Educational Neuroscience: Key Processes and Approaches to Measurement

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Background

Education must accommodate huge variation in leaners' abilities and behaviour. This presents a central challenge to achieving optimal outcomes for all children; and can, therefore, lead to major societal impact. Thus, it is critical to understand sources of this variation in order to address them. Taken alongside behavioural scientific evidence, neuroscience techniques continue to provide novel insights into the neural/neurocognitive processes involved in learning in many different areas, and the factors that might influence these, leading to individual variations in outcome. These processes have been systematically investigated by those working in the field of educational neuroscience for over twenty years in an attempt to derive implications for teaching and learning. This work has led to substantial understanding in learning of language and literacy, and growing understanding in the areas of mathematics and science. In many respects, then, educational neuroscience has become a mature field.

However, this maturity has begun to highlight key issues that need to be addressed for the field to grow further and have real impact on educational practice. For instance, much effort has been spent on examining the role of executive function (EF) in learning, as a core system underpinning higher-order cognitive abilities. This work has largely been based on the Miyake model of EF, and deployed measures based on the stringent idea of three primary cognitive constructs (i.e. inhibition, task-switching, updating). This assumption has arguably led to noisy and potentially misleading assessment of abilities. As a result, we still lack any fine-grained grasp of the mechanisms of executive systems, how these relate to other cognitive and neurocognitive processes - including attentional systems, motor control and cerebellar function - and how best to facilitate more optimal development. Current work is beginning to place greater emphasis on developing better investigation of EF, improving measurements to truly understand the impact of findings. Relatedly, there is increasing interest in the role of spatial, spatial-temporal and other forms of nonverbal higher-order cognition in learning, especially in mathematics and science, but with limited consensus on how these should be measured, or how these systems connect to verbal cognition. Building better understanding here is critical, given consistent evidence that the acquisition of symbol-based processing marks a key shift in ability in a range of areas of learning, and therefore that promoting explicit (typically verbal) ability may be the principal point of convergence across these areas in terms of pedagogic support.

The purpose of the proposed Research Topic is to compile a connected set of publications that address these and related issues at the cutting edge of educational neuroscience and developmental cognitive science, with the objective of influencing the onward growth of the field. We welcome original Research manuscripts, reviews, hypothesis/theory manuscripts, mini-reviews, perspectives and Brief Research reports.

Keywords: edcational neuroscience, mind; brain and education, executive function, nonverbal cognition, symbol-based processing

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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