Three Requirements for Justifying an Educational Neuroscience
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| Title: | Three Requirements for Justifying an Educational Neuroscience |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Hruby, George G. |
| Source: | British Journal of Educational Psychology. Mar 2012 82(1):1-23. |
| Availability: | Wiley-Blackwell. 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. Tel: 800-835-6770; Tel: 781-388-8598; Fax: 781-388-8232; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Physical Description: | |
| Page Count: | 23 |
| Publication Date: | 2012 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Evaluative |
| Descriptors: | Expertise, Rhetoric, Educational Research, Theory Practice Relationship, Integrity, Educational Researchers, Ethics, Neurology, Science Education |
| DOI: | 10.1111/j.2044-8279.2012.02068.x |
| ISSN: | 0007-0998 |
| Abstract: | Background: Over the past quarter century, efforts to bridge between research in the neurosciences and research, theory, and practice in education have grown from a mere hope to noteworthy scholarly sophistication. Many dedicated educational researchers have developed the secondary expertise in the necessary neurosciences and related fields to generate both empirical research and theoretical syntheses of noteworthy promise. Nonetheless, thoughtful and critical scholars in education have expressed concern about both the intellectual coherence and ethical dangers of this new area. It is still an open question whether educational neuroscience is for some time yet to remain only a formative study area for adventurous scholars or is already a fully fledged field of educational scholarship. Aims: In this paper, I suggest that to be a worthy field of educational research, educational neuroscience will need to address three issues: intellectual coherence, mutually informing and respected scholarly expertise, and an ethical commitment to the moral implications and obligations shared within educational research generally. I shall set forth some examples of lapses in this regard, focusing primarily on work on reading development, as that is my area of expertise, and make recommendations for due diligence. Arguments: First, intellectual coherence requires both precision in definition of technical terms (so that diverse scholars and professionals may communicate findings and insights consistently across fields), and precision in the logical warrants by which educational implications are drawn from empirical data from the neurosciences. Both needs are facilitated by careful attention to categorical boundary and avoidance of category error. Second, educational neuroscientists require focused and broad expertise in both the neurosciences and educational scholarship on teaching and learning in classrooms (and/or ancillary fields). If history is our guide, neuroscience implications for practice will prove unlikely in practice without expertise on practice. Additionally, respect for the expertise of others in this hybrid and necessarily collaborative enterprise is required. Third, educational neuroscience must take seriously the heightened moral and ethical concerns and commitments of educational professionals generally and educational researchers particularly. This means keeping a vigilant eye towards preserving the integrity of empirical and theoretical findings against rhetorical misuse by educational marketers, policy makers, and polemicists targeting the general public. Conclusions: I conclude that educational neuroscience is more than a hybrid patchwork of individual interests constituting a study area, and is perhaps ready to stand as a legitimate field of educational inquiry. It will not be accepted as such, however, nor should it be, unless the need to demonstrate a capacity for consistent intellectual coherence, scholarly expertise, and ethical commitment is met. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Number of References: | 121 |
| Entry Date: | 2012 |
| Accession Number: | EJ965360 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwFNDZGsvm4FQb3MiLYyfwoBAAAA4jCB3wYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHRMIHOAgEAMIHIBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDMszwO1FXtHrhDsYIwIBEICBmopzCIHQV4NpzzuyUj510zUZTLmcW8S_SFseUjOGcXVKeZloTRtSyPVnJmq3amf5pkdHT5twA8s5gNUPZ_Kp1ls2fkMQ1xhTK-rzO8fLFUbwTQGLNjt4dDQKPULMgLqT1Vjvq8Py2DiNfkgDaJE2PW5XLzGBB62mj5NOO6bYWeX3LI3kWgklrcswZN0yBKRxAZNsXNU4n5usO4Y= Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0073464976;6kx01mar.12;2019May28.13:13;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0073464976-1">Three requirements for justifying an educational neuroscience. </title> <p>Background. Over the past quarter century, efforts to bridge between research in the neurosciences and research, theory, and practice in education have grown from a mere hope to noteworthy scholarly sophistication. Many dedicated educational researchers have developed the secondary expertise in the necessary neurosciences and related fields to generate both empirical research and theoretical syntheses of noteworthy promise. Nonetheless, thoughtful and critical scholars in education have expressed concern about both the intellectual coherence and ethical dangers of this new area. It is still an open question whether educational neuroscience is for some time yet to remain only a formative study area for adventurous scholars or is already a fully fledged field of educational scholarship. Aims. In this paper, I suggest that to be a worthy field of educational research, educational neuroscience will need to address three issues: intellectual coherence, mutually informing and respected scholarly expertise, and an ethical commitment to the moral implications and obligations shared within educational research generally. I shall set forth some examples of lapses in this regard, focusing primarily on work on reading development, as that is my area of expertise, and make recommendations for due diligence. Arguments. First, intellectual coherence requires both precision in definition of technical terms (so that diverse scholars and professionals may communicate findings and insights consistently across fields), and precision in the logical warrants by which educational implications are drawn from empirical data from the neurosciences. Both needs are facilitated by careful attention to categorical boundary and avoidance of category error. Second, educational neuroscientists require focused and broad expertise in both the neurosciences and educational scholarship on teaching and learning in classrooms (and/or ancillary fields). If history is our guide, neuroscience implications for practice will prove unlikely in practice without expertise on practice. Additionally, respect for the expertise of others in this hybrid and necessarily collaborative enterprise is required. Third, educational neuroscience must take seriously the heightened moral and ethical concerns and commitments of educational professionals generally and educational researchers particularly. This means keeping a vigilant eye towards preserving the integrity of empirical and theoretical findings against rhetorical misuse by educational marketers, policy makers, and polemicists targeting the general public. Conclusions. I conclude that educational neuroscience is more than a hybrid patchwork of individual interests constituting a study area, and is perhaps ready to stand as a legitimate field of educational inquiry. It will not be accepted as such, however, nor should it be, unless the need to demonstrate a capacity for consistent intellectual coherence, scholarly expertise, and ethical commitment is met.</p> <p>The exponential increase in both the volume and sophistication of the neurosciences over the past 30 years has had an at times curious impact on the public imagination and that of educational professionals. It has spawned a popular industry in brain‐based educational methods, workshops, and materials; fostered serious scholarship and professional organizations dedicated to the coherent bridging of the neurosciences with educational research; and continues to inspire a fair degree of confusion and misgiving in the minds of many thoughtful educational academics.</p> <p>The confusions are understandable. The neurosciences are plural, and take up a variety of topical, hypothetical, methodological, and philosophical positions. Different neuroscience fields engage in diverse lines of research that employ diverse methodologies and locate and span numerous scales of analysis, from the genetic to the cellular to the systemic to the behavioural (variously parsed in developmental, linguistic, cognitive, and social neuroscience; [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref1">73</reflink>]). Some research is focused within a single scale, others bridge across scales. In addition, the growth of the neurosciences over the past quarter century (as measured by research grant funding, published papers, graduate programs and students, conference attendance, and journals) has been stunning, and the variety and sophistication of the methodologies, technologies, theoretical models, and statistical measures employed has grown impressively.</p> <p>Into the excitement of this neuro‐revolution has emerged the promise of an applications‐oriented field of educational inquiry increasingly referred to as <emph>educational neuroscience</emph>. Educational neuroscience would draw implications from the findings and theories of the neurosciences for application in educational research, theory, and practice ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref2">12</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref3">19</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref4">35</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref5">39</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref6">62</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref7">67</reflink>]; Snowling &amp; Hulme, 2011; [<reflink idref="bib107" id="ref8">107</reflink>]). Efforts to this end so far have been limited, yet not without some critique (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref9">2</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref10">18</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref11">20</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref12">26</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref13">41</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref14">43</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref15">50</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref16">60</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib87" id="ref17">87</reflink>]).