Joana R. Rato
Jorge Amorim
Alexandre Castro-Caldas- Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Health, Institute of Health Sciences, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal
The fascination with brain research is widespread, and school teachers are no exception. This growing interest, usually noticed by the increased supply of short-term training or books on how to turn the brain more efficient, leads us to think about their basic training and outreach resources available. Little is known about what the official Initial Teacher Training (ITT) offers concerning the brain literature and if it meets scientific standards. Also, what are the science communication materials that teachers can access to learn about the developing brain remain undiscussed. First, we examined the ITT courses taught in Portuguese Higher Education, both in public and private institutions, to identify the syllabus with updated neuroscientific knowledge. Second, we searched for the neuroscience-related books published in the last 6 years through the National Library of Portugal database. Thirty ITT courses and 35 outreach publications were reviewed through a rapid review methodology. Our results showed an absence of curricular units indicating in their programs that brain research, and its relationship with learning, would be taught in a representative and updated way. In contrast, the number of brain-related books for educators increased in Portugal, corroborating the demand for this field of study by these professionals. Based on the literature that shows how misunderstandings about the brain have increased in school contexts, our discussion recognizes that science outreach could be a way to increase the scientific literacy of school teachers with the research community working more in this direction, but, since a previous problem seems to be unsolved, there is an urgent need for specialized attention to the development of training curricula for future kindergarten and elementary school teachers.
Introduction
In the educational neuroscience field, which has been advancing more to emerge as a distinct discipline, how to integrate neuroscience into educational practice remains a discussion (Wilcox et al., 2021). Between the past (or still present) caution views and promising research works arising, all agree that more is needed to build a robust translational bridge between brain research and classroom practices (e.g., Bruer, 1997, 2006; Ansari and Coch, 2006; Kelleher and Whitman, 2018; Tan and Amiel, 2019).
One of the problems pointed on this highly interdisciplinary research framework is based on the scarce specialty literature. It has been presenting more discussion about the promise of applying neuroscience to education than educational neuroscience applications already studied (Bruer, 2016). Increasing the evidence-based practice (EBP) rate in school contexts is a pre-occupation in the educational sciences since the 1990s (Davies, 1999). Despite the growing of EBP potential recognition to transform teaching and learning, incorporating collaborative research projects into everyday school practice has not been seen by the teachers as so easy as expected (Walker et al., 2019).
The relationship between neuroscience and education advances theoretically but not practically in natural contexts (Thomas et al., 2019), and we still found an ongoing debate about the potential of interdisciplinary research and its applications. Several societies and special interest groups established being the International Mind, Brain and Education Society one of the first to be released and counting currently with 17 years of existence (IMBES1).
The enthusiasm of educators and policymakers to support their educational policies and practices with scientific evidence quickly caught the attention of the commercial companies to sell new learning techniques with science make-up (Goswami, 2006; Howard-Jones, 2014b). Teachers need to know how to disentangle whether what arrives at school comes from good scientific sources or pseudoscience, for less attentive or empowered teachers easily can be dragged along by speculative ideas, interfering with their pedagogical decision-making. Even with some notions of how we process information, it is not enough to understand how brain mechanisms work, and it may lead to erroneous theories about brain functioning (Thomas et al., 2019). Some assumptions can also be out of initial training and be more connected to popular contexts and everyday interpretations (Schregel and Broer, 2020). We knew that short-term training can impact personal beliefs and promote awareness about myths but do not develop full immunity to neuromyths (McMahon et al., 2019). People can have a profound interest in a topic and dive into non-scientific sources about it, and some popular courses about the brain can reinforce neuromyths (Hughes et al., 2020).
According to previous surveys, despite interest of teachers in brain topics, a high percentage believed in neuromyths. Moreover, this happens despite they are teachers from Portugal, Spain, England, The Netherlands, Turkey, or China (Dekker et al., 2012; Rato et al., 2013; Howard-Jones, 2014a; Ferrero et al., 2016). These studies illustrate how teachers will not always be explicitly aware of whether it is or not an evidence-based source. A recent systematic review focusing on the neuromyths popularity in educational contexts showed that brain misunderstanding is remarkably consistent among worldwide teachers and highlighted the need to improve the scientific content in higher education and the importance of in-service teacher training (Torrijos-Muelas et al., 2021).
