Neuroscience and Education

For roughly the past 20 years, the field of education has touted how research in neuroscience (how students best learn) will revolutionize classrooms.

Unfortunately there is much misinformation that teachers and parents believe to be true, “neuro-myths” that are believed to be true.

Two neuroscience truths that we all need to embrace are, first, that the brain is less hard-wired from birth than people have believed and, second, different parts of the brain act more interdependently than most of us believed.

In terms of the brain’s interdependence, a metaphor I recently read asks us to think of the different parts of the brain like the letters of the alphabet. By roughly 8 months, the letters have formed in the brain, e.g., the prefrontal cortex or hippocampus, but through experience, these “neural letters” activate in patterns to form “words, sentences, and paragraphs” of thought--in other words, they operate interdependently, not independently.

This is different from what many of us thought about the brain. While the prefrontal cortex controls decision-making and impulse control and the hippocampus stores memory, don’t think that other sections of the brain don’t influence decision-making and memory; again, different sections of the brain work as a team (or as letters) when it comes total brain function.

In education, this belief that one particular area of the brain controls a particular brain function and that the brain is hard-wired from birth led to a myth about dyslexia. While the back left of the brain influences sound processing and children with dyslexia have a poorly functioning back left of the brain, it does not mean that children with dyslexia can’t learn to read. More than one section of the brain influences how one reads; hence, educational interventions can help a child learn to read effectively.

Because the brain is less hard-wired and more flexible and changeable than many of us thought, the home or school environment is vital.

Because there is often not a direct link to neuroscience research, many teachers and parents have formed overly simplistic—or in the extreme wrong—implications in the classroom for how children best learn. In one article I recently read, teachers accepted the validity and accuracy of a bogus scientific research article if it included a picture of a brain scan.

While I've read a few books on neuroscience and the brain, neuroscience remains a vast, confusing topic and its implications for education are still forming.

But what has happened is many of us have taken our limited knowledge and understanding to form faulty, simplistic conclusions about brain research and its implications in the classroom.

Here's a link to a quiz about neuroscience and education See how well you do. (I had a group of heads of school take this quiz at conference this summer and no one cam close to answering all the questions correctly, especially me.): Link to Quiz.