Inhoud
Week 1
Chapter 1 Why do we need educational neuroscience?
‘Evidence-based’ is not the same as ‘neuroscience-based’. And while educational neuroscience
embraces any approach that uses scientific evidence of outcomes – that is, findings that robustly
demonstrate A works better than B – it also wants to ask, ‘How does it work?’ Neuroscience, in other
words, want to take things a step further by studying what actually happens in the brain. This isn’t
necessarily the same as we might conclude by looking from the outside.
Tools of neuroscience
Brain scans are an important tool of neuroscience. These colourful pictures of brains are a wonder of
science and seem to be every where – but they can sometimes be misleading. They can give the
impression that things are more certain than they are, particularly when writers describe parts of the
brain ‘lighting up’ when people do or think a particular thing. It all sounds so neat: cause and effect,
case closed. In reality, evidence from brain scans is rather messier.
A common type of neuroimaging is the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scan. The basis
for measurement is the fact that blood carrying oxygen has different magnetic properties from blood
that isn’t carrying oxygen. We know that active tissue requires oxygenated blood, so by extrapolation
we can look at areas which are using more or less oxygenated blood. So the measure is quite indirect:
not the chemical or electrical activity of neurons, but the metabolic requirements of areas of neurons.
This has many implications, but one big one concerns speed: blood flows a lot more slowly than
neurons fire (the average cortical neuron fires between 1 and 30 times a second (it’s variable); the
brain blood oxygen signal is also variable but can take around 10 seconds to reach its peak) – so fMRI
is better at saying where in the brain something is happening than precisely when. Another important
consideration is that fMRI does not measure brain activity by itself but in relation to another brain
activity; a brain scan is a comparison, for example, between what is happening in the brain when
someone is trying to come up with alternative uses for a paperclip versus when they are just looking at
a paperclip and thinking how to describe it. The fMRI results are the difference in brain activity
between these two tasks – which theoretically determines the specific areas that are crucial to (in this
case) generating an idea.
Another neuroscience tool is electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the
brain through receptors that pick up tiny electrical signals through the skull (it involves wearing one of
those chic caps). An advantage is that EEG is measuring direct neural activity – so it can be quite
specific about timing, but since skull position only maps roughly to brain area, it is not so good on
positioning. The opposite of fMRI, EEG is better on when than where.
Both techniques – and many similar ones used in the lab – (magnetoencephalography (MEG) – which
uses the property of the magnetic field the brain emits or functional near-infrared spectroscopy
(fNIRS), which uses the extent to which the brain’s tissues absorb light shone through them) – involve
,highly artificial settings, obviously very far from the classroom. The latest cutting-edge technology is
trying to make these techniques more portable, indeed wearable, so that scientists can observe the
brain’s operation as people go about their everyday lives, or students pay attention (or don’t) to the
teacher in a classroom. Perhaps they will even allow us to observe how the teacher’s and students’
brains are synchronised.
Educational neuroscience draws on many sources of evidence – neuroimaging tools, animal
experiments, single neuron studies, computational models, eye tracking, behavioural psychology
experiments, genetic studies, quantitative and qualitative classroom assessments and more.
Neuroscience is not just brain imaging, it’s a set of different methods to answer the question, ‘how
does the brain work?’ The key is that, if there is converging evidence from many different sources that
point to similar findings, it gives much greater confidence that effects are real – and that they operate
not just in the confines of the lab but also out in the real world.
Namely, that teacher enthusiasm – and corporate hunger to develop and use neuroscience based
applications – are out of step with the actual science. In reality, there are very few currently available,
systematically evidence-based neuroscience approaches available for the classroom.
There are other barriers to the interdisciplinary ambition to have neuroscientists, psychologists and
teachers working together (Churches et al., 2017). These include:
• Different goals. Neuroscience is a natural science in its adolescent stage of development. It still has
gaping holes in its understanding of detailed brain function and is still primarily concerned with
building a basic science research base about the detailed workings of the brain. Teaching is a practical
endeavour geared to daily improving outcomes for children.
• Different levels of description. Neuroscience tools include many levels of analysis, from studying
genes to single neurons to brain networks to whole brains. Educational investigations begin at the level
of the whole student and go all the way up to the level of society and culture.
• Different words. Sometimes things get lost in translation between the very different languages and
jargon of different professions. Accurate translation takes expertise, commitment and time.
the type of learning children experience in schools is very far from its main goal (its most fundamental
aim is to keep us alive.
,people will only do it – learn – if their internal cost/benefit analysis tells them it is worthwhile.
Thinking of the brain in this way also makes it clear that if students’ more basic needs are not met,
then learning cannot possibly be optimised. By ‘more basic’ we mean everything from really basic,
such as being properly nourished and getting enough sleep, through to less obviously basic such as not
feeling intimidated by a teacher or being emotionally engaged enough to pay attention.
, How can neuroscience help?
Neuroscience help us understand why things happen
Neuroscience has a particular interest in nutrition since the brain is by far the biggest
consumer of energy of all the organs in the body, typically gobbling up about 20 per cent of all
our intake
We know that physical exercise benefits the brain through diverse mechanisms – from
generalised effects such as improving blood flow, lowering stress hormones and stimulating
growth factors, to specific effects such as enhancing neural growth in the hippocampus, a
brain area key to memory formation
For example, a recent study looking at the effects of physical activity found that it was more
strongly associated with greater emotional regulation in younger children (7-year-olds) and
with greater behavioural regulation in older children (11-year-olds) (Vasilopoulos & Ellefson,
2021)
sleep research shows that quality of sleep, and the proportions of REM and slow wave sleep
are also important. One of the key features of sleep is that the way that sleep establishes
memories simply would not be compatible with the brain’s normal awake mode of operation.
consolidation of memories – that is, the process which firms up new, shaky memories by
connecting them to pre-existing long-term memories – happens by running those memories
through the same networks that were involved when the experiences were originally
processed. If this happened in the awake brain, it could cause huge confusion – hallucinations,
double memory formation, all sorts. The waking brain works well for encoding memories. The
sleeping brain works well for consolidating them.
Traditional detection using psychological tests was only possible for infants already several
months old. Children who receive cochlear implants earlier (usually before the age of 3)
acquire vocabulary and develop speech faster, and show better reading comprehension than
age-matched peers who received implants at a later age.
Plasticity: the process by which the connections between neurons are changed in response to
stimulation from the environment. There are some pretty important things to know about plasticity:
The brain remains plastic right through life – from the womb, right into old age – it is
evolution’s way of allowing brains to adapt to the bodies and environments they find
themselves in.
It’s thanks to plasticity that people can recover from some forms of brain damage, by the brain
changing its connections in response.
Plasticity is a feature of all learning processes, whether that’s playing the piano, kicking a
football, learning a language, or remembering what happened yesterday.
Without plasticity we would be unable to learn new things or form any new memories.
The degree of plasticity is not constant. It can be reduced as a result of stress, ageing and
injury, and increased through sleep, exercise and learning
Think about neuron connections like a thick forest where you cut your way through to make a path.
The path will stay, but it will overgrow a little. So you go to the next forest and make a path there.
When you return to the original forest, you can find the path you took earlier and you will make some
mistakes, but can find the path back. It’s the same in our minds.
Key principles of neurons