What contributes the most to these beliefs is not yet consensual, and data suggest that factors like age, education level, and neuroscience exposure influence neuromyths detection (Macdonald et al., 2017). Hence, it is not surprising that greater knowledge exchange in the context of teacher training already has been promoted by diverse international bodies (Coch, 2018). Examples of this are the Royal Society in the United Kingdom (2011), the International Society for Neuroscience (2009), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2007), which all of them presented recommendations that preparation programs must include neuroscience components relevant to educational issues since we already have brain knowledge that should be central to the teacher and could provide to him another perspective on learning, development, and instruction (Leibbrand and Watson, 2010).
Knowing that for any professional domain, initial training plays a fundamental role in the success of the practice; we developed this study to verify which updated scientific knowledge coming from the neurosciences field can be accessed by teachers in their basic training. First, we analyzed the syllabus in the Portuguese reference courses for teacher education. And second, we surveyed the outreach books about the brain available in Portuguese and published in Portugal in recent years.
Materials and Methods
Based on a double objective, we divided the study into the (1) Initial Teacher Training (ITT) syllabus survey and the (2) neuroscience outreach books rapid review.
Mind-Brain Curricular Units Present in the Teacher Training Courses
The Portuguese Elementary Education Degree (in Portuguese, Licenciatura em Educação Básica) is a 3-year course directed to prepare future professionals to deal with children from 0 to 12-year-old in school contexts. This ITT course is required to access the master’s degree that enables later to teach pre-school and elementary years (Faria et al., 2016). It is the basic training for any future teacher and includes a total of 180 European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) credits. Through the DGES Database (Direção Geral do Ensino Superior2), we found the list of the higher school institutions and through their web pages (Supplementary Appendix 1); we scanned the public information. Thirty (N = 30) elementary education ongoing courses in the academic year 2020/2021 were reviewed to identify the curricular units related to the mind-brain scientific research domain. We used the following criteria for the analysis of the courses: name of the curricular unit, contents covered, unit objectives, and recommended bibliography. Unrelated curricular units, i.e., without mind-brain topics, were excluded from our selection process. Since the analysis was only based on publicly available information, the data limitations in several courses prevented us from relying on bibliographic criteria for robust conclusions. The main reason for selecting the courses for Early Childhood Education and Elementary Education is because these teachers will be the first line of contact between children and formal education, in which the importance of the early years in human development must be specially attended to in your training.
Books About the Brain Published in Portuguese
To review the books available with a brain subject focus, we used the National Library of Portugal online database (BPN---Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal3). The mission of the BPN is to gather, protect, and make available all knowledge in the Portuguese territory. With 200 years of existence, BNP acts as the National Bibliographic Agency and gathers its collection either through legal deposit or through the acquisition of works of a recognized bibliographic or cultural value, keeping a collection that exceeds 3 million publications (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, 2021). We defined a procedure similar to the systematic review for eligibility criteria, but as we were limited to a single database (i.e., BNP database is the only one with the national collection of this type of publications), we used a rapid review format for a quantitative approach (Grant and Booth, 2009). In records and titles in European Portuguese from 2015 to 2020, we collected the data with the terms including, brain, neuroscience, and neuropsychology using the advanced search option that allowed the use of Boolean operators (e.g., AND; OR). The database advanced option also allowed to limit the search to a specific catalog (i.e., science, educational, and outreach items), the years of publication, and personalize data output. The selection criteria for the book search were first based on the title (i.e., descriptors combination), then the summary, and index reading. The background of the authors was taken into account (if were from academia/clinician specialist in the field or not) acting as a myth-screening process. We excluded the academic thesis, non-dissemination books related to brain-mind themes (e.g., health legislation and national health reports), and books written in languages other than Portuguese. The terms selected simulate a basic search to learn about this main topic since it will also be the word brain or neuro-prefixes, the most searched for on the covers of books. The time frame of 6 years was defined to follow the same period of the revised initial teacher training courses and coincide with the latest government changes regarding curricula in Portuguese higher education. Three researchers were involved in the selection process, one screened each record, the other screened the list for a tiebreaker, and the third reviewed the final list obtained to check eligibility decisions.
Results
Concerning the ITT courses, we found 30 open courses in Portugal among which, 20 are from public higher education and 10 from private institutions (Table 1). To understand the representativeness of the curricular units in the mind-brain domains, we analyzed the number of ECTS and the proportion considering the total of 180 ECTS for training completion. Based on the data that stand out, we figured out that the ISEC Lisboa is the higher institution that makes more investment in these domains presenting 10% of the required ECTS. The standard curricular unit in practically all courses is Developmental Psychology.
Table 1. Initial Teacher Training (ITT) courses and European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) distribution by the curricular units with mind-brain subject domain (N = 30).