</p> <p>There is as yet no body of research that employs neuroscience methods and techniques to generate findings about effective classroom teaching and learning – for the simple reason, explained in more detail later in this essay, that neuroscience, by definition, is not about classroom teaching and learning. Nonetheless, the <emph>potential</emph> positives of educational neuroscience – positives limited to gleaning implications about teaching and learning from what the neurosciences (and related fields) can tell us about learning and development at a biological level, have garnered serious scholarly interest.</p> <p>These potential positives might include a sharper aetiology of cognitive skill processes and their development, including a more nuanced understanding of specific learning disabilities to inform diagnostic instruments and effective interventions ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref18">7</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref19">52</reflink>]). Perhaps equally valuable would be the potential of a biologically grounded field of educational research to better‐inform practitioners, administrators, and policy makers about developmental processes generally, allowing them to make better sense of the necessity and ubiquity of human variance in ways thoughtful, helpful, healthful, and socially productive (cf., [<reflink idref="bib112" id="ref20">112</reflink>]). Educational theory, traditionally framed either in terms of reductive mechanism with a focus on structure, or determinative context with a focus on function, might be extended to include bio‐ecological frames with a focus on the embodied dynamics of adaptation to situation over time, both in learning and in development ([<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref21">61</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib76" id="ref22">76</reflink>]). The near‐intuitive organic metaphor of learning as growth (rather than as conditioned response, information processing, socio‐cultural appropriation, or identity construction) might be revived with greater precision as a professional idiom to the benefit of practitioners. (For current examples of neuroscience implications for education, including empirical investigations, see the excellent monograph recently published by this journal; [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref23">39</reflink>]; as well as the special issue of <emph>Philosophy of Education</emph>, [<reflink idref="bib87" id="ref24">87</reflink>]).</p> <p>However, although educational neuroscience suggests the potential for interdisciplinary synergies and the excitement of new frontiers for educational investigation, some critics have been more dismayed than confused (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref25">25</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref26">65</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib106" id="ref27">106</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib107" id="ref28">107</reflink>]). Much of this dismay has been focused on the apparent pretense of neuroscience for hawking education‐related commercial products and freighted political agendas. At issue is not the importance of neuroscience or the prospects for synergy with educational research, but the historical record of misuse in this regard, a history typically focused by critical scholars through a lens of ethical concern.</p> <p>So, although there has been much effort and promise, it is as yet not certain whether educational neuroscience is still only a study area for adventurous scholars or is prepared, instead, to become a fully fledged field of educational inquiry. I believe it is ready to become the latter, but, to do that, it will need to demonstrate an identity correspondent to the expectations of serious educational scholarship.</p> <p>In this paper, I will suggest that to be included as an equal within the broader domain of educational scholarship, educational neuroscience requires (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref29">1</reflink>) careful and explicit attention to intellectual coherence, especially in its definitions and interpretive warrants, and in particular through close attention to the categorical boundaries that structure these; (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref30">2</reflink>) the matching of an expertise both deep and broad in the neurosciences to an equally extensive expertise in educational theory, research, and practice, abetted by mutual professional respect; and (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref31">3</reflink>) an attention to the ethical issues, concerns, and obligations of educational research generally, and in particular, an ethical commitment to preserving the integrity of empirical and theoretical findings against misuse by marketers, policy makers, and polemicists targeting the general public. I will draw my examples from the reading‐related educational neuroscience, as (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref32">1</reflink>) this is my area of expertise, (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref33">2</reflink>) the scholarship in the area is relatively well developed, and (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref34">3</reflink>) for that reason is exemplary of both the promise ([<reflink idref="bib113" id="ref35">113</reflink>]) and problems here reviewed. I forewarn the reader that my emphasis here is on the need to acknowledge and address the problems.</p> <hd id="AN0073464976-2">Interpretive warrants</hd> <p>As a practical matter of academic credibility, the need for intellectual coherence should be obvious. This requirement implies more than <emph>pro forma</emph> attention to requisite formats for reporting of studies, or to professional research standards of investigation, crucial through those be. Intellectual coherence is prerequisite to properly substantiating a literature review, study design, or research agenda. But, there is also an implied professional obligation (perhaps more pronounced in education than in other academic domains) to foster an appreciation for this prerequisite through teaching and public outreach, and therefore to demonstrate this commitment to the larger educational community.</p> <p>I would suggest that much of the difficulty with intellectual precision in educational neuroscience to date has been due to a lack of attention to categorical boundary, and, as a result, this new field has often suffered from imprecise or conflated definitions and muddled reasoning. Intellectual coherence requires categorical precision, as most logical fallacies are matters of categorical conflation. And, in crossing or bridging between disciplinary boundaries, definitions and other categories are too easily abused, an issue with a good bit of history in debates about parsing the relationship of brain function and behaviour ([<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref36">40</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib117" id="ref37">117</reflink>]), or in the debates about mind and behaviour that preceded them (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib95" id="ref38">95</reflink>]; cf. [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref39">59</reflink>]). This is not merely an academic nicety of formal definition and coherence; it has serious implications for classroom practice. For imprecise definitions born of blurry categorical boundaries make for cloudy formative assessments providing weak guidance for teaching. And nothing is improved when the inadequate response to unfocused instruction is handed off to specialists using equally imprecise definitions, spawning muddled diagnoses, and improbable interventions.</p> <p>I believe rigour in regard to categorical precision could have an empowering effect on educational neuroscience. The violations of careful analytical thought to be found in the brain‐related educational literatures are fairly basic yet are occasionally evident in even the most formal educational and neuroscience publications. These flaws are easily identified and critiqued by scholars who may harbour an aversion to, and wish to dismiss, research on neurological factors in education (cf. [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref40">5</reflink>]). Educational neuroscientists do a disservice to their budding field by being anything less than rigorous in avoiding these mistakes and alerting the larger community of educational researchers and practitioners to them. It is beyond the scope of this paper to give a comprehensive review of such problems, but a few rudimentary examples may suffice as guidance.</p> <hd id="AN0073464976-3">Category error across disciplinary boundaries</hd> <p>Taking research findings on a particular topic in one field as proof for claims about another topic in a different field is the most obvious example of disciplinary category error. It crops up in loose allusion to the brain or neurological process in material that, strictly speaking, is about neither. Detailing descriptions of the brain along side descriptions of favoured teaching practices does nothing to enhance, let alone demonstrate, the efficacy of those practices. The terms <emph>brain‐based learning</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref41">69</reflink>]), <emph>brain‐based teaching</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref42">27</reflink>]), or <emph>brain‐based classrooms</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref43">38</reflink>]) are examples. What other kind of learning or teaching is there? The <emph>neurological impress method</emph> for reading fluency ([<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref44">37</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref45">57</reflink>]), although potentially effective, is no more or less neurological than any other kind of educational method that makes an impression. Reference to the brain is apparently meant to imply research‐demonstrated efficacy, but the only warrant for suggesting research demonstrated efficacy of a method is citation of research on said method's efficacy.