This week’s editorial in Science, “Pedagogy Meets Neuroscience,” is the crest of a wave that began back in June when The Journal of Neuroscience published the commentary, “Science Education: A Neuroscientist’s View of Translational Medicine” (Schwartz-Bloom R. 2005. JNAS, 25 (24): 5667-5669), and Nature printed, “Big Plans for Little Brains” (Volume 435, 1156-1158). The topics of each of these pieces address the potential for neuroscience to inform and reform educational policy, intervention, and practice. This issue lead to my interdisciplinary graduate training in educational psychology and neuroscience, which included experiments on the effects of Ritalin on learning and memory in hyperactive rats, and using EEG to explore the abilities of intellectually gifted and hyperactive adolescent boys to shift between academic and creative tasks. Michael Posner once shared with me videotaped discussions between cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and education professionals brought together by a philanthropic organization in hopes of generating interdisciplinary research topics.
I have witnessed the approach-avoidance dance between the fields of neuroscience and education for about 9 years now. On one hand, neuroscience has been reticent until now to consider the paradigmatic influence that educational psychology could have on discerning relevant research hypotheses. Indeed, the neuroimaging methods we use to adequately explore cognition, its development, and the nature of individual differences are just beginning to mature from their infancy. In this same issue of Science, there is a report that anomolies in certain genes that guide brain development are now linked to dyslexia. But in many ways, the metric between neuroscience and education is still off. Cognition viewed in the lab doesn’t necessarily reflect “real-world” cognition, at least not in the way that practitioners think about it. On the other hand, educators have been quick to conform to whatever pieces of information about the brain they can learn from the popular press and self-proclaimed experts. Intervention techniques that currently exist perturb the plastic brain, but for how long?
John Bruer, President of the McDonnell Foundation, once proclaimed it a “bridge too far” to cross. Now, just recently, the National Science Foundation has laid the foundations of those bridges with their Science of Learning endowments to University of Washington, Stanford, Dartmouth, Carnegie-Mellon, and Boston University. In my own talks about the neuroimaging studies that my lab performs on nonverbal reasoning, I preface remarks to educational audiences with two main topics. First, why it looks like we know so much when we know so little. Indeed, until the advent of neuroimaging, members of the animal kingdom were our “age-old experts.” And second, the need for developing greater scientific literacy so that people are equipped with the skill to evaluate translated scientific information. The challenge on the front of science involves innovating experimentation that will allow us to characterize cognitive function with greater ecological validity so that neuroscience can potentially inform and reform how we educate. We also have a responsibility to promote scientific literacy. The challenge on the front of education is to refrain from conforming to ideas and information that are still new and unreplicated.
Discoverers and Discoveries 