According to the list of applications for the first phase in 2020, the ITT courses only filled 71.3% (N = 630) of the open vacancies (N = 846). Despite our 20 public courses list, the official results of the entry grade average in higher education only count to 19. For reasons beyond our knowledge, the University of Évora does not appear. The grades (ranking between 0 and 20) of the last student admitted in the 19 public courses (M = 12.01; SD = 1.17) show the highest grade was 14.52 (Polytechnic Institute of Porto—Higher School of Education), and the lowest grade was 9.85 (Polytechnic Institute of Guarda—Higher School of Education, Communication, and Sports). Seven courses have filled all student vacancies, and four courses have less than five students each (DGES, 2020). In private institutions, this classifications entry system does not apply.
Of the 30 courses reviewed, we found 46 curricular units linked to human mind themes. No unit names were found with the prefix neuro (neither the term brain) or that explicitly addressed the link between neuroscience and cognition in the contents or objectives of the curricular unit (e.g., how the nervous system enables cognition). The selected units fall into the course general education category and were distributed across four major domains (Table 2). The available syllabus shows us that brain-based concepts are scarce, and the “mind-brain” domains only have a visible presence through classical theories about mental development (e.g., Piaget, Vygotsky). In the case of “Human Biology” and “Psycholinguistics,” we only inserted the syllabus for the count whose we could verify that were within the mind-brain themes. While the psychology curricular units were more consensual about the topics approached, “human biology” without reference to the study of the nervous system and “linguistics” without the study of brain activity and structures were excluded from our final list.
Table 2. Selected curricular units with mind-brain approach in the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) courses (N = 46).
As for the survey of books about the brain, applying our search descriptors, the BNP database showed us 272 records (Figure 1). Considering the exclusion criteria previously defined, we excluded a total of 132 records related to (i) academic thesis, (ii) duplicates (first edition only considered), (iii) non-scientific outreach books (e.g., health legislation and national health reports), and (iv) non-Portuguese written books.
Figure 1. Flow diagram of the brain topic publications via the database of the National Library of Portugal.
We included 140 records from which we carried out a screening to classify the books to further fine the selection. As for the original language of the books, only 19% are written by Portuguese authors, in which the majority (81%) are translations from English, Spanish, and Italian. From our classification based on the BPN descriptions, we identified 78% outreach books, 8% textbooks, 6% exercises books for adults, and 8% for children/youth (i.e., brain-training exercise books). Within the outreach category, we looked into the books within the scope of the mind, brain, and education themes (N = 35).
The publication number shows an increasing trend over the last 6 years, with 2019 standing out compared with other years (Figure 2). In the distribution of percentages per year, 11% of publications were found in 2015, growing 1% in each of the following 2 years, reaching 19% in 2018 and 36% in 2019. In 2020, it drops to 9%, and we verified that this break in the growing trend is probably due to the mandatory stop of the publishers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the 2019 difference also could be related to the Neuroscience and Psychology collection, where only this year, 16 books were distributed by a Portuguese weekly magazine of general information. Between 2015 and 2020, we found that the books Open brain! (2015), The child’s brain explained to parents (2016), and The brain: a story of you (2017) were the top three books reprinted in Portugal, assuming a higher sales volume.
Figure 2. Brain-related books published (2015–2020).
Within the included books list (N = 140), we selected those that presented valuable content for teachers to learn about the neuroscience of learning, reading, identity, language, memory, and attention (N = 35). Table 3 presents our mind, brain, and education selection books describing a brief content analysis of these publications. Most of the 35 selected books (Damásio, 2015; Searle, 2015; Bilbao, 2016; Castro Caldas, 2016; Cotrufo, 2016, 2019; Dierssen, 2016, 2019; Sena, 2016; Fonseca, 2017; Rato and Castro Caldas, 2017; Rego et al., 2017; Lauffer, 2018; Matute, 2018; Sigman, 2018; Alonso, 2019; Berardi, 2019; Bote, 2019; Burgaya-Márquez, 2019; Canessa, 2019; Caruana, 2019; Daphna, 2019; Domínguez, 2019; Garcia, 2019; Maojo, 2019; Quintero and Álamo, 2019; Sepulcre, 2019; Tafet, 2019; Viosca, 2019; Castro Caldas and Rato, 2020; Correia and Ferreira, 2020) are written by academics or clinicians in the fields of medicine, neuroscience, and psychology, with four exceptions to report (10, 11, 13, 15, refs number in Table 3). The guide for discovering the brain by Martins et al. (2017), was written by the writers of children books; however, the contents were reviewed by a panel of scientific experts. The book about how students can get better grades (Gaspar, 2018) is authored by a math teacher responsible for the Neurosup project to help French students and teachers learn better using neurosciences, although no scientific evidence on the impact of the project was found so far. Two books (10, 15) were written by non-scientific background writers (Gifford, 2017; Ibánez, 2018) with experience in outreach for a broader public.
