Explorations in Learning and the Brain
This month the NWO-PROO report Explorations in Learning and the Brain: On the Potential of Cognitive Neuroscience for Education has been published by Springer publishers. This publication, on which Tamara van Gog and Jeroen van Merriënboer of CELSTEC collaborated with colleagues of three other universities, contains the results of an investigation into what neurosciences can do for education.
Look into the brain
Wouldn’t it be nice to see how somebody learns? Or to discover when a student gets stuck while solving a problem? Teachers and researchers would love to know what goes on in the mind of a pupil. The past decade has witnessed efforts on the part of research, education and policy communities to create a dialogue about the potential relationship between cognitive neuroscience and the science and practice of education. The upsurge of interest in neuroscience in general has given rise to increased attention to the role of the brain in learning. As a result, several major initiatives have been undertaken to examine the viability of bringing the fields closer together.
Different stance
However, much of the debate has been dominated by extremes. Some purport to offer a panacea to many of the problems in education and educational research on the basis of data from cognitive neuroscience while others perceive the gap between the fields as untenable. The writers of the report, researchers of CELSTEC, Universiteit Twente, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and Universiteit Maastricht take a different stance in the sense that developments within neuroscience are not the starting point but rather sets off from major questions dominant in educational research, notably instructional systems design and related fields within the educational sciences. The book identifies interfaces between neuroscientific and educational research, and informs on potentially interesting additions to educational research and viable interdisciplinary ventures.
Reinforce
The conclusion of the researchers is that neurosciences and educational sciences can reinforce each other. They already collaborate in a number of fields, but there are more topics on which collaboration is possible. For example on multimedia learning, social learning, implicit learning and self-directed learning.
Reference:
De Jong, T., Van Gog, T., Jenks, K., Manlove, S., Van Hell, J., Jolles, J., Van Merrienboer, J., Van Leeuwen, T., Boschloo, A. (2009) Explorations in Learning and the Brain. On the Potential of Cognitive Neuroscience for Educational Science, Springer, 85 p.
Ordering information (the Springer site)
