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Points of View: On the Implications of Neuroscience Research for Science Teaching and Learning: Are There Any?
I am notorious for my skepticism about what neuroscience can currently offer to education. My skepticism derives from several concerns, but a common theme runs through all of them: attempts to link neuroscience with education pay insufficient attention to psychology. In what follows, I will present four variations on this theme. First, for those who are committed to developing a science-based pedagogy and solving existing instructional problems, cognitive psychology offers a mother-lode of still largely untapped knowledge. Second, attempts to link developmental neurobiology to brain development and education ignore, or are inconsistent with, what cognitive psychology tells us about teaching and learning. Third, cognitive neuroscience is the brain-based discipline that is most likely to generate educationally relevant insights, but cognitive neuroscience presupposes cognitive psychology and, to date, rarely constrains existing cognitive models. And fourth, the methods of cellular and molecular neuroscience are powerful, but it is not always clear that the concepts of learning and memory used by neuroscientists are the same as those used by psychologists, let alone by classroom teachers.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1618519/