Table 3. Outreach books selection with mind, brain, and education themes (N = 35).
Of the 35 books in review, we selected those that explicitly bridged the gap between neuroscience and education by addressing, in simple language, important themes, such as brain plasticity, types of memory, and the brain of teenagers, demystified some erroneous concepts, or explored the potential of interdisciplinary knowledge of applications in the classroom (marked in bold in Table 3). Of these 35, we highlighted 18 books, written or reviewed by experts, that fulfill the outreach function by disseminating in a useful and clear way, brain content to the educational community. Topics, such as the construction of memories and the relationship between emotions and learning, are the most frequently discussed in these publications and we also found two books that explicitly aim to debunk neuromyths (11 and 34 in Table 3).
Discussion
Concerns about the academic skills of prospective teacher candidates are recurrently featured in education quality policy discussions around the world (OECD, 2019). Portugal is not an exception, and with this study, we aimed to take a picture of the state of curriculum programs in terms of the presence of up-to-date content about the learning brain. Results showed that teaching training includes scientific domains related to the psychology of education and development, being these the most representative of the mind-brain domains searched. However, we did not directly connect with neuroscientific knowledge since the syllabus analyzed does not evidence this domain, either in the content or in the recommended bibliographical references. Curricular units linked to human biology and psycholinguistics were also identified, but far from representative, given the sparse number of units with the majority being proposed as optional.
Despite the psychology domain content presence, brain knowledge has been deeply absent from the Portuguese teacher’s initial training. With few recent bibliography lists, the historical foundations of psychology and the classic models of child development (e.g., Piaget and Vygotsky theories) are the topics mostly present in the psychology disciplines examined. Also, the revised syllabus does not address the mind, brain, and education integrated view, not even in a slight way. This is in line with the National Council on Teacher Quality report, which indicates that most of the teacher education courses and textbooks in the United States do not cover principles from cognitive psychology related to evidence-based learning, and some of them propagate learning misunderstandings (Pomerance et al., 2016).
Trying to implement popularized strategies, such as the multiple intelligences, the learning styles, or the brain gym, may not be the best use of teacher’s time and, as Weinstein and Sumeracki (2019), we also believed that teachers and researchers can benefit from an open dialogue about the learning science research evidence. It is not new the suggestion that curricular subjects, such as psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience in a course syllabus, are one possible way to narrow the knowledge gap concerning how the mind works (Damasio, 2008). According to Liebowitz et al. (2018), the coursework should efficiently introduce key theory embedded into learning sciences, while primarily supporting teaching candidates in building skills in response to the realities they face in their classrooms. However, by our results, Portuguese teachers may be still far from this achievement, especially concerning updating neuroscientific knowledge applied to education.
Providing new tools drawn from scientific research does not have to go through the prescription way (Brookman-Byrne and Thomas, 2018). Involving teachers at the early stages of research projects, shaped by their needs, could help them choose the most appropriate method for a given scenario in their classroom. The Portuguese teacher’s profile recommends that in their professional activity teachers should participate in research projects related to teaching, learning, and student development (DRE, 2001), but analyzing the contents that are worked on in initial training, it seems difficult for these teachers to feel prepared to execute projects on the subject of mind, brain, and education.
Previous studies revealed that Portuguese teachers are very interested in training in these domains and the lack of scientific literacy can contribute to their easily succumbing to neuromyths (Rato et al., 2011, 2013). If on the one hand, we have teachers fascinated to learn more about how the brain works, on the other hand, teacher training itself is losing demand. Our data review of the ITT courses suggests a growing lack of interest to follow a teaching career since these courses are getting low-grade students and have lost candidates over time. Adding to this scenario, we noted that only 2% of Portuguese students express a desire to be a teacher in the PISA report (5% on the OECD average), which are also the ones with low rankings in literacy and mathematics (OECD, 2015). These are enough reasons to make us conclude that the social devaluation of the teaching profession in Portugal is currently a reality.
