Mind, Brain, and Education: A Discussion of Practical, Conceptual, and Ethical Issues

Lessons to be learned: how a comprehensive neurobiological framework of atypical reading development can inform educational practice

“…Indeed, historically, attempts to translate research findings to ‘real-world’ practices have been ridden with dubious brain-based recipes for practice and premature misinterpretations of data [176,197 • ]. Furthermore, there has been some resistance from practitioners to the one-sidedness with which scientific knowledge has been handed down from research labs into schools.…”

Brain Knowledge and the Prevalence of Neuromyths among Prospective Teachers in Greece

“…However, in 1997 Bruer argued that education and neuroscience are “a bridge too far.” He claimed that the distance between the two disciplines was too far to make meaningful extrapolation from neuroscience to educational application, and that this distance could only be covered with the introduction of a third discipline, psychology (Bruer, 1997 ). Since then, a number of publications have argued that education can be informed by neuroscience, as many believe that the findings from brain research can be transformed into practical strategies teachers could use to improve their teaching (e.g., Geake and Cooper, 2003 ; Goswami, 2004 ; Blakemore and Frith, 2005 ; Posner and Rothbart, 2005 ; Ansari and Coch, 2006 ; Immodino-Yang and Damasio, 2007 ; Pickering and Howard-Jones, 2007 ; Varma et al, 2008 ; Howard-Jones, 2014 ; Ansari, 2015 ; but also see Willingham, 2009 ; Horvath and Donoghue, 2016 , for more skeptical accounts). It has even been claimed that an interface can be constructed between educational psychology and cognitive neuroscience, with the benefits of this interface being comparable to those accrued when a paradigm shift from a behaviorist orientation to a cognitive perspective in the 1960s and 1970s took place (Byrnes and Fox, 1998 ).…”

“…In order to critically evaluate the reported findings, be it on the web or in the press, teachers need to have developed an understanding of not only the workings of the nervous system, but also of how neuroscientific research is carried out. For example, it is important to understand that findings are often based on averages and that they might not be applicable to every student individually or that studies that have used adults as participants (let alone non-human animals) may not be readily generalizable to younger populations, such as their students (Ansari, 2015 ). Interestingly, research has shown that people tend to believe research findings when they are accompanied by brain images and/or neuroscientific explanations (McCabe and Castel, 2008 ; Weisberg et al, 2008 ; but also see Michael et al, 2013 , who failed to replicate these effects), even when those explanations are pseudo-scientific or plain irrelevant to the topic at hand.…”

Contexts of educational neuroscience

“…Further, recent EN recognizes that '[n]ormal and abnormal cannot be de ned without understanding the beliefs, values, and power structures of a cultural group' (Mason, 2015, p. 345). Certainly, many helpful assessments have resulted from medically conceptualized diagnoses, where struggling students have been signi cantly helped (Ansari, 2015a). Nevertheless, the contextual question that EN needs continually to ask is: When is it helpful and when is it not helpful for EN to rely on a bifurcating medical model with respect to students' ourishing?…”