Points of View: On the Implications of Neuroscience Research for Science Teaching and Learning: Are There Any? A Skeptical Theme and Variations: The Primacy of Psychology in the Science of Learning

I am notorious for my skepticism about what neuroscience can currently offer to education. My skepticism derives from several concerns, but a common theme runs through all of them: attempts to link neuroscience with education pay insufficient attention to psychology. In what follows, I will present four variations on this theme. First, for those who are committed to developing a science-based pedagogy and solving existing instructional problems, cognitive psychology offers a mother-lode of still largely untapped knowledge. Second, attempts to link developmental neurobiology to brain development and education ignore, or are inconsistent with, what cognitive psychology tells us about teaching and learning. Third, cognitive neuroscience is the brain-based discipline that is most likely to generate educationally relevant insights, but cognitive neuroscience presupposes cognitive psychology and, to date, rarely constrains existing cognitive models. And fourth, the methods of cellular and molecular neuroscience are powerful, but it is not always clear that the concepts of learning and memory used by neuroscientists are the same as those used by psychologists, let alone by classroom teachers. Cognitive Psychology: A Basic Science of Learning My notoriety as a neuroscience and education skeptic derives primarily from my 1997 article “Education and the Brain: A Bridge Too Far” (Bruer, 1997 ). I argued that cognitive psychology, not neuroscience, is the strongest current candidate for a basic science of learning. The psychological research that appears most relevant to improved educational practice is research on human problem solving and expertise, a research program initiated by Newell and Simon (1972) , and research on memory and knowledge organization as reviewed by Brown et al. (1983) . Research in this tradition attempts to explain problem solving and learning by formulating and testing cognitive models that assume the existence of mental representations and functions. In the educational context, such models can describe novice behavior in a problem-solving domain, as well as expert behavior. Such models can guide learning by suggesting instructional interventions that might transform novice models into more expert models (Bruer, 1993 ). In 1986, at the James S. McDonnell Foundation, I initiated a program, Cognitive Studies for Educational Practice (CSEP), that funded applications of cognitive principles to K–12 instruction (McGilly, 1994 ). That program provided research support for collaborations between cognitive psychologists and classroom teachers to develop research-based methods for solving recognized instructional problems, that is, classroom problems teachers identified as significant barriers to learning. Among the issues teachers identified were students' inability to read with understanding, to master elementary arithmetic, to understand fractions, to make the transition from arithmetic to algebra, to transfer scientific understanding from classroom to real-world problems, to learn American history, and to write a coherent essay. The psychologist–teacher teams developed instructional methods based on cognitive research to address these problems and tested their interventions in classrooms, often with educationally significant results. Research funded under the CSEP program, along with other cognitively inspired educational research, provide the substance for a series of reports published by the National Research Council (NRC). Neuroscience does not figure prominently in these reports even though brain scientists served on the boards and advisory groups that prepared these documents. For example, How Students Learn (NRC, 2005 ) makes no mention of current or future implications of neuroscience for educational practice. Another NRC study, Knowing What Students Know (NRC, 2001 ), discusses the implications of brain science in a six-page appendix within the 315-page report. The report dismisses the folk-theoretic views about brain lateralization and learning, the advisability of extrapolating from effects of environmental enrichment on rodent brain educational practice, and the educational significance of critical periods. While concluding that applications of brain science to general education are currently limited, the report points to special education as a promising area for future applications, citing Michael Merzenich and Paula Tallal's work on dyslexia (p. 109). The NRC study How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (NRC, 1999 ), a 300-page book, has one 10-page chapter on the brain. The study modestly concludes that brain research has established that structural changes in the brain encode learning and acknowledges that in the future, neuroscience might provide some practical benefits to educators. So, I am not alone in my skepticism, or at least my reservations, about the relevance of current neuroscience to educational practice. There is a substantial research community within psychology—whose work focuses on teaching, learning, real-world instructional problems, and solutions to these problems—that shares my concerns. Given the problems that confront teachers in the classroom (as illustrated by the list above), as a practical matter, many of us see neuroscience as having currently little to contribute toward solving those problems. What is frustrating to educational researchers and others committed to developing a science of learning is that educators' current fascination with synapses and brain images causes them to overlook a substantial body of psychological and behavioral research that could have immediate impact in the classroom.