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GORDON ELDRIDGE: LESSONS IN LEARNING
Neuromyths
By Gordon Eldridge, TIE Columnist 15-Jul-14
If we look towards the future of learning, there are some obvious trends that are simply too important to ignore. One is the explosion of technologies, with their obvious impact on society and their huge potential for allowing learning to become both more accessible and more individualized. A second is the enormous amount we have learned about the human brain and how it functions over the past couple of decades. Both of these hold a huge amount of promise to refine the art of learning and teaching, and make it both more effective and more efficient. Both can also be a double-edged sword, however. Technology used without sufficient consideration of purpose can easily become more of a distraction than a learning tool. Neuroscience, for its part, has been oversimplified and misused in sometimes potentially dangerous ways. Elena Pasquinelli, of the Department of Cognitive Studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, has put forward some explanations for why the results of neuroscientific research have often morphed into neuromyths that proliferate among educators and why those myths are so hard to dispel. Examples of neuromyths: • The belief that playing classical music to children will increase their cognitive performance (known as the “Mozart effect”). • The belief that some types of cognitive tasks depend on the right hemisphere of the human brain while others depend on the left, and that we can “train” the relevant hemisphere to perform these tasks better—and the connected belief that some people are more “left-brained,” while others are more “right-brained.” • The belief that it is possible to categorize learners based on their “learning style” (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.). • The belief that certain types of movement can stimulate the brain (Brain Gym, for example). • The belief that we only use something like 10 percent of the capacity or our brains. None of these beliefs is supported by research in neuroscience, yet they are widely held not only by the general public, but by the education community as well. It may appear innocuous to act on some of these beliefs, but Ms. Pasquinelli challenges this. She notes, for example, that in 1998 the governor of the state of Georgia, USA asked for US$105,000 to distribute classical music to newborns, and that in Japan it is possible to buy bananas grown with the help of Mozart music. She further suggests that in schools or classrooms where these methods are adopted, constraints of both time and money mean that other, more effective approaches can be crowded out. So just how do these myths arise and persist? According to Ms. Pasquinelli, there are a number of reasons. 1. Communication shortcomings • The popular press tends to jump on the latest sensational information about the brain before it has been subjected to further research. For example, in the case of the Mozart effect, the original research was never successfully replicated. Furthermore, the original research was done with adults, yet the general belief is that children are the ones who benefit and that it will produce some kind of long-term gain. • The media tends to offer irrelevant information, and omit relevant information. For example, one media report mentions that brain studies had shown that the frontal lobes are not fully developed until the age of 25, and goes on to discuss the reduction of prevalence of traffic accidents in people over 25. No study of the brain has connected these two pieces of information, so the inclusion of information about the brain here is irrelevant. On the flip side, the media almost never includes relevant information about how brain images are made, and what the comparison conditions were in a given study. The lack of this kind of information can be very misleading to lay people and can contribute to what is described as “neurorealism.” • Media articles are often accompanied by images of the brain. These images give us the illusion of being “eyewitnesses.” Apparently we are much more likely to believe the content of an article containing a brain image over one that does not, regardless of the content, or the relevance of the image. 2. Neurophilia We all have a fairly strong belief that an understanding of the human brain can and should guide what we do in the classroom, but we have a limited understanding of the science itself. This means that: • We are susceptible to “easy fixes” presented in scientific jargon. • We tend to believe that the translation of neuroscience into educational applications is fairly straightforward, when in fact there are still relatively few neuroscientists working with educators to conduct the kind of bridging studies necessary to trial what works and what does not in classroom contexts. 3. Cognitive illusions and other biases Neuromyths tend to persist, even in the face of disconfirming information. Why is this? Pasquinelli claims this is because: • They can be soothing. For example, a correlation has been shown between belief in the Mozart effect, lower teacher salaries, and low national test scores per student spending (based on comparison of these measures in American states). Ms. Pasquinelli interprets this as suggesting that the more anxious people are about student performance, the more likely they may be to buy into neuromyths. • They play to our intuitions. We tend to seek information that confirms our existing beliefs, and neuromyths tend to confirm our optimistic overestimation of our own cognitive abilities as a species. So what can we do? Since most of us will never be experts in neuroscience, is there something we can do to ensure we are not taken in by oversimplifications? Some researchers have found a correlation between educators who read popular press articles about the brain and belief in neuromyths. One thing we can do is to confirm information from these publications with information from more reliable sources, such as peer-reviewed journals. We should also be looking for information that specifically confirms the efficacy of certain approaches in classroom contexts. Though neuroscience does seem to hold great promise for classroom applications, for the moment the ready-to-use classroom applications are limited. It is only fairly recently that an area of research known as Mind, Brain and Education has emerged at the interface of neuroscience and education. The International Mind, Brain and Education Society (IMBES) was founded in 2007 in a deliberate attempt to bridge the gap between research and practice in this area. According to their website, “The Society’s principal goal is to foster dynamic relations between neuroscience, genetics, cognitive science, development, and education so that each field benefits from and influences work in the others, including questions asked, phenomena addressed, and methods employed.” They publish a journal, which I recommend. For further information and the references related to this study, email [email protected]From October 2012.
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Comments
08/28/2014 - Gordon
Hi Renea - We sometimes see educators categorize students in this way and then allow them to demonstrate understanding of ideas in ways that are supposedly more appropriate for their learning style or the particular intelligence they are believed to be stronger in. This has a danger of becoming quite superficial sometimes. It ignores the fact that it is always most beneficial to learning to demonstrate understanding in the way that is most appropriate for achieving a purpose with a particular audience. It also ignores the fact that language is our primary meaning making system. While we should definitely support students in making use of their areas of strength, we have a duty as educators to firstly support students in developing their capacities in all areas, and particularly getting them to become as proficient at using language as we possible can.
07/28/2014 - Renea B
Hi, Gordon: Very insightful article, as always. You mention that one prolific neuromyth among educators is categorizing students by learning style. I recall that you mentioned the misuse or misinterpretation of Gardner's work when I spoke with you in Miami this summer. Can you talk about that in a little more depth? I think this one is still quite pervasive, and I'd like to know more.