</p> <p>Easy point, but the same critique applies to clinical research self‐described as <emph>neuro‐cognitive</emph>, when the study in question does not actually involve any measures of neurological correlation (cf. [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref46">13</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref47">23</reflink>]). Although we might assume that neurological processes in the brain subserve cognitive behaviour, that in itself does not make the study of cognitive behaviour neuro‐cognitive research. The same should hold true for <emph>neuro‐education</emph>, a term favoured by some ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref48">6</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib111" id="ref49">111</reflink>]). General education recommendations asserted in the belief that particular instructional practices develop the brain more than others fail to compel unless research can be cited that both substantiates the neurological claim and the efficacy of the intervention. Moreover, too‐ready use of the affix <emph>brain</emph>‐ or <emph>neuro</emph>‐ when unwarranted suggests a lack of confidence in the kind of teaching or research that actually is being done. There is something inherently dissuasive in such compensatory pretense.</p> <p>Disciplines and fields are defined and bounded by the objects of their inquiry. Strictly speaking – and in the domain of credible research and scholarship, strict or close language use is paramount – findings on a phenomenon pertain to that phenomenon and not other phenomena. Moreover, disciplines are defined by the phenomena they study. Neuroscientists, by definition, study neurological phenomena (informally, the brain). Cognitive psychologists have traditionally studied models of mental process (informally, the mind). Educational researchers study a raft of various topics closely related to education and schooling (including teaching and learning). It is not unreasonable to imagine that the brain, the mind, and the conditions for effective instruction might have something to do with one another. What is unreasonable is to imagine that research from neuroscience on brain chemistry and physiology can easily address theories from cognitive psychology on models of mental process for application in education as effective instructional methods.</p> <p>The connection may seem intuitive, but intuition is neither research nor philosophy, and, in any case, a poor stand‐in for direct evidence, especially when there is quality research available on the efficacy of most instructional methods under particularly relevant conditions. Neuroscience research can inform us about the brain, and perhaps inspire our thinking about learning and development, but only research on effective instruction can indicate the likely conditions for effective instruction with any ascertainable degree of probability.</p> <p>Neuroscientists do often borrow empirically based functional categories from theories in cognitive or behavioural psychology to search for neurological correlates to those functions. But such studies of neurological correlation do not test whether the functional categories borrowed are warranted or fruitful in their domain of origin (they generally are), nor whether the theories that employ them are sound (often debatable). This is why advocates of contradictory approaches to pedagogy (say, between phonics‐based and whole language reading instruction, to take an example from reading education) are equally able to locate individual neuroscience studies to demonstrate their respective theories of text processing (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib96" id="ref50">96</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib103" id="ref51">103</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib107" id="ref52">107</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib108" id="ref53">108</reflink>]). Unfortunately, research from the neurosciences on the brain cannot support theories from other domains on other phenomena so simply. Interdisciplinary synergy is not the same thing as categorical conflation of fields and their discrete phenomenal foci. [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref54">18</reflink>] described these categorical confusions in bridging across neuroscience and education as building 'a bridge too far' (1997, p. 7).</p> <hd id="AN0073464976-4">Category error across scales of analysis</hd> <p>Due to the complexity of neurological systems, care in tracking conditional relationships across scales of analysis is imperative. This is exciting and conceptually difficult work. Corridors of effect are potentially to be traced across genetic, proteomic, cytological, intercellular, systemic, organismic, and behavioural levels of analysis (studied in systems neuroscience; [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref55">1</reflink>]). The dynamics between higher order and lower order structures and functions across these levels are complex, and reductive recourse to a single level for asserting definitive causation is dubious (yet perhaps a too common suggestion in reference to cognitive and educational neuroscience; see discussion in [<reflink idref="bib114" id="ref56">114</reflink>]). But the simplest and most obvious instance of category slippage across levels of analysis in the brain‐related educational literature is simply that between the learner and her brain, as in reference to the <emph>learning brain</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib104" id="ref57">104</reflink>]) or the <emph>reading brain</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib119" id="ref58">119</reflink>]).</p> <p>Formally, this error is known as the mereological fallacy, where characteristics, attributes, or behaviours of the whole entity are misattributed to a part of the whole ([<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref59">9</reflink>]). In the example of the reading brain, reading behaviours are anthropomorphically attributed to the nervous system that subserves the reader's ability to read. Neuroimaging studies do suggest unique neural activation correlatable to disaggregated behaviours deemed significant for reading. But the firing of the pistons is not the driving of the car. One is unlikely to say, for instance, that it is one's digestive system that is having dinner. And, although the imputation of the brain to account for culturally favoured higher order symbolic behaviours such as reading or mathematical calculation is abundant, it is rare to find popular imputation of the brain in regard to such acts as lawn mowing, carousing on the town, or napping, even though these behaviours would also demonstrate unique patterns of neural activation. We are unlikely to tell a friend, 'My brain is going shopping', simply because <emph>we</emph> require our brain to do so.</p> <p>The intuition that it is our brain that does the learning, reading, or math stems from our belief that thinking, at least abstract thinking, is essentially a symbolic process and that the brain is our symbol processor. This metaphor has been borrowed wholesale from cognitive psychology ([<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref60">19</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib115" id="ref61">115</reflink>]) and is amplified in the brain‐based literature where cognitive constructs such as data processing and working memory are casually commingled with descriptions of 'how the brain encodes incoming information' ([<reflink idref="bib120" id="ref62">120</reflink>], p. 34). But claiming that neurons or neural networks actually represent information for computational purposes is more than the current research supports, and the sustained utility of cognitive metaphors for understanding the brain has been called into question by some neuroscientists (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref63">44</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib84" id="ref64">84</reflink>]).</p> <p>The deepest problem with the brain‐as‐computer metaphor is that it fails as a heuristic for addressing any of the hard questions about the brain of interest to educators – particularly, on the nature of conscious awareness (including as in memory), on how experience is valued and made meaningful, and how comprehension emerges from sensory transaction with symbolic environments as in language, mathematics, or reading. For all their sleek interactivity, computers are texts: purely symbolic, from the icons on the desktop all the way down to the Boolean juggling of binary addresses denoting memory registers. It is not really the symbols of the text that themselves mean anything – ink and paper cannot comprehend, nor does the binary code in your mobile phone assistant – it is the meaning‐maker who does the meaning making, though often with the aid of symbol‐based technology. Computers operate on programs deliberately designed by human programmers to generate output potentially meaningful to human meaning makers. Thus, computers, like books, are poor metaphors for comprehending minds, as their functioning precedes and presumes a user's capacity to make meaning.</p> <p>Yet, even if we accept the computational metaphor as the best approximation of neural function, that in itself does not justify locating functions of subject behaviour at the level of neural process. Functions are functional at the level of the structures that afford them. If the functions are determined on the basis of behavioural analysis, then that is the level at which the functionality occurs. Lower order structures and processes may subserve these higher order functions, and be necessary to effect them, but they cannot in themselves be sufficient conditions for a higher order function because more immediate higher order structural conditions are required, and these may, in fact, evoke the lower order processes. After all, biological systems evolve, develop, and learn functional responses over time in transactive relationship with, and in response to, structured environmental conditions ([<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref65">36</reflink>]). Adaptive response to such conditions is why such responses are deemed <emph>functional</emph>. A more functional approach to parsing experience, comprehension, memory, and learning argues for a biological systems or embodied view ([<reflink idref="bib76" id="ref66">76</reflink>]) – precisely the reason educational researchers are drawn to research from the neurosciences, as it informs such a view in ways of which pioneers such as Jean Piaget or John Dewey could only speculate ([<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref67">56</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0073464976-5">Circular reasoning in determining causes</hd> <p>A related and common reasoning flaw in educational citation of neuroscience is circular reasoning. This syllogistic fallacy, formally known as <emph>affirmation of the consequent</emph>, cripples attempts to locate causation from correlational data (and most functional neuroscience research is correlational – and moreover often employs reverse inference, making it susceptible to affirmation of the consequent fallacies; [<reflink idref="bib89" id="ref68">89</reflink>]). The formal structure of this fallacy is <emph>If A is true, then B is true; B is true; therefore A must be true.