• DOI:10.1016/j.cortex.2008.06.001
• Corpus ID: 15392805

Thinking about mechanisms is crucial to connecting neuroscience and education

@article{Coch2009ThinkingAM,
  title={Thinking about mechanisms is crucial to connecting neuroscience and education},
  author={Donna Coch and Daniel Ansari},
  journal={Cortex},
  year={2009},
  volume={45},
  pages={546-547}
}

• Donna Coch, D. Ansari
• Published 1 April 2009
• Medicine, Psychology
• Cortex

For the most part, neuroscientists do not typically consult the education literature to generate hypotheses and conduct studies with an educational application in mind. Similarly, for the most part, educationalists do not typically consult the neuroscience literature to decide how to teach a child. So how is it that neuroscience and education have become increasingly interlinked within recent years, and how should these fields be connected? Despite the recent development of the new field of mind, brain, and education or MBE [e.g., Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2007], there has been little discussion in either the neuroscience or education literature about how the interaction among mind, brain, and education will work in practical terms and what results it can be expected to generate. In view of this, a concerted effort is needed to think about the goals and benefits of connecting education and neuroscience (e.g., Ansari and Coch, 2006). While there are often great expectations for direct application of neuroscientific data to pedagogy, we believe that very few findings from neuroscience are directly applicable in a broad educational context. Rather, basic neuroscience findings need to be tested – rigorously and scientifically – in the classroom before any ‘‘educational application’’ or ‘‘translation’’ can become clear. Thus, an important goal of MBE must be to provide realistic information about the potential outcomes of interactions between neuroscience and education. It is also important that this new field does not involve the establishment of a hierarchy of knowledge such that neuroscience is perceived as a panacea for educational problems. Indeed, most teachers and educational scientists likely know more