Abstract
The US ‘decade of the brain’ in the 1990s saw the launch of a number of educational programmes that claimed to be ‘brain-based’. These were usually unscientific in their approach and motivated by commercial interests. Rather than inform education, these programmes often promoted misunderstandings about the brain: so-called ‘neuromyths’ (Howard-Jones, 2014). In contrast, the last two decades have seen a blossoming of authentic dialogue between education and neuroscience, aimed at enhancing teaching and learning with insights from the mind and brain. These more recent initiatives are very different from their predecessors, often including critiques of the myths that the brain-based industry helped to create. These efforts to identify genuine scientific insights that can inform teachers’ understanding and practice bear a variety of names, including ‘neuroeducation’, ‘educational neuroscience’ and ‘mind, brain and education’. Rather than producing brain-based approaches, they converged on the view that neuroscience is one important source of insight into learning that should be considered alongside other scientific and educational sources.
Some critics of these efforts have proposed that education is better served by psychology and that neuroscience can add nothing new to what psychology already offers (Bowers, 2016). In response, those working across neuroscience and education point to how our understanding of the mind and brain are complementary to each other (Howard-Jones, Varma, et al., 2016). Indeed, it is usually the collaboration of neuroscientists, psychologists and educators that characterises research involving neuroscience and education. Efforts to consider classroom practice in modern scientific terms have recently been referred to as the ‘science of learning’ (SoL). They do not promote a single model of classroom learning, but instead refer to a range of insights about learning that have been derived using the scientific method.