Skip to main content

Christy Tucker's Library tagged neuroscience →  View Popular

19 Jul 08

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: “Brain-Based” Learning: More Fiction than Fact

This article examines several myths of brain-based learning, looking at what the neuroscience research actually tells us. Very little of the research at this point is directly applicable to the classroom; it just doesn't tell us enough about how people learn in real environments.

www.aft.org/...cogsci.htm - Preview

education learning research neuroscience cognition

  • For neuroscience to mean something to teachers, it must provide information beyond what is available without neuroscientific methods. It’s not enough to describe what’s happening in the brain, and pretend that you’ve learned something useful.
  • In general, if you are interested in describing effects at a given level of analysis, you are most likely to make progress by sticking to that level of analysis. If you’re interested in describing ways that students learn best, it makes sense to study classroom situations. To the extent that neuroscience will inform good teaching practice, it seems most likely that this influence will be funneled through the cognitive level of analysis: For example, neuroscience will help us better understand memory, and this improved understanding of memory might be used to improve classroom practice. It’s unlikely that leapfrogging the cognitive level analysis and going straight from the brain to the classroom will work out very often.
1 - 1 of 1
Showing 20▼ items per page

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Sponsored Links

Ads by Google

Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »

Join Diigo