</emph> In other words, if your car is out of fuel, it will not run; and your car does not run; therefore it must be out of fuel. Of course, there may be other possible explanations for why your car does not run. Circular reasoning, too, can be seen as a type of category error, with C being a category of potential causes for result B, and A being a single cause internal to set C but misconstrued or conflated as being equivalent to C.</p> <p>As an example, this error has been common in neuroscience‐based claims regarding dyslexic populations. Strictly speaking, dyslexia refers to precise impairments in text decoding processes such as rapid serial letter–sound matching and blending (as in developmental phonological or, possibly, acquired deep dyslexia) or word‐form recognition. But, the term often is employed more loosely as a synonym for reading difficulty of any sort (including difficulties with language comprehension which, though crucial to <emph>reading</emph> are not a element of <emph>decoding;</emph> i.e., translating an alphabetic text to a linguistic stream).</p> <p>Expansion of the clinical definition of dyslexia has been powered, in part, by recourse to neuroimaging studies showing similar lack of typical brain activity in diverse populations of non‐readers ([<reflink idref="bib103" id="ref69">103</reflink>]). This lack of activation is often confusingly described as a neurological deficit. Because dyslexia is presumed to be a neurologically related disability, and because brain scans of poor readers show similar lack of activation in particular brain areas, the hasty conclusion is sometimes drawn that in nearly every case the problem is a development deficit in decoding ability due to a neurological glitch ([<reflink idref="bib96" id="ref70">96</reflink>]). This interpretation appears to suffer from the challenges to hypothetico‐deductive inquiry posed by the use of reverse inference in neuroimaging research generally, leading to a confirmatory bias in interpretation of data ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref71">5</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib88" id="ref72">88</reflink>]).</p> <p>One need not be a neuroscientist to realize that children who have not yet learned a skill will fail to demonstrate neural activity indicating functional dedication in the brain for that skill because the neural architecture to allow for it has not yet developed in response to educational experience. The lack of activation in a brain image may thereby be a symptom rather than a cause of the lack of skill ([<reflink idref="bib91" id="ref73">91</reflink>]). The International Dyslexia Association's formal definition of dyslexia ([<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref74">68</reflink>]) assumes as much, as it requires that dyslexia can only be diagnosed when reading difficulty occurs in spite of effective instruction (presumably effective methods delivered by a skilled practitioner when developmentally appropriate for the student), and when there are no other fundamental causes preceding the disability that could account for it.</p> <p>Worse, a confusion of stacked categorical ranges (say, phonological processing = decoding = reading) can lead to the misdiagnosis of students. For instance, a student with, perhaps, a language development deficit, or prior knowledge deficit, or some similar comprehension process‐related deficit, might too easily be diagnosed as needing intensive phonemic awareness training simply because they are dyslexic because they do not read well (obviously, this inappropriate intervention would in no way solve the comprehension deficit). In any case, to claim that, because neural dysfunction can prevent the development of ability, lack of ability must always be the result of neural <emph>dysfunction</emph> is the fallacy of affirmation of the consequent. Inability to develop a skill and inability to demonstrate a skill are not the same thing. <emph>In extremis</emph>, this fallacy would render infancy itself pathological.</p> <hd id="AN0073464976-6">A double need for expertise</hd> <p>As already noted, disciplines and fields are defined by their particular focus of inquiry. The presumed reason for educational efforts of any kind is to effect conditions of optimal growth, learning, and sociality for children through schooling. Educational research is research that informs how to do that most optimally, ethically, and effectively. Educational neuroscience is set apart from other fields of educational inquiry by virtue of its broad and deep expertise in the neurosciences, but is set apart from other fields of neuroscience by virtue of similar expertise in educational scholarship and practice. Anchoring educational neuroscience's empirical and theoretical orientations within the traditions of educational research, theory, and practice, would locate it squarely in the larger domain of educational research, which ought to prove crucial to the potential of research‐informed applications and lend authenticity and credibility to the field among the wider educational research community as well as among practitioners.</p> <p>By analogy with educational psychology, educational anthropology, educational philosophy, and so forth, educational neuroscience should be the neuroscience of education. The foundation for an educational neuroscience has already been well established thanks to scholarship on learning and development by neuroscientists, psychologists, and educational researchers suggesting important implications from brain study for education (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref75">16</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref76">21</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref77">39</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref78">43</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref79">50</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref80">52</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref81">53</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref82">71</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib81" id="ref83">81</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib87" id="ref84">87</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib109" id="ref85">109</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib113" id="ref86">113</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib114" id="ref87">114</reflink>]). But the variability of this work to date indicates that scholars in other disciplines cannot be expected to have the deep expertise or interest in the research, history, and practice of education as educational scholars ought to be expected to have, and they do not share the same professional goals, or inhabit the same professional climate.</p> <p>If adequately educated in the nature of the neurosciences, no one should be better placed to infer potentially useful implications for educational practice than scholars of educational practice. Bridging the neurosciences into educational psychology alone will not be sufficient. The bridge from and to the neurosciences needs to extend beyond this initial beachhead into educational research on teaching and learning at specific grade levels and content areas. The assistance of scholars in teacher education and naturalistic classroom inquiry should be brought to bear, and, happily, a healthy number of education scholars of this sort already evince an interest in the project.</p> <p>Research on the nervous system is not research on instruction, assessment, classroom management, or curriculum; generating coherent applications from one for the other would not be a simple matter (cf. Bransford, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref88">15</reflink>]). To pursue educational neuroscience research, educational researchers have collaborated with neuro‐physiologists, neuro‐cytologists, developmental and cognitive psychologists, bio‐medical technicians, statisticians, and so on, to winnow useful findings inspired by and informing of educational questions. It is important that educational researchers contributing to educational neuroscience not be shy to acknowledge their credentialed expertise in education. After all, that is what they have of value to offer educational neuroscience and bring to interdisciplinary research collaborations with neuroscientists ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref89">42</reflink>]).</p> <p>Specialists in the pertinent fields of neuroscience and psychology would do well to guard against dismissing the value of educational professionals and their expertise to guide their work; educational psychologists should not dismiss the expertise of teacher educators who have extensive and ongoing classroom experience; and no one serious about this endeavour should dismiss the practical knowledge of teachers or specialists. At the same time, taking such expertise and knowledge at face value would also be a mistake, and helping teacher educators and teachers get the concepts and reasoning of neuroscience right would be an important goal of educational neuroscience. It is at the practical application end of things, after all, that we find most of the perpetuation of neuro‐myth ([<reflink idref="bib121" id="ref90">121</reflink>]). But it is also where we find the perpetuation of edu‐myths (e.g., the ongoing support for learning styles in spite of the lack of quality research demonstrating an effect on student achievement; [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref91">24</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib86" id="ref92">86</reflink>]).</p> <p>Educational neuroscientists should hold their educational colleagues to high standards regarding the application of neuroscience to theory, research, and practice; provide tutelage and guidance wherever possible; and demonstrate an interest in the base of research, theory, and practice already abundant in fields of teacher education and practice. Unfortunately, pioneers of educational neuroscience have not always been careful in characterizing educational research to the general public. Rather, they have often ignored the copious research base in education or not given much credit to its efforts when communicating the promise of neuroscience. As a result, no doubt unwittingly, they have propagated some myths themselves.