better help their learners.”

Brasile echoed these sentiments, saying, “It has been the combination of Dr. Piraino’s vision with our instructors’ willingness to learn and grow that has led to our success in this effort.”

Piraino explained that the instructors at Beaver Valley are trained to design and deliver content for the plant’s workforce that is based on research on the primacy-­recency effect, through which “students are most likely to retain that which they learn first, and second most that which they learn last, due to attention span and memory limitations.” Therefore, instructors at Beaver Valley spend a lot of their early class time delivering key content material, rather than discussing administrative tasks. She noted that such administrative tasks, including “the verbatim reading of long lists of learning objectives, the daily review of safety/human performance messages, and the repetitive review of items/lists, such as training standards and expectations,” have “long plagued the nuclear industry.”

Piraino stated that focusing on administrative duties, though “important when used deliberately and purposively,” can unfortunately hinder learning when reviewed only as a formality. So instead, the Beaver Valley instructors are trained to concentrate on teaching connections between the newly taught material and the previously taught material. In this way, students gain the opportunity to grasp the relevance of information and to discover answers to the question, “What’s in it for me?”

The training team at Beaver Valley has found that certain tools are particularly beneficial in education at the nuclear plant. Piraino said, “One of our greatest focus areas has been the development of our PowerPoints. We encourage instructors to use PowerPoint as a form of visual media, as opposed to text-laden slide decks.” This emphasis on the visual is based on the ideas of dual coding theory, which holds that equal weight be given to verbal and nonverbal cognitive processing. “Practitioners of educational neuroscience know that the brain is wired for the visual, and research shows that text-dense slides create cognitive noise. They do not support effective instruction,” she said.

Instructors at Beaver Valley are also taught the basics of design theory to help them develop effective graphic representations that support learning, rather than overwhelm and distract. With such guidance, the instructors have redesigned existing content and developed new content so that most PowerPoint slides emphasize visual, nonverbal graphics.

The PowerPoint SmartArt tool is often used at Beaver Valley to produce graphics that provide “instantaneous relational data,” according to Piraino, “thus freeing cognitive capacity that then allows students to focus on the instructor’s verbal message.” These graphics serve to reinforce important concepts with visual cues that are more readily transferred into long-term storage.

Exam score data of two reactor operator students at Beaver Valley, indicating positive results following implementation of the student exam anxiety program.

Exam anxiety

Beaver Valley’s operator, maintenance, and technical training includes a student exam anxiety program—a key element designed especially to support the mental health and exam performance of initial license students. The program focuses on managing the physiological and psychological processes related to stress and anxiety. Piraino underlined the fact that stress and anxiety, in addition to potentially leading to such negative effects as increased aggressiveness, social isolation, and insomnia, are also “really impactful when it comes to learning and academic performance. Students who suffer from exam anxiety also suffer from increased rumination, or negative thoughts and constant thought streams; decreased exam scores; and hindered problem-solving.” Piraino cited research that has shown a direct correlation between increased stress levels and decreased exam performance.

According to Piraino, biological mechanisms of stress involve a battle between the cortical and subcortical structures of the brain. The cortical structures make up the prefrontal cortex—the site of complex reasoning, emotion regulation, personality, decision-making, and problem-solving. “This is what makes us human—what we need our students to be able to activate to be successful in the classroom,” she said.

By contrast, the subcortical structures, or the limbic system, constitute the survival mechanisms of the brain that allow people to detect threats—prompting what is commonly known as the “fight or flight” response. Piraino explained, “These structures are more readily activated by the brain [than are the cortical structures] because they keep us alive. So, in a fight between the subcortical structures and the cortical structures, the subcortical will always win.”

During the fight-or-flight response, the sympathetic nervous system may erase the working memory as the brain focuses on increasing survival chances during the perceived threatening situation. “So, the functions that we need the students to be able to access, they literally can’t when they get to this extreme level of stress and anxiety,” Piraino explained. “So, what we need to do is activate the parasympathetic nervous system, or PNS. This is what is essential to mitigating test anxiety. It’s the ‘rest and digest’ center.” PNS activation helps the brain access its higher-level cognitive functions.

Beaver Valley uses a two-part strategy to help its instructional staff and students learn how to deal with exam anxiety. In the first part, initial license classes are taken through a workshop in which participants learn how to “develop a plan to engage their PNS and thus counter those processes that may be engaged by their sympathetic nervous system,” Piraino said. In the second part of the strategy, students who are in need of greater support work individually with Piraino in the development and implementation of their plans, focusing on three areas. She described these areas as encouragement of metacognition, to “help students think about their own thinking”; creation of cues, to “encourage focus and situational control”; and elimination of cognitive noise, to “manage anxiety through thought modification and control.”

Student plans to combat exam anxiety also have three chronological components—elements that the learners are taught to implement before, during, and after the exam. The pre-exam part of a student’s plan focuses on the importance of diet and sleep, on skills for accessing higher brain function (based on the motivational theory known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), on tricking the brain into “journalizing” anxieties, and on developing a sense of control.

Skills that students are taught to implement during the exam include managing distracting cues and cognitive noise, controlling cognitive distortions, regulating breathing, and developing progressive relaxation and basic meditation abilities. For the period after the exam, students are guided in reviewing and assessing how their anxiety-reducing plans worked so that they can make adjustments to the plans for future exams.

Instructor practices

The Beaver Valley training department’s application of educational neuroscience and MBE has also involved adjustments to basic instructor practices. Piraino explained that, based on research findings about neuroplasticity, it is known that neural pathways in the brain “are created through the completion of learning episodes. Each subsequent iteration then serves to strengthen the pathway.” Therefore, an instructor should try to foster successful learning episodes for as many students as possible. In that regard, many Beaver Valley instructors have changed their questioning techniques so that “the learner is not called upon until the complete question is asked to all students, and all students are given a proper amount of wait time.”

Learning episode completion is also fostered by the integration of a variety of formative assessment techniques by instructors. For example, said Piraino, “With the integration of individual whiteboards, every student has the chance, and the motivation, to process an information request and complete the learning episode iteration.”

Connections to leadership

Not only is neuroscience a component of training and learning at Beaver Valley, but the plant has also begun integrating neuro­science into its leadership development. Neuro­leadership is a field that applies the tenets of neuroscience to promote organizational success by focusing on the domains of decision-making and problem-solving, emotional regulation, collaboration and influence, and change management. According to Piraino, Beaver Valley is “applying what we know of the brain to help leaders strive toward creating a positive work environment and building individual and team relationships in support of effective decision-making, problem-solving, innovation, and resilience.”

Energy Harbor’s organizational effectiveness consultant, Susan Mosko, recently began working with Piraino to bring these concepts to the company’s leadership. Mosko said, “Our goal is to bring the latest research into our programs and to help our leadership team apply them to what they do every day.” She added, “Neuroleadership principles are strengthening the foundation of our leadership program by giving our leaders the ‘why’ behind the behavioral skills they are developing. As we move into topics of emotional intelligence, interpersonal communication, and change management, we are shifting the discussion from that of ‘soft skills’ to one of ‘power skills’ as our leaders recognize the significance of building effective individual and team relationships.”

Successful results

The neuroscience-based training program at Beaver Valley, though “still very much in development here,” according to Piraino, has shown encouraging results in both comparative data and anecdotal evidence. For example, several candidates who were previously identified as high risk were able to successfully complete the new exam anxiety program.

At CONTE 2023, Piraino presented data comparing the scores of reactor operator students on various exams (such as the Generic Fundamentals Examination and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission practice exam) before and after exam anxiety plan participation. Students who were considered at-risk showed score improvements after using their anxiety-management plans.

Brasile described one anecdotal example: “I knew what we were doing was working when a student purposively approached me immediately following the NRC exam celebratory dinner and told me that they were thankful for this approach—that they felt like it helped them to complete the exam cycle and ultimately to graduate.”

A long way to go

The results that Piraino and the Beaver Valley training team have observed from their neuroscience-based efforts prove that emotional state can matter as much as cognition in learning. “It is neurobiologically impossible to engage in complex thought, to build memories, or to make meaningful decisions without emotion, because emotion and cognition are supported by interdependent neural processes,” Piraino explained. “We need to attend to students’ emotional considerations where possible.” She added that it is especially important to identify students who need extra attention. “Instructors have to be educated in identifying those students, because many students will not self-identify. So, it’s key that instructors and supervisors are attuned to this.”

Throughout the coming years, Piraino and the Beaver Valley training team plan to continue their improvements to the plant’s operator, maintenance, and technical instructional training program, grounded in the latest MBE science. She said, “We’ve been working pretty heavily with it for about two years, but we still have a long way to go.”