Confusions that make us think? An invitation for public attention to conceptual confusion on the neuroscience-education bridge

Abstract

The interest to connect results of neuroscientific research to educational contexts has increasingly grown in recent years. Actors from neuroscience and education show the explicit intention to approach each other. Still, issues and debates exist in the relation between them.This paper aims to bring to the fore one such specific issue that is not only relevant to be mindful of, but also raises questions of an organisational and pedagogical nature. The issue concerns the possible occurrences of conceptual confusion on the bridge from neuroscience to education. I present this paper as a thought experiment that hopes to make public not only the respective issue, but also some of its related questions, such as 'neuroprofessionalisation' and 'relevant knowledge for educational actors'. In doing so, I attempt to make the issue and its questions a concern of ours, and invite readers to join in a collective and vivid conversation about it.

Aportaciones desde la teoría de la educación a la investigación de las relaciones entre cognición y tecnología digital

“…¿Qué aporta la neurología?, ¿por qué está de moda? En muchas ocasiones lo que trasluce este aumento de referencias a la neuroeducación y las neurociencias está relacionado con una imagen de conocimiento sólido, "científico", que las anteriores referencias a la psicología otorgaban de manera menor (De Vos, 2015, Leysen 2021. Este recurso a la neurociencia contribuye a descentrar la investigación educativa con el espejismo de soluciones fáciles o menos criticables (Smeyers, 2016).…”

The reported effects of neuroscience literacy and belief in neuromyths among parents of adolescents

“…The results show that both groups have a high belief in neuromyths [Dekker, Lee, Howard-Jones & Jolles, 2012;Ferrero, Garaizar & Vadillo, 2016;Herculano-Houzel, 2002;Howard-Jones, Franey, Mashmoushi & Liao, 2009;Macdonald, Germine, Anderson, Christodoulou & McGrath, 2017;Tardif, Doudin & Meylan, 2015]. Parents form a specific group of interest as several neuromyths relate to how parents ought to behave in relation to their child [Leysen, 2021] and because it is known that parents' beliefs and expectations, influence the actual behaviour of their adolescent children [Hines & Paulson, 2006;Jacobs, Chhin & Shaver, 2005]. Therefore, our first aim on how scientific information is understood, will be to explore the belief in neuromyths among parents.…”