Bridging the Gap: Exploring the Connection Between Neuroscience and Education

Introduction

Exciting new developments in the field of neuroscience are leading to a new understanding of how the brain works that is beginning to transform how we teach in the classroom. Teachers are aware of these developments and are hungry for information that they can apply to their practice. An academic article on the value of neuroscience in the classroom states teachers need training to understand how neurodiversity and inclusive educational practices go hand in hand to foster academic success and holistic development.

The Promise of Educational Neuroscience

Neuroscience aims to understand the mechanisms underlying various cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes, shedding light on how the brain processes information, learns, and adapts. By incorporating insights from neuroscience into educational practices, educators can contribute to more effective and inclusive student-centered teaching and learning experiences. Neuroscience research helps educators and specialists better understand the diversity of cognitive processes and learning styles among students. This knowledge can lead to greater awareness and sensitivity to the needs of neurodivergent students, such as those with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or other conditions. Experts say neuroscience provides insights into how the brain processes and retains information and can be used by educators to optimize teaching strategies, curriculum design, and assessment methods. A deeper understanding of neuroscience and how the brain works helps teachers plan appropriate individual lessons for students.

Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections

One of the central goals of Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections is to help teachers learn to use research to create their own solutions to their particular classroom challenges. Another important goal is to provide new and useful metaphors that we all can use to describe teaching and learning and that are grounded in modern neuroscience. Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections was designed for K-12 teachers, other educators, researchers, and adult learners who want to learn more about current issues in education. College or graduate students-especially those considering careers in education-will find this course useful. Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections is a self-contained distance-learning course distributed free of charge on the Web. The course is designed by Kurt Fischer, director for the Mind, Brain, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, assistant professor of education at the Rossier School of Education and assistant professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California; and Matthew H. Schneps, George E. Burch Fellow in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution, director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and executive director of the Science Media Group at CfA. The multimedia course consists of six units, with an introduction and a conclusion. Each unit contains many integrated videos and sidebars of additional information, as well as a list of resources. The materials are designed for various uses. Some individuals may want to learn about a single topic and study parts of one unit on their own. Some may want to join facilitator-led groups, such as professional development workshops or in-service sessions. Each unit of the course is composed of text with integrated videos, visuals, and sidebars. However, each component of the course is also designed to stand alone. You do not need to use all of the materials or access them in any particular order. If you are interested in a particular topic, you can jump in at your point of interest. Users can search the site for topics of interest in three ways: a traditional key word search, a visual search engine (Dynamic Content Map), and by “Top Teaching Issues.” Users are also encouraged to “chat” with other participants by utilizing the Teacher Talk section of the site. Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections is available beginning in the fall of 2011.

The Role of Teachers in Informing Educational Neuroscience Research

Teacher training programs do not typically address the brain. Even educational psychology courses fail to adequately discuss the brain and how it relates to affect, body states, and self-regulation. However, many provincial curricula specifically talk about self-regulation to adjust brain and body states. For example, in one province in Canada, British Columbia, the curriculum aims for students to develop “healthy personal practices” and “understand that physical, emotional, and mental health are interconnected.” What do physical, emotional, and mental health all have in common? The brain. Healthy brains support overall health and wellness. As Rueda (2020) noted, it is a closed loop where optimal learning leads to optimal brain functioning, which is essential, and then leads back to optimal learning. Therefore, the brain and how it functions or does not function are relevant to every teacher, regardless of their curriculum specialty. Some, such as Dr. Stephen Campbell, founder of the ENGRAMMETRON: Educational Neuroscience Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Canada, would contend that it is essential for teachers to learn about neuroscience and the brain to maintain agency within education (Campbell, 2011). His fear is that educational neuroscience will be dominated by scientists and neurologists, with little input from educators. Then, all research and treatment would be driven by the scientists and not educators, and the knowledge generated would remain clinical and potentially not practical, translatable, or usable. This outcome has been one of the barriers to educators stepping up to the neuroscience plate. Interdisciplinary collaboration (in this case, neuroscience and education) is challenging and well-documented by others. As Bruer (1997) posited, it is simply a “bridge too far”.

Addressing the Knowledge Gap

At the very least, teacher training programs must include educational neuroscience in their curriculum. If teachers are better informed about the brain/body/behavior connection, they are less likely to believe neuromyths (Dekker et al., 2012; Torrijos-Muelas et al., 2021), such as “right-brain/left-brain learning”. Additional neuroeducation also leads to more positive attitudes for teachers dealing with students with complex needs (Chang et al., 2021; Gola et al., 2022). Inservice teachers can bridge the knowledge gap by reading peer-reviewed publications or taking graduate courses in educational neuroscience (Torrijos-Muelas et al., 2021). Amiel and Tan (2019) and Tan and Amiel (2019) have demonstrated how collaborative action research enhances teacher knowledge and application of neuroscience concepts. Another solution to the “bridge too far” common in interdisciplinary collaborations is to embed scientists in schools, jointly researching how neuroscience informs the learning and teaching process. One example of collaboration between educational neuroscientists and teachers is the Synapse School in California, which is connected to Stanford University's Educational Neuroscience Initiative. They created the Brainwave Learning Center within the school, and their educational neuroscientists play an integral role in the day-to-day functioning (White, 2023). Director Lyn Toomarian notes that there “has always been this … separation between neuroscientists studying the way kids learn and the places where kids are actually learning….[but] we've been able to integrate the two” (White, 2023, p. 4). It is an excellent example of bringing neuroscience into the school and successful interdisciplinary collaboration. However, even if you do not have educational neuroscientists in your school, there are many other reasons to stand up and pay attention to the brain.