If the interest in the educational vocation were equal to the general fascination with neuroeducation topics, we would no longer have a problem to solve. Our results show an increase in the number of publications about brain discoveries in the last 6 years. As for the book category, there were more outreach books found, although brain stimulation exercise books were higher produced, compared with textbooks. We also noticed that the available books in European Portuguese are mostly translations, with few Portuguese academics specialized in writing books for the general public. Furthermore, not all of the brain outreach books reviewed are written by experts in the neuroscience field, which also makes this kind of publication more vulnerable to speculation (i.e., the spread of pseudoscience/myths). Nevertheless, the publications reviewed that have school teachers as a target, and which main subjects are addressed to bridge the interdisciplinary area of the mind, brain, and education, remain scarce. As such, it is not run out yet the production of these materials for the educational audience with a scientific quality label. We also realized that even Portuguese researchers with an expressive scientific contribution in the field of relationship between brain sciences and education may not have science extension materials recently published (e.g., Morais, 1997) or authors who may not have the proper recognition in Portugal since their books remain untranslated into Portuguese so far (e.g., Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2018; Dehaene, 2020).
We knew that neuroscience has a major presence in psychology than in education research (Bruer, 2016), and we also knew that the psychology literature has been playing a fundamental role to inform educational settings (Mason, 2009). But, none of this seems enough to reach an interdisciplinary knowledge dialogue, which is structural to the educational success of neuroscience as a field. The brain research contribution, jointly with extensive dissemination and translational work, is increasingly needed to an integrated learning research enterprise for school best practices.
Limitations and Future Work
As limitations, we highlighted the restraint on public data that when not available unallowed to draw strong conclusions regarding the recommended bibliography in the reviewed courses. However, we also recognized that there may be a wide variability since the same content can be approached differently depending on the training or updating of teachers, which may be a good indicator to explore in future studies. Another weakness is due to the library database used since it is not prepared for the application of typical procedures on a scientific basis (e.g., refined filters and data export), making advanced surveys less accurate and reliant on manual final verification. Also, due to not achieving a full reading and a fact-check, the scientific quality of the reviewed books was based on the broad subjects and authorship expertise, so further studies are required to thoroughly analyze the neuro-prefix materials and workshops or other events that enter schools. A review of the publications to the general public by panel-of-expert would help to distinguish what is pseudoscience from the issues covered in a scientifically supported way.
Conclusion
The main contribution of the study was to present an exhaustive curricula picture in future training of teachers on Early Childhood Education and Elementary Education and the brain-mind outreach books published in Portugal. The recent explosion of mass-produced information about brain discoveries runs counter to what we see embodied in teaching curricula. Improving the units within the general education category in the ITT courses with an integrated mind-brain-education updated program appears urgent and a possible path to stop misinformation and the spread of educational practices so-called based on the brain but without scientific evidence. Achieving EBPs in schools also involves preparing the educational professionals for scientific literacy right from the beginning of their training. The teacher preparation programs should be seen as a good investment and here neuroscience can play a modest, but booster role in building an evidence-based learning education culture. Still few reference researchers who work on the relationship between brain sciences and education published outreach books for Portuguese educational communities. Quality science communication publications can narrow the scientific brain knowledge gap in educational professionals but, in this case, is dependent on their interest and careful interpretation of this kind of literature.
Data Availability Statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.
Ethics Statement
Research protocol was approved by the Comissão de Ética para a Saúde (CES)—Universidade Católica Portuguesa (ref. number 131/2021). Written informed consent was not required in this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.
Author Contributions
JR and AC-C outlined the research idea. JA collected and processed the data. All authors contributed to the writing and reviewing of the manuscript.
Funding
This work was financially supported by National Funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the project UIDB/04279/2020. JR and JA were also supported by the FCT with individual research grants [Award number(s): SFRH/BPD/109234/2015 and DFA/BD/6336/2020, respectively].
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s Note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to teachers João Martins Nunes for helping to clarify the teacher career requirements in Portugal and Lurdes Florindo for the inspiration.
Supplementary Material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.737136/full#supplementary-material
Footnotes
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Keywords: syllabus, teacher training courses, neuroscience education, outreach books, mind, brain, and education, rapid review
Citation: Rato JR, Amorim J and Castro-Caldas A (2022) Looking for the Brain Inside the Initial Teacher Training and Outreach Books in Portugal. Front. Psychol. 13:737136. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.737136
Received: 09 July 2021; Accepted: 21 January 2022;
Published: 28 February 2022.
Edited by:
Valeria Abusamra, University of Buenos Aires, ArgentinaReviewed by:
Vitor Teodoro, Lusophone University of Humanities and Technologies, PortugalYesica Aydmune, CONICET Institute of Basic, Applied and Technology Psychology (IPSIBAT), Argentina
Copyright © 2022 Rato, Amorim and Castro-Caldas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Joana R. Rato, joana.rato@ucp.pt; Alexandre Castro-Caldas, acastrocaldas@ucp.pt