Editorial

The Latin American School on Education and the Cognitive and NeuralSciences: Goals and challenges

John T. BruerJames S. McDonnell Foundation, St. Louis, MO, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Keywords:EducationNeuroscienceCognitive neuroscience

a b s t r a c t

Although the institution of summer schools is well established within the scientific community, the LASchool is unique in its goals and future challenges.

& 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

This volume presents papers prepared by participants at thefirst three Latin American Schools on Education and the Cognitiveand Neural Sciences (Atacama, Chile, 2111; El Calafate, Argentina,2012; and Itacaré, Brazil, 2013). Summer schools and instituteshave a significant place in the development of scientific andscholarly communities. The Latin American School contributes tothe development of an international community of psychologists,cognitive neuroscientists, and neuroscientists committed to apply-ing their research to improve educational outcomes for children,not only in Latin America but also internationally. However, inaddition to fulfilling the typical goals of a summer school, the LASchools have additional goals and challenges.

2. Background

The LA School had its genesis in March 2007, when theUniversity of Chile hosted the Symposium on Early Educationand Human Brain Development. Symposium speakers, several ofwhom remain involved with the LA School, presented research incognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience which hadpotential application to educational issues. The audience wasoverwhelmingly educators and representatives from ministries ofeducation. At the final symposium session, the symposium speak-ers answered questions from the audience. It was evident from thequestions that the attendees were interested primarily in whatneuroscientific research could immediately tell them about earlychildhood education, early numeracy, beginning arithmetic, andthe effects of daycare. At the time, there was worldwide interest inhow ideas from developmental neurophysiology – synaptic pro-liferation and subsequent synaptic pruning, critical periods, andenriched environments – might contribute to child developmentand early learning. Many of the teachers‘ questions assumed the

central relevance of developmental neurophysiology to addressingproblems in early childhood education. The speakers suggested thatthere were other areas of cognitive and neural science that mighthave greater relevance to the issues that educators and policy-makers confront. Work in the social and behavioral sciences, forexample provides models of child development that offer roadmapsfor policy makers, educators, and instructional designers who wantto understand not only what children learn, but how they optimallylearn [7]. Thus, the Symposium indicated that there was an interestin science-based educational practice in the region and that therewas a need to broaden the perspective of educators and policymakers on what kinds of research at which levels of analysis mightmost contribute to their real-world concerns.

Subsequent discussions with three Latin American neuroscien-tists – Marcela Peña, Mariano Sigman, and Sidarta Ribeiro – re-enforced this conclusion. There was a need to develop a commu-nity of young investigators in Latin America who would have thescientific backgrounds needed to guide national educational pol-icy, a community of young investigators well-equipped to enterinto constructive dialog with educators and policy makers. All ofthose engaged in these discussions were familiar with or hadparticipated in the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience.We decided to develop a Latin American School on Education andthe Cognitive and Neural Sciences, patterned after the SummerInstitute. The immediate goal was to provide young Latin Amer-ican investigators, already trained in either the cognitive or neuralsciences, with the knowledge, skills, and international professionalcontacts that would allow them to turn their research interestsproductively toward educational problems. These young investi-gators would first of all provide an educational research resourcein Latin America to further science-based practice