Editorial: Utilizing Neuroscience Core Concepts to Guide Programs, Curricula, Courses, and Assessment Across Diverse Institutional Contexts

Jennifer E Schaefer ^1* Audrey Chen Lew ² Kimberley A Phillips ³ Patrick M Sonner ⁴

• ¹ College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, Collegeville, United States
• ² University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, United States
• ³ Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, United States
• ⁴ Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, United States

al. (2024) address how departments at one institution differ in the degree to which they actually incorporated and desired to incorporate NCCs into their neuroscience courses. Unsurprisingly, they noted differences in depth of coverage amongst individual psychology, cognitive science, and biology courses. Their in-depth analysis found that instructors would like to include more NCCs in their courses and identified, along with Stocker and Duncan (2024), NCCs that were difficult to incorporate into specific courses, due to prioritizing other concepts based on focus of the course and instructor expertise.Their work provides other educators with ideas as to how they can assess their own courses/curricula to determine if some NCCs should be emphasized more or less. 2024) note an opportunity for how to engage both biology and psychology disciplinary strengths as instructors introduce the Gene-Environment Interaction concept into the neuroscience curriculum. Given that revisions to courses and curricula often require buy-in from various stakeholders, Schaefer and Michael (2024) provide communication strategies that may help educators realize the utility of CCs for such work.A group of papers in the collection also provides practical resources and suggestions for using NCCs to support teaching. Schaefer and Michael (2024) provide a set of tips that can assist educators in implementing disciplinary CCs in their own teaching. Cooper et al. (2025) examine novice students' understanding of the Evolution and Structure-Function Relationship NCCs at the outset of a general education neuroscience course for non-majors. Their findings-that a majority of non-biologists enter introductory courses with little comprehension of either concept and that preconceptions vary by student major-will help faculty predict areas of emphasis for applying NCCs in their courses and identify target areas for attending to common misconceptions. Streidter (2023) focuses specifically on the Evolution concept, making a strong case for why understanding nervous system evolution is essential for neuroscientists. Additionally, Strieder (2023) provides specific examples and ideas as to how educators can address this core concept in their teaching. Shah et al. ( 2025) provide resources and suggestions for navigating the rapidly-expanding, interdisciplinary field of neuroimmunology using an integrated coreconcept based approach, providing a blueprint that may assist in course development or revision. Hannah and Schaefer (2025) describe an easily-replicated teaching activity that helps students learn to read primary literature using NCCs as a contextual framework. They provide data outlining the metacognitive processes identified by students as most benefiting from the use of NCCs to read primary literature. Finally, Stocker and Duncan (2024) suggest practical teaching activities that incorporate NCCs into coursework when faced with limited institutional resources, connecting classic published research papers, case studies, and 3-D printing of biomolecules to specific NCCs.As the papers in this collection indicate, there are a variety of benefits in using NCCs in neuroscience courses and curricula. However, such efforts by the neuroscience community are just beginning and will need to continue to adapt implementation of NCCs to the needs of students, courses, curricula, and institutions. An example of the continued work needed following development of NCCs can be seen in the work products that followed publication of Biology Core Concepts in Vision and Change (AAAS, 2011). Following the identification of the Biology Core Concepts, various instruments and frameworks for utilization by departments and programs were developed (Branchaw et al. 2020;Brownell et al. 2014;Cary et al., 2019). The work needed to effectively utilize NCCs has begun with publications in this collection. We hope the papers in the collection will provide neuroscience educators with ideas and inspiration for how they might utilize the NCCs in their courses, curricula, programs, and assessments and inspire continued application and research in this important field.Looking toward the future, a key next step is unpacking the NCCs into the underlying conceptual elements within each core concept. We invite collaborators to join us in that work. Additionally, we envision that concept inventories and other assessment tools will be developed for the neuroscience education community to utilize. Finally, we are hopeful that the neuroscience community will continue the conversation about the most effective ways to utilize NCCs in neuroscience education.