Educational Neuroscience: Challenges and Opportunities

Educational neuroscience is an emerging multidisciplinary field wherein the aim is to link basic research in neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science, with educational technology. Broadly speaking, it explores the relationship between education and ‘Brain Sciences’, the latter encompassing neurosciences, child psychology and cognitive science. Batro in 2011 pointed out that ‘the bridges between brain sciences and education are numerous and quickly developing. Neuroplasticity is the key bridging process and its molecular, neuronal and brain-wide mechanisms should be better investigated in future’. Additionally, ‘the methods of brain and cognitive sciences have reached a stage where we can now objectively monitor the developmental trajectory of the childu0027s brain and document how this trajectory is being shaped by parenting, education and other environmental influences’. Dehaene [1] claimed that ‘human cognitive neuroscience has made enormous strides in understanding the specific cerebral circuits underlying particular domain of education, such as mathematics, reading and language acquisition’. Conversely, there are those like Bruer, a cognitive scientist and a philosopher of science, who object to the term ‘Educational Neuroscience’ and wish to consider child psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science as distinct disciplines. Nevertheless, even he acknowledged that ‘educational applications of brain sciences may come eventually, but as of now neuroscience has little to offer teachers in terms of informing classroom practice. There is, however, a science of mind, cognitive science that can serve as a basic science for the development of an applied science of learning and instruction’. Abundant information has accumulated in the last 2 decades as a result of coming together of various disciplines, which directly or indirectly are dependent on the understanding of brain structure and function. This approach is akin to that of Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl, co-directors of the Institute of Learning and Brain Science, Washington. They proposed that neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning. It is generally agreed that new insights from many fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices [2,3]. Correspondingly, Albert Galaburda, Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, Boston, stated, ‘Knowledge from neuroscience also lends itself to applications to education and I would hypothesize that the predictive value of neuroscience data to learning is opt to be greater than that of genetic data’ [4].