Neuroscience and Teaching

In the last years, neuroscience has had a tremendous and exciting research development. Neuroscience encompasses three important independent sciences: neurology, psychology and biology and, thanks to that research, many aspects of the brain have become increasingly understood like physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology and structure. But, there is a new study branch within neuroscience that is called cognitive neuroscience, this area of brain study deals with basic perceptual, cognitive, attentional, emotional, and mnemonic functions. For educators and neuroscientists one fact unites their work: learning. Neuroscientists investigate the processes by which the brain learns and remembers from the molecular and cellular levels right trough to brain systems. Obviously, educators don’t study learning at that specific level, but teachers are responsible for their students learning.

It is well known that successful learning depends on different factors like curriculum, the teacher, family and community context and even diet. We also know that successful learning corresponds with successful teaching so it is necessary to ask what invisible mental processes and inferences successful teachers perform in order to get a clearer idea of what to do. There seems to be three fields from which teachers can benefit from cognitive neuroscience the first is language, the second reading and the third mathematics.

Language learning was an unknown process for a long time, and all peoples of the world just transmitted languages in a natural way. Brain researchers have helped unveil the secrets behind this process and now teachers can use that information to improve the way students learn. For example, scientists have found a gene called FOXP2 and they have come to the conclusion that this gene differs in chimpanzees and man by 3 amino acid differences, two of which occurred after separation from the common human chimp ancestor about 200,000 years ago. This gene is implicated in a severe developmental disorder of speech and language that affects the control of face and mouth movements, impeding speech. Neurally, accurate vocal imitation appears to be critical for the development of speech. That's why when linguistic input is degraded or absent for various reasons, speech and language are affected. So, when teachers face students’ speech problems, they have to think of the development of the student as a whole and not separately. Another discovery shows that when English is acquired late (due to auditory deprivation or late immigration to an English speaking country) syntactic abilities do not develop at the same rate or to the same extent; this clarifies that the brain systems important for syntactic and grammatical processing are more vulnerable to altered language input than the brain systems responsible for semantic and lexical functions.

Reading is another area teachers can benefit from neuroscience discoveries. We know that children, who are slow in learning language both in speaking and listening, are more likely to have trouble learning to read, regardless of their level of intelligence. Many researchers believe that this association is observed because both are caused by difficulty in phonological processing, that is, a problem in understanding subtle differences in speech sounds. There is evidence that problems in phonological processing lie behind language learning impairment and underlie difficulties in learning to read. Consequently, neuroscience can help teachers to identify children with learning disabilities.

Neuroscientists have contributed to help teachers in mathematics too. The most relevant findings from the last 20 years are first that humans are born with the ability to appreciate the concept of number and second humans seem to be born with the sense that numbers and space are related. This debunks the myth that there are some students not apt for math. Teachers must know that children have a natural number sense that allows them to understand and manipulate very small quantities with precision, and much larger quantities in approximation and these abilities are the base upon which teachers must build the mathematical proficiency required for our advanced society.

There are many neuroscience findings that are being used today in many classrooms. They are not ordinary practices yet, but they are helping teachers and students improve their performance. It might be starting with special education needs, but it’s slowly moving towards a greater number of beneficiaries. It is expected that, in the next years, larger amounts of students will benefit from what neuroscience can offer them.