Utilization of Neuroscience Core Concepts to Guide Programs, Curricula, Courses, and Assessment in Diverse Institutional Contexts

Core concepts, or overarching principles that identify patterns in processes and phenomena, provide a framework for organizing facts and understanding. Core concepts have existed for many years in some life science disciplines, including biology, microbiology, and physiology yet have only recently been published for neuroscience in a recent article by Chen et al., from 2023. A multi-year community-derived project identified the following neuroscience core concepts: communication modalities, emergence, evolution, gene-environment interactions, information processing, nervous system functions, plasticity, and structure-function relationship. Given the rapid scientific advances in the field and the ever-growing number of neuroscience programs, core concepts are particularly important in neuroscience education as a foundation on which educators and students can scaffold new knowledge and research findings. Neuroscience core concepts can be implemented at the course, curricula, and/or program levels where they can be used to inform development, guide revisions, and structure assessments.

This Research Topic aims to disseminate strategies by which the neuroscience core concepts can be utilized in diverse courses, curricula, programs, and assessments. We welcome both forward-facing approaches for future implementation and evidence-based studies evaluating the use of the identified core concepts in neuroscience education. Authors may propose models on how neuroscience core concepts can be effectively embedded at multiple levels, describe frameworks on how neuroscience core concepts compare with previously described core concepts and competencies in biology, provide theoretical underpinnings for the use of neuroscience core concepts, suggest future methods of implementation, provide instructional tools which utilize the validated core concepts, or present pedagogical research on methods to teach one of the eight core concepts. Sharing these innovations will allow educators to more readily envision how to use core concepts in their own contexts.

Topics and themes of interest include, but are not limited to:

● Implementation of neuroscience core concepts to structure new programs/curricula/courses

● Revision of existing programs/curricula/courses based on neuroscience core concepts

● Teaching neuroscience core concepts in introductory versus advanced courses

● Assessment tools based on neuroscience core concepts

● Use of neuroscience core concepts to address misconceptions in neuroscience

● Implementation of neuroscience core concepts in different institutional contexts (PUI, R1, community college, etc) and program contexts (home department in psychology vs. biology, interdisciplinary program, etc)

● Alignment of neuroscience core concepts with core concepts in other disciplines

● Complementarity of neuroscience core concepts and neuroscience core competencies

● Use of neuroscience core concepts to introduce new subfields of neuroscience to trainees

● Use of neuroscience core concepts to improve student learning processes, such as metacognition or critical reasoning