</p> <p>For instance, in an otherwise balanced and thought‐provoking description of reading and its development, [<reflink idref="bib119" id="ref93">119</reflink>]; cf. [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref94">60</reflink>]), excited justifiable interest in insights from neuroscience research on reading, while citing only a handful of studies from the much larger corpus of research on reading education and reading‐process development. Most of the landmark works by literacy researchers that have helped bring our understanding of reading into focus went missing (as reviewed in the major handbooks and edited volumes of the field; e.g., [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref95">70</reflink>], and earlier volumes; [<reflink idref="bib93" id="ref96">93</reflink>], and earlier editions). Ignoring this legacy allowed Wolf to too easily assert that we <emph>now</emph> know how reading works thanks to neuroscience – although most of the findings she described confirmed earlier results from behavioural, cognitive, and social research on reading processes and literacy education.</p> <p>[<reflink idref="bib96" id="ref97">96</reflink>]; cf. [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref98">63</reflink>]) gave a popular interpretation of brain research from the perspective of dyslexia studies and reading education with virtually no reference to the research in reading education or reading disabilities, again, as could be reviewed by recourse to the major reference handbooks of the field at the time (or since, e.g., [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref99">70</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib78" id="ref100">78</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib93" id="ref101">93</reflink>]). As she was one of the 15 members of the National Reading Panel (NRP) in the United States charged with reviewing four decades worth of reading research ([<reflink idref="bib82" id="ref102">82</reflink>]), her omitting it is curious. It is difficult to rationalize her choosing to ignore this history, given her extended attention in her book to typical and remedial reading instruction and her emphasis on <emph>research‐based</emph> intervention.</p> <p>Demonstrating expertise in the relevant educational research (and the history of educational interventions, programs, and policies that have been variously informed by it over the years) is a crucially important contribution for educational neuroscientists to be able to make to their new field. Neither mainstream neuroscientists nor the general public can be assumed to enjoy such knowledge, and cannot benefit from it if it is withheld. The reinvention of failed methods, programs, nostrums, and policies under new banners could be a likely and costly result of such ignorance. Educational neuroscientists ought to have the easy expertise in their twin fields to provide sage counsel in this regard, and not enable such redundant futility.</p> <p>As noted, even the most accomplished of neuroscientists cannot be expected to have such expertise, or to even consider the need to determine if it exists. For instance, in his popular press book, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref103">30</reflink>] reprised his research on the visual word form area in the left ventral occipital‐temporal region of the brain. His descriptions of the relevant neuroscience were as fresh and effective as his original work was nuanced and groundbreaking. As in [<reflink idref="bib119" id="ref104">119</reflink>] and [<reflink idref="bib96" id="ref105">96</reflink>], however, he failed to reference the educational research, theories, and models to which his views might have been related, and by which they might even have been informed.</p> <p>But they were not, and yet, in the fifth chapter of his book, Dehaene took on the topic of reading instruction. He there voiced a strong dismissal, based on his reading of the neuroscience, of what he identified as <emph>whole language</emph>. This might have been of great interest, for, at the time of his writing, the 'reading wars' between advocates of whole language and of phonics drilling were only just winding down, with critiques from both camps continuing to echo in the popular media in forms ranging from concerned to crude. The worst of these were imbued with misplaced ideological fervour about the pedagogical necessity of inculcating obedience (or resistance) to authority, including that presumed of a text. It was a fraught discourse for a non‐educator to step into.</p> <p>Unfortunately, without benefit of the available research and theoretical history of reading instruction, Dehaene seems to have confused <emph>whole language instruction</emph> with <emph>whole word reading</emph>, an entirely different framework. For those who lack the background, whole word reading was inspired by the pioneering decoding theories of Samuel [<reflink idref="bib83" id="ref106">83</reflink>] and the 1930s figure‐ground studies of Gestalt psychologists (e.g., Koffka, Köhler). In contrast to the assumptions behind teaching reading through spelling (as was traditionally done with primers in the 19th century), whole word reading posited that children should not be taught to read letter‐by‐letter, but by first coming to recognize the notion of a word unit, and from that, the overall shape of entire words, generally at first, then with ever greater attention to graphic detail (i.e., the actual letter sequences). Although the 'look‐and‐say' method of reading instruction this was said to justify was quickly contradicted by research and replaced by an analytic phonics theory of word identification, elementary teachers can still be found today who require students to circle words to emphasize their shape, often in multiple colours (i.e., rainbow words), or place common words on a wall (i.e., a word wall) atop a coloured background cut to the shape of each word. This emphasis on word shape arguably lacks a coherent psychological rationale or research base, and Dehaene's argument against it is sound, if not new.</p> <p>But <emph>whole language</emph>, as he mistakenly labels whole word reading, was something else entirely, as were the debates about it in the 1990s and 2000s. Whole language was an approach to reading instruction based on a holistic theory of language development, as advanced by psycholinguistic education scholars (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref107">49</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib102" id="ref108">102</reflink>]). Whole language instruction observed that children come to the task of learning to read already in possession of substantial knowledge about their language, particularly its basic patterns of phonology, vocabulary, syntax, and higher order semantics, including the structure of stories and other text genres. Young students also have a budding understanding of the world at large and readily employ it to facilitate their comprehension of text content.</p> <p>In this view, early readers start learning to decode words, as they start learning to spell, with preliminary attention to the first letter of a word, and then to easily distinguished letters or letter patterns, which is to say, analytically (as opposed to synthetically, as promoted in systematic phonics drilling; hence the heated instructional debates). But children are also assumed to use their already strong knowledge about linguistic patterns to determine difficult words in a text on the basis of phonological, lexical, syntactic, or semantic probability, as informed by context clues in the text and their prior linguistic experience ([<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref109">49</reflink>], unfortunately if famously described reading as a 'psycholinguistic guessing game', title). Moreover, according to whole language theory, the student's larger and highly determinative goal is to make sense of a text by identifying language forms, narratives, or information not unlike what they have often heard orally and already value (read at bed times or encountered around the dinner table).</p> <p>Taken together, in learning to read, children attempt to recreate what their experience has informed them is most linguistically probable, socially conventional, and personally significant. Which is to say, whole language defines reading as a meaning‐making process, as opposed to a sound‐making process, as it tends to be in phonics skills instruction. Informed reading scholars can and do disagree about the details and logic of this account of reading and its application by way of constructivist versus didactic instructional methods ([<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref110">64</reflink>]). Nonetheless, whole language reading instruction has nothing to do with teaching young children to read words whole.</p> <p>In spite of Dehaene's notable authority in cognitive neuroscience, it apparently does not extend to classroom methods for reading instruction. With this and other examples in mind, I respectfully submit that scholarship on educational practice has a place at the table of any hybrid field that would presume to arrive at educational implications from neuroscientific inquiry, and such expertise deserves to be respected and integrated accordingly.</p> <hd id="AN0073464976-7">Matching nuanced expertise with interpretive integrity</hd> <p>The foregoing illustrations are admittedly rudimentary and possibly unnecessary for properly trained educational researchers (notably, all the examples I cite were by accomplished researchers in works written for a general audience). But uneven expertise, as well as conflated definitions and fallacious reasoning, is abundant enough in brain‐based and educational neuroscience tracts to give a reasonable person pause, especially when it is matched to and abetted by a collusion of reified rhetorical tropes (e.g., argument from authority, argument from analogy, argument from anecdote/majority, etc.). The lack of theoretical, or even logical, coherence in much of the brain‐based teacher development materials pitched to the popular market is a case in point. But even otherwise stellar academics can fall afoul of these reasoning errors, particularly if they take their cue on how to address a general educational audience from the non‐specialist literatures (cf. [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref111">34</reflink>]).</p> <p>As an instance of how notable but fractionated expertise matched to the categorical fallacy of conflated definition can fuel exciting but misleading assertions about the potential of educational neuroscience itself, consider [<reflink idref="bib113" id="ref112">113</reflink>]. These respected educational psychologists made a strong case for the potential of educational neuroscience, reviewing several of the concerns educational psychologists might have with the emergence of the field, and made the case for a bridge from cognitive neuroscience to education (by which they actually meant educational psychology – suggesting an equation of educational psychology with all of educational research and practice, a preliminary example of the kind of categorical conflation that crops up at the heart of this case). To illustrate their argument, they chose several examples from the neuroscience research on early reading, asserting that this was the 'most mature example' (p. 146) of success in bridging between the educational and neuroscience domains.</p> <p>As a 'representative study' (p. 146) of educational neuroscience on reading, they cited [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref113">32</reflink>]. They described the Eden study as a comparison of neural activity correlated to phonological processing evident in normal but not dyslexic readers, in which the latter were run 'through a program that educational researchers had developed for remediating phonological difficulties' (p.146). All good and well, but they then noted that subsequent brain imaging of the now 'successfully <emph>remediated</emph> dyslexic readers' (p. 146, emphasis added) demonstrated impressive new activity in a previously neglected brain region. Three functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) charts of subjects' brains from the original study were included in a figure captioned: '<emph>Remediation of dyslexia</emph> at the level of brain function' (p. 147, emphasis added), with the three charts sequentially labelled 'Typical', 'Dyslexic Before Remediation', and 'Dyslexic After Remediation'. Although careful reading of the [<reflink idref="bib113" id="ref114">113</reflink>] text indicates the 'remediation' in question might have been restricted to explicit demonstration of phonemic awareness, the brain scan figure and legend suggests instead the successful remediation of a typically intractable reading disorder, and that neuroscience demonstrated or facilitated the result. Readers' excitement over such a claim would be understandable, and tying it to brain images made it seem all the more powerful. (Researchers have demonstrated that even nonsensical claims can be made to seem more feasible if matched to neurological images and explanatory narratives; [<reflink idref="bib77" id="ref115">77</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib116" id="ref116">116</reflink>]).</p> <p>Unfortunately, [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref117">32</reflink>] did not study the remediation of dyslexia, at least not as that disability is defined by the International Dyslexia Association ([<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref118">68</reflink>]). Rather, Eden and colleagues studied the remediation of a common correlate to dyslexia (phonological processing difficulty) in a group of adult dyslexics chosen because they indeed had that correlated deficiency. Specifically, Eden and colleagues wanted to know whether adult developmental dyslexics, when taught specific phonological processing skills related to phonemic awareness, demonstrated changes in brain activity similar to (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref119">1</reflink>) typical adults who had learned such skills in childhood or (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref120">2</reflink>) brain‐injured adults who had lost and then recovered the skills through development of compensatory brain areas. (The answer was both.)</p> <p>Categorically, not all phonological processing is text processing. Given historical approaches to reading instruction in the United States (where the study was done), most typical adults have developed their explicit phonemic awareness skills in tandem with, or as a result of, learning to decode print text to sound. So adult dyslexics who cannot easily learn to decode, as might be expected, demonstrated poor development of those correlated phonemic awareness skills. Providing such poor readers with explicit phonemic awareness training allowed them to develop the explicit demonstration of these skills nonetheless. But is that the same things as remediating the inability to decode a text?</p> <p>Strictly speaking, the identification and manipulation of discrete language sounds from within a sound stream, although a predictor of decoding ability, and arguably a precursor to its development, is not itself a text decoding process, and thus itself would not be the locus of dyslexia or its remediation. Dyslexia is a highly variable decoding disorder, and not all dyslexics have problems with matching letter symbols to identifiable sounds, <emph>per se</emph>, provided they have learned the two sets of elements and the systemic associations between them. By definition, the core problem in <emph>phonological dyslexia</emph> is making such associations rapidly and in sequence across the ongoing string of letters that make up alphabetic texts. By contrast, <emph>surface dyslexia</emph> is an inability to identify word forms or orthographic patterns. Dyslexics may suffer from either or both problems to varying degrees; these processes trace two very distinct neural pathways. Dyslexics may also demonstrate delayed speech perception ([<reflink idref="bib75" id="ref121">75</reflink>]), delayed visual response or symbol recognition ([<reflink idref="bib101" id="ref122">101</reflink>]), deficits in rapid automatized naming ([<reflink idref="bib80" id="ref123">80</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib118" id="ref124">118</reflink>]), or limitations in phonologically related working memory ([<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref125">11</reflink>]).</p> <p>There are several contrasting theories of the neurological basis for dyslexia. One of note (see reviews in [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref126">47</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib97" id="ref127">97</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib100" id="ref128">100</reflink>]) argues for a deficit in phonological processing ability as the central cause of dyslexia. The assumption is that the phonological neural pathway must be developed first, either because that is the primary or sole way in which texts are decoded, or because it is required to train up the word‐form pathway (phonological processing being required to over‐learn the spelling patterns of common words or morphemes). Hence, an impairment to the first pathway, whether from birth or early environmental factors, would disrupt not only phonological processing abilities but all subsequent text processing abilities and their development, accounting for the correlation of phonemic awareness with text‐decoding ability ([<reflink idref="bib99" id="ref129">99</reflink>]). Both [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref130">32</reflink>] and [<reflink idref="bib113" id="ref131">113</reflink>] apparently assumed this view of dyslexia as unproblematic, but in the wording of their paper appear to go further in conflating phonological processing difficulties with dyslexia itself – a category mistake.</p> <p>As it turned out, the detailed results of [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref132">32</reflink>] contradicted this conflation. For after 8 weeks of intervention, Eden <emph>et al</emph>. found marked improvements in subjects' phoneme identification and manipulation, letter–sound association, and pronunciation accuracy, all relatable to the phonemic awareness and letter–sound matching skills they had been successfully taught. But the study's authors noted a lack of statistically significant improvement in single‐word reading (suggesting persistent surface dyslexia), reading rate (suggesting persistent phonological dyslexia), and reading comprehension (likely due to the persistence of the subjects' dyslexia). In other words, after an average of 112.5 hr of intervention per subject, the dyslexics demonstrated remediation of a tangential deficiency, but no 'remediation of dyslexia' itself, <emph>pace</emph>[<reflink idref="bib113" id="ref133">113</reflink>], p. 147). (The results nonetheless served the limited purposes of the original brain study; they may also imply phonology‐only text‐decoding <emph>process</emph> models are unlikely, but allow for phonology‐before‐word form decoding <emph>development</emph> models.)</p> <p>I do not believe this bit of disjunction seriously undermines the value of the otherwise compelling arguments put forth by [<reflink idref="bib113" id="ref134">113</reflink>] on behalf of the potential value of educational neuroscience. On the contrary, as an object of seminar study, the categorical slippage possibly makes the contribution richer. And, as noted, the work of even the most diligent of neuroscientists has similarly been misappropriated regarding issues not precisely neurological (cf., [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref135">51</reflink>], pp. 4–5, on [<reflink idref="bib94" id="ref136">94</reflink>], and its use to recommend the efficacy of a proprietary educational intervention). The original team of neuroscientists can be forgiven for not having the expertise to do anything other than take the promises of a proprietary reading program (in this case, [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref137">74</reflink>]) at face value. But educational psychologists ought not to have seemed so uncritical, nor the editors and reviewers of a major educational research journal.</p> <p>Again, it is important for educational neuroscientists to take seriously their role as interpreters and evaluators of educational promise in the complex work that its collaborations will generate. It is not the case that neuroscientists, or even cognitive psychologists, are the best judges of the educational efficacy of the interventions they employ in their studies. These judgments are simply beyond the focus of most neuroscientists' diligently practiced expertise. A truly interdisciplinary cross‐checking effort across the two domains is called for, as are scholars willing to develop bi‐lateral expertise and respect for same to broker the process.</p> <p>Of course, to bring expertise from educational research to bear in educational neuroscience, an educational researcher must have the expertise to bring. A potential danger in novel disciplinary hybridity is that newer academics or graduate students in education can be seduced by the quickness with which they can become more 'expert' in neuroscience than their departmental colleagues. With a bit more effort, they may even become preeminent guides for their particular field. This can initially provide newer scholars a unique professional identity from which to offer novel scholarly perspectives. But uncharted territory provides few mentors; reality checks and intellectual preparation must be rigorously self‐managed. And such border crossers should reflect honestly on their motivations and ambitions and be wary of reaching for quick 'expertise' in foreign fields to compensate for the typical early career frustration of suffering less than full adequacy in one's own.</p> <hd id="AN0073464976-8">Guarding against misappropriation with an ethical eye</hd> <p>At a time when national educational policies and the debates that surround their formation may seem to many scholars to be only tangentially related to educational research, the prospect that educational neuroscience may play a role in such efforts may seem slim. And it may be unlikely that even as educational neuroscience takes a place within the larger pantheon of educational research fields that it will or should ever be primarily focused on advocacy. Nonetheless, educational scholarship enjoys an ethical sensibility that educational neuroscientists should share regarding societal impacts. At the very least, a commitment to preserving the integrity of educational neuroscience's contributions against misuse by marketers, policy makers, and polemicists targeting the general public may be necessary.</p> <p>Correlating the structure of the brain to behaviour is readily grasped by the general public, but so too is the idea that the detailed structure of the brain and thus an individual's abilities are 'hardwired' due to a genetic blueprint (i.e., innate), a suggestion not entirely accurate and, for educators charged with making a difference in student achievement, unsettling. It is that latter supposition that haunts popular political discourse and troubles many educators, and educational neuroscience is going to need to come to responsible terms with this sooner or later. An emphasis in most educational research fields on social justice is evident, and, given any reasonable person's regard for the welfare of children, a sensibility of professional ethics so informed is an expectation for inclusion as an educational professional.</p> <p>This all suggests that educational neuroscientists require a well‐honed sensitivity to issues of ethical and moral commitment in educational research beginning (but surely not ending) with a concern for the welfare of children, either as students or as study participants, commensurate with that of educational professionals generally. As well, there are ethical issues of application to consider, such as the possibility of research or analysis informing policies and practices related to categories of disability and recommendations for effective response – and the concomitant risk of unintentionally fomenting misdiagnosis and malpractice.</p> <p>Thus, the need for categorical and definitional precision again presents itself. If educational neuroscientists are not careful about their definitions and warrants, such confusion and intellectual imprecision is likely to carry through to educational professional practice – and on their authority as educational neuroscientists! If they are not careful to distinguish when symptoms of, say, math <emph>inability</emph> are not evidence of neurologically mediated math <emph>disability</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib90" id="ref138">90</reflink>]), or distinguish when reading difficulty is the result of a neurological deficit from when it is the result of an educational deficit (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib98" id="ref139">98</reflink>]), then we are in part culpable as a field for the inept practices and policies these confusions may inspire. We must therefore engage due diligence in intellectual precision in our own work and in our societal outreach.</p> <p>And this obligation gets more daunting the more we consider it. Social institutions for education exist on behalf of the socialization and enculturation of the young in order to foster the kind of society we would wish to have, to preserve of the past what we deem worth preserving, and to afford for the future what we think we should require. However, if social inequities are not merely reflected in students' achievement disparities but actually built into the education system to guarantee such disparities – including through categorically fallacious diagnostic systems ([<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref140">4</reflink>]), employing medical‐sounding nomenclature and wielding neurological justifications for clinical definitions – in turn guaranteeing inequities in life outcomes, then all implicated in such a system are implicated in the perpetuation of social inequity and injustice ([<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref141">3</reflink>]). For whom and by whom education policy choices are made thus becomes a barbed question, yet even those who simply go along to get along may be deemed culpable ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref142">48</reflink>]). Although not all educational researchers address these concerns directly, most demonstrate a requisite sensitivity to them (or are guided in that direction by educational journal editors and reviewers).</p> <p>Furthermore, the importance of demonstrating a sensitivity to social justice is heightened in the case of educational neuroscience because of the unfortunate cultural history of the West, where biological idioms have been recruited at times to reify social constructs of race, gender, and class as immutable natural phenomena, and to warrant the acceptance of disparities of power and social expectation on those bases as reasonable and natural (cf. [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref143">33</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref144">72</reflink>]). This self‐fulfilling rhetorical gesture on behalf of categorical advantage may have been echoed in our own time in ideologically driven arguments that would shift the cause of minority student disparities in achievement from the social and economic inequities impacting schools, students, and teaching, to putative physical and genetic defects of the underserved students themselves.</p> <p>Educational neuroscientists need to be mindful about the implications of seeming to suggest that the structures and processes they study amount to a comprehensive account of human behaviour. Neurological processes are clearly necessary conditions, but can never be sufficient conditions, for learning and behaviour. Simply because there are necessary neurological conditions for particular developmental outcomes does not mean that there are not also necessary social conditions, and these conditions may extend well beyond the classroom ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref145">10</reflink>]). That the developmental impact of social, economic, and political inequity on children's learning is dependably the result of an inherent neurological (or genetic) dysfunction of the child seems a dubious assumption based on an aversion to the social data and perhaps a circularly reasoned misinterpretation of the neurological data. But this is not to say that the cognitive and emotional impact of poverty and social marginalization is not realized in and through neural development ([<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref146">45</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref147">46</reflink>]).</p> <p>Educational neuroscience has a potentially important role to play in conversations about social justice in the classroom and school policy, especially when confused assertions about nature and nurture arise. Aversion to biological explanations in education may be understandable given its history, but the biological basis of social and emotional response to environmental factors is undeniable. We are well into a revolution in biological science where it no longer makes sense to argue whether it is genetics or environment that leads the development of ability and behaviour ([<reflink idref="bib85" id="ref148">85</reflink>]). Although genetic propensity is an important factor in development, it is becoming increasingly clear that chronic changes in neuro‐endocrinological self‐regulation due to environmental factors impose biochemical changes in cells, including in neurons, that could alter their genetic expression (through methylation and histone binding; [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref149">31</reflink>]). These <emph>epigenetic</emph> effects on learning and behaviour can be persistent, and are even potentially heritable ([<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref150">54</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref151">55</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref152">79</reflink>]). At the same time, educational neuroscience itself reminds us of just how pliable something as presumably genetic as measurable intelligence can be ([<reflink idref="bib92" id="ref153">92</reflink>]).</p> <p>Lest this seem to threaten the hard and enviable objectivism of neuroscience with soft and fuzzy social science concerns, it is worth noting that numerous voices from within the neuroscience community, including the Society for Neuroscience (<ulink href="http://www.sfn.org">www.sfn.org</ulink>), and the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society (<ulink href="http://www.imbes.org">www.imbes.org</ulink>), have expressed a profound commitment to professional ethics and the need to correct public misperceptions about the implications of neuroscience research. The Society for Neuroscience, for instance, is made up of eight topic areas, one of which, Section H (History, Teaching, Public Awareness, and Societal Impacts), is clearly dedicated to these issues. (Notably, SfN provides a link on its web page for K‐12 educators, but the focus is on how to effectively teach <emph>about</emph> neuroscience, not on the basis of it. More directly, the numerous neuroscientists who signed on to the <emph>Santiago Declaration</emph>[[<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref154">58</reflink>]] have cautioned against irrational exuberance regarding immediate prospects for answers from neuroscience on questions of classroom practice.)</p> <p>Among the newer perspectives to recently emerge within and in response to the neurosciences, three are worth noting in regard to these concerns: (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref155">1</reflink>) Neuro‐philosophy, an outgrowth of philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref156">8</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref157">17</reflink>]); (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref158">2</reflink>) Neuro‐ethics, devoted to questions of both subject treatment and the tangible, legal, and potentially ideological impacts of neuroscience research (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref159">66</reflink>]); and (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref160">3</reflink>) Neuro‐diversity, addressing the inherent normative bias of neurological research studies that construct the concept of a standardized brain (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib110" id="ref161">110</reflink>]), and, more notably as a social awareness movement, rejecting biomedical and other interventions for divergence from the mean, as in cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) autism, or other putative disorders (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref162">14</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref163">28</reflink>]).</p> <p>What all this suggests is that a concern for professional standards, ethics, and societal impact is very much a part of the neurosciences; these are not just the concerns of critical theory scholars of education. Thus, in order to bridge between neuroscience and educational research, and in the process be both legitimate neuroscience <emph>and</emph> legitimate educational research, educational neuroscientists must take seriously these professional, ethical, and social concerns, and make allowance for them as additional foundations for their new field.</p> <p>Differences in ideological orientation are to be respected, and the emerging life science is not likely to settle disagreement between diverse and deeply held philosophical commitments. Indeed, new scientific discoveries in biology and neuroscience will likely re‐inform and expand the discourses on social equity, not quiet them (cf. [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref164">22</reflink>]). The emerging medical research on biomarkers, or genetic interventions and management, is particularly challenging in this regard (e.g., [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref165">7</reflink>]). Committed critical scholars of education may be making a strategic blunder to turn their collective back on such science. But educational neuroscientists should acknowledge the special tensions these issues pose for their field. And at least some educational researchers ought to be sufficiently knowledgeable about the science and its implications to refute careless claims both within scholarly debates and in the political discourses about schooling echoed in the public media.</p> <hd id="AN0073464976-9">Conclusions</hd> <p>I have argued that educational neuroscience requires careful and explicit attention to its definitions and interpretive warrants, the matching of a deep expertise in educational theory and research to an equally deep expertise in the neurosciences, and a commitment to preserving the integrity of its work against misuse by marketers, policy makers, and polemicists. These three challenges are not unrelated. Carefully warranted interpretation will be necessary to compelling bridge across expertise in the twin disciplines that make up educational neuroscience. And the ability to articulate this careful bridging convincingly to a broader audience of educational scholars, teachers, administrators, and policy makers will require a familiarity with educational research's ethical and moral commitments, and be the true test of the field's value.</p> <p>Attention to intellectual precision, disciplinary focus, and ethical concern would at once demonstrate a greater maturity for educational neuroscience than many currently presume, and possibly earn it a valuable measure of trust and credibility. Given the currently increasing likelihood of neuroscience‐related recommendations and rhetorical idioms to influence education policy and practice, the need for trustworthy and well‐informed guidance is imperative. 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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Three Requirements for Justifying an Educational Neuroscience – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Hruby%2C+George+G%2E%22">Hruby, George G.</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22British+Journal+of+Educational+Psychology%22"><i>British Journal of Educational Psychology</i></searchLink>. Mar 2012 82(1):1-23. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Wiley-Blackwell. 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. Tel: 800-835-6770; Tel: 781-388-8598; Fax: 781-388-8232; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: PhysDesc Label: Physical Description Group: PhysDesc Data: PDF – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 23 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2012 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Expertise%22">Expertise</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Rhetoric%22">Rhetoric</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Research%22">Educational Research</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Theory+Practice+Relationship%22">Theory Practice Relationship</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Integrity%22">Integrity</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Researchers%22">Educational Researchers</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Ethics%22">Ethics</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Neurology%22">Neurology</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Science+Education%22">Science Education</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1111/j.2044-8279.2012.02068.x – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0007-0998 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Background: Over the past quarter century, efforts to bridge between research in the neurosciences and research, theory, and practice in education have grown from a mere hope to noteworthy scholarly sophistication. Many dedicated educational researchers have developed the secondary expertise in the necessary neurosciences and related fields to generate both empirical research and theoretical syntheses of noteworthy promise. Nonetheless, thoughtful and critical scholars in education have expressed concern about both the intellectual coherence and ethical dangers of this new area. It is still an open question whether educational neuroscience is for some time yet to remain only a formative study area for adventurous scholars or is already a fully fledged field of educational scholarship. Aims: In this paper, I suggest that to be a worthy field of educational research, educational neuroscience will need to address three issues: intellectual coherence, mutually informing and respected scholarly expertise, and an ethical commitment to the moral implications and obligations shared within educational research generally. I shall set forth some examples of lapses in this regard, focusing primarily on work on reading development, as that is my area of expertise, and make recommendations for due diligence. Arguments: First, intellectual coherence requires both precision in definition of technical terms (so that diverse scholars and professionals may communicate findings and insights consistently across fields), and precision in the logical warrants by which educational implications are drawn from empirical data from the neurosciences. Both needs are facilitated by careful attention to categorical boundary and avoidance of category error. Second, educational neuroscientists require focused and broad expertise in both the neurosciences and educational scholarship on teaching and learning in classrooms (and/or ancillary fields). If history is our guide, neuroscience implications for practice will prove unlikely in practice without expertise on practice. Additionally, respect for the expertise of others in this hybrid and necessarily collaborative enterprise is required. Third, educational neuroscience must take seriously the heightened moral and ethical concerns and commitments of educational professionals generally and educational researchers particularly. This means keeping a vigilant eye towards preserving the integrity of empirical and theoretical findings against rhetorical misuse by educational marketers, policy makers, and polemicists targeting the general public. Conclusions: I conclude that educational neuroscience is more than a hybrid patchwork of individual interests constituting a study area, and is perhaps ready to stand as a legitimate field of educational inquiry. It will not be accepted as such, however, nor should it be, unless the need to demonstrate a capacity for consistent intellectual coherence, scholarly expertise, and ethical commitment is met. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: Ref Label: Number of References Group: RefInfo Data: 121 – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2012 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ965360 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1111/j.2044-8279.2012.02068.x Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 23 StartPage: 1 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Expertise Type: general – SubjectFull: Rhetoric Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Research Type: general – SubjectFull: Theory Practice Relationship Type: general – SubjectFull: Integrity Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Researchers Type: general – SubjectFull: Ethics Type: general – SubjectFull: Neurology Type: general – SubjectFull: Science Education Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Three Requirements for Justifying an Educational Neuroscience Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Hruby, George G. IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 03 Type: published Y: 2012 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0007-0998 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 82 – Type: issue Value: 1 Titles: – TitleFull: British Journal of Educational Psychology Type: main |
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