Read also: Navigating UCLA Neuroscience PhD

Practical Examples of Neuroscience in Education

Science and education have come a long way from “right-brain, left-brain”. Every day, teachers are changing the brains of their students, and, at present, we have the technology to see how pedagogical choices impact the brain in different ways (Brult Foisy et al., 2020). For example, McCandliss (2011); Yoncheva et al. (2015) have investigated the impact of different reading programs on both skill development and brain changes (structural and functioning) using electroencephalogram (EEG) technology. This is not science fiction! Imagine that you would be able to determine the best teaching methods for a student based on their brain activity! Another example of adapting pedagogy/curriculum based on neuroscientific data relates to printing and handwriting. Though many primary schools have removed formal printing/handwriting instruction from the curriculum, James (2017) found that handwriting is important for brain development and specifically supports learning to read. Furthermore, research has also revealed distinct phenotypes or biomarkers of brain activity that are directly related to learning and emotional behaviors. That is, by looking at brain activity, we can identify or anticipate learning or emotional challenges that a student may experience (Xiao et al., 2023). There are specific applications for special education by identifying where in the brain cognitive processes are breaking down or may be bottlenecked (Kropotov, 2016). Yet another application of neuroscience in education could be to measure brain health throughout a child's education, and in particular, if students are involved in physically demanding contact sports. Using EEGs, we could measure brain health in our student athletes at the beginning and end of each sport season, which is vitally important should they sustain any head injuries (Thanjavur et al., 2021). Finally, another application of neuroscience in education is simpler and more direct. Students themselves can learn about their own brain and body functioning, and acquire appropriate strategies to self-regulate (Moreno and Schulkin, 2020; Goldberg, 2022). After all, is not this one of our main goals as educators and which reflects the demands of the curriculum, as stated at the outset of this paper?

Navigating the New Realities

There are many realities that our students encounter, including digital technology. Numerous devices are available that can alter brain activity, such as the Muse (Science | MuseTM EEG-Powered Meditation and Sleep Headband, n.d.), which teaches the user to calm the brain and body, or more radically, a brain chip to implant memories (Hern, 2024). In addition, the use or misuse of gaming (Swingle, 2019), social media, virtual reality (Kaimara et al., 2021), and online learning (Firth, 2019; see also Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2021) will impact the developing brain. Educators need to know the impact in order to appropriately adjust pedagogy and policies. Why would we leave these types of applications to non-educators? If educators understood more about the brain and why it does or does not learn, they would be optimally situated to guide interventions and seek appropriate pedagogy. Again, to do this, we absolutely must learn about basic brain functioning. As we plunge into this new reality, we are right to be cautious. Indeed, there are numerous ethical issues to consider. One of these issues relates to the use and security of the biometric brain data collected (Guidelines for Practice | ISNR | Neurofeedback Training and Research, n.d.). Another issue is using technology as an intervention, and there is a need to research the long-term impacts of devices such as the Muse, a neurofeedback device (Thibault et al., 2016), or other brain stimulation technologies on the developing brain. Fortunately, the IEEE (Frankston et al., 2021) is working to develop a neuro-ethics framework for use in education and other disciplines as a starting point to guide our plunge.

The Synapse School Model

On a typical day at the Synapse School in Menlo Park, California, where a team of Stanford University neuroscientists works hand in hand with teachers, students might drop by the Brainwave Learning Center, an on-site research lab where they can wear stretchy caps with more than a hundred small, spongy sensors on their heads. These sensors measure the naturally occurring brain waves that fluctuate as they play educational games or engage in guided meditation. The students can also watch live computer displays to witness how their own brain waves change as they concentrate on a task or engage in mindfulness. This interactive experience provides each child the chance to see and think about their own brain activity, how it changes with learning, and even how it changes with moment-to-moment shifts in mindset, which helps instill in students a sense of ownership of their learning process. Every class of kindergartners at Synapse is actively going through those processes during the school year. Each student brings with them a diversity of developing skills in language, vision, attention, and other cognitive factors that can be measured safely and conveniently in their on-site Brainwave Recording Studio. After six months of learning, students come in again to allow researchers to trace how their brain circuits have developed. Repeated visits over the subsequent elementary school years will enable our research team and the school staff to watch as students’ brain circuits change as they grow from novice kindergartners to confident middle schoolers who spend hours a day learning through reading.

Overcoming Challenges and Building Bridges

There have been numerous detractors and supporters relating to attempts to merge the neurosciences and the knowledge base of related contributing disciplines with the field of education. Some have argued that this is a “bridge too far”. The predominant view is that the relationship between neuroscience and the classroom has been neither significantly examined, nor applied. What is needed is a specially trained class of professionals whose role it would be to guide the introduction of cognitive neuroscience into educational practice in a sensible and ethical manner. Neuroeducators would play a pivotal role in assessing the quality of evidence purporting to be relevant to education, assessing who is best placed to employ newly developed knowledge, as well as with what safeguards, in addition to investigating how to deal with unexpected consequences of implemented research findings. Potential application areas include the investigation of brain processes involved in mathematics instruction and understanding, reading, sustained attention, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, memory and retention, and many other areas.

tags: #neuroscience #and #education #connection