Neuroscientific knowledge has undeniably gained interest among educators worldwide. However, not all "brain facts" believed by teachers are supported by science. This study sought to evaluate the belief in these so-called neuromyths among 3,451 Latin American teachers. We found that, consistent with prior research among teachers in other geographic areas, teachers in Latin America hold major misconceptions about neuroscience, especially as it relates to factual information about its structure and functioning. Differences across South American nations were observed with moderate and slight effect sizes for general knowledge of the brain and neuromyths, respectively. Teachers working in higher education had slightly superior performance. Teachers at all levels who reported knowing more about the brain, however, were more likely to believe invalid assertions known as neuromyths. These results shed light on trends in the field of education, hoping to encourage the development of strategies aimed at correcting the use of science as it relates to education. The implications regarding teaching practice, policy, and teacher training are discussed.For the past two decades, we have witnessed an ever-growing interest in neuroscience and knowledge about the brain, both in and outside the laboratory. Education has not been an exception to this phenomenon, and after centuries of parallel work between (neuro)scientists and educators, we now recognize the need for them to converge in an attempt to design better, more efficient teaching and learning

A multi-sensory structured language reading program was deployed in six first grade public school classrooms (n=150 students) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Six control rooms usedbusiness-as-usual, whole language, instruction (n=178 students). Control and treatment roomswere well-matched in initial status. Students’ abilities and progress were recorded 3 times over27 weeks using a test battery covering basic pre-reading and reading skills: phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, rapid automatized naming, and executive function. At the startof 1st grade, most students have no measurable capacity for decoding. Many struggle withphonological awareness and letter naming. Very high rates of absenteeism and school closures(similar in both groups) meant that planned treatment dosage was not achieved. However, atthe endpoint of the study, students in MSL classrooms show an advantage over those in control classrooms in sentence reading comprehension, but the groups remain at parity in othermeasured skills.

In fact, research shows that human beings who are socially isolated not only report higher rates of depression, which is a state characterized by persistent feelings of very low mood, they also get sick more often and live shorter lives [1]. Many brain functions are involved in allowing us to have healthy human interactions. One such function is empathy. Empathy allows us to understand and respond to the emotional experiences of others. A key part of empathy is "theory of mind, " the ability to understand other's feelings, beliefs, thoughts, and intentions. Without realizing it, we use this ability every time we interact with our family, friends, classmates, and teachers: in order to have healthy social interactions, we have to understand that they think and feel differently than we do. But, we are not born with this ability. It is not until we are between 4 and 5 years that theory of mind starts developing, and this leads to many changes in our behavior, such as learning new social rules and being able to play more complex games with friends. Figure 2 shows that the brain network activated when thinking of our own mind and the mind of a friend is strikingly similar when compared to the brain activity seen when we try to understand the mind of a stranger. That is, our brain does make a difference in the way it responds to friends versus unknown people.Research also suggests that learning in a classroom with teachers and friends is more effective than learning on your own. For example, in a study withIs it important to have friends? Why do we enjoy spending time with them? Do we learn differently around our friends? Neuroscience research is helping us to answer some of these questions by looking at the way our brain allows us to, and benefits from, interacting with other humans. Part of the reason why human brains are so complex is that our interactions with others are so complex; we are social creatures and have been living in groups for thousands of years. Our brain has developed the ability to handle the complexity of the social world that our species (human beings) have created. We organize our interactions into different levels of complexity: we tell apart our closest family members, we can help our neighbors, we belong to a nation, and we recognize ourselves as a part of the large world. But why have humans developed such complex social organizations? Interacting with others has been helpful to us as a species: there is something about cooperating with others that made us more fit to survive through evolution (Figure 1).