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Performance feedback about whether responses are correct or incorrect provides valuable information to help guide learning. Although feedback itself has no extrinsic value, it can produce subjective feelings similar to “rewards” and “punishments.” Therefore, feedback can play both an informative and a motivational role. Over the past decade, researchers have identified a neural circuit that processes reward value and promotes reinforcement learning, involving target regions of dopaminergic input (e.g., striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Importantly, this circuit is engaged by performance feedback even in the absence of reward. Recent research suggests that feedback-related brain activity can be modulated by motivational context, such as whether feedback reflects goal achievement, whether learners are oriented toward the informative versus evaluative aspect of feedback, and whether individual learners are motivated to perform well relative to their peers. This body of research suggests that the brain responds flexibly to feedback, based on the learner’s goals.

Because I want the next generation of women to be set free from the birdcage of racial, gender and class stereotypes, a place from which my mother, grandmothers and great grandmothers never had the chance to escape, it is a personal and political choice to rupture the experiences of racial prejudice that bind us into phobic races within various shades of hatred. I am both digging a new place to find “truth” and criticizing an essential part of who I am or what I was taught to believe about our black and indigenous heritage. An epiphanic moment combines past, present and future moments into an act of doing and becoming. In honoring the first “queen” in my family, I wrote the following non-fiction children's story about my great grandmother Bernarda in three languages. Although I have never seen a picture of Bernarda, I feel her Chibcha blood burning inside of me and within every awkward phrase that I piece together as I fumble through grammatical structures, reviving memories into performative language. I wrote the first draft in English and later translated it into French and Spanish.