Some Useful Pedagogical Practices: Educational Neuroscience Perspective

Abstract

We have reviewed the goals of education by approaching them from the direction of educational neuroscience; through education, we have to achieve transfer of learning in order to produce individuals who are better problem solvers and decision makers. To achieve this goal, learners will have to transform what they have learned explicitly into implicit memories and vice versa by attaching sense and meaning, ideally across multiple domain areas. Further, through education, we enhance learner consciousness and/or wisdom that give abilities to spontaneously recall retained memories readily, whenever necessary. A number of pedagogical practices that are useful in achieving the above goals are identified. When new contents are presented to learners, high-level, generalised concepts need to be emphasised; concepts are likely to penetrate through multiple domain areas and last longer in memory, thus helping learners to attach sense and meaning better. In order to reach out to multiple brain regions, inducing creativity, we need to get frontal lobes involved essentially, with an appropriate pace and form of presentation. The important task of motivating learners can be done by presenting learners with educational neuroscience facts that can be enlightening; even difficult content can be mastered by simply paying attention fully and through elaborate rehearsal; human brains have the feature of neural plasticity and neural networks can grow throughout the lifespan through effective learning. When setting assessment, we should focus on open-ended, novel and conceptual/generalised questions so that learners use their frontal lobes, engaging in a higher-order, divergent and/or inductive thinking process to provide answers.

Principles of Curriculum Design and Construction Based on the Concepts of Educational Neuroscience

“…From another point of view, our working memory has a limited capacity, and when it is filled with specific details, as in the case of reading the book, instead of high-level concepts, we may not be able to relate what we learn to our existing knowledge (make sense) efficiently. The reason for this is that it is easier make connections with the high level the concepts than with specific details, as highlighted before (Watagodakumbura, 2015a(Watagodakumbura, , 2015d. Consequently, when we go through the high-level concepts only, using the provided summary of concepts that exclude specific details, in a second reading, we can fill our limited capacity working memory with as many high-level concepts as it permits and makes connections with existing knowledge networks better or more efficiently.…”

“…By doing this, we enable transfer of knowledge as if protruding neural sensors of learners are waiting to be connected to any related piece of knowledge or application. The outcome of the curriculum is not an end itself, but a means by which the learners can make more connections or neural networks of knowledge in future as they get exposed to further knowledge and experiences in a lifelong journey (Watagodakumbura, 2015c(Watagodakumbura, , 2015d. A broadly-based curriculum like this will attract learners' motivation better, as it is useful in a more generic sense.…”

“…Essentially, we must prioritise the high-level concepts we are going to highlight and include them in the curriculum for discussion, starting from the top of the list and covering as many as time permits. We should never be carried away by the notion that learners only learn what is presented in a classroom environment and as a consequent, as many important concepts/sections as possible need to packed tightly into a curriculum (Watagodakumbura, 2015d). It is worth paying attention to the fact that most of our learning is implicit, that is not done in a classroom environment.…”

“…In a curriculum design process, one of the most important tasks is preparing appropriate assessment components (Watagodakumbura, 2015b(Watagodakumbura, , 2015d. Learners, in general, associate with a curriculum from the perspective of assessment tasks used.…”

“…In this article, we discuss numerous ways curriculum designers and constructors can rely on knowledge from educational neuroscience. In sections two and three, we present the essential background information related to neuroscience, as done in other similar work (Watagodakumbura, 2015c(Watagodakumbura, , 2015d, so that the readers can digest the rest of the article more comfortably. We present much practical guidance for designing and constructing curricula based on the input from educational neuroscience in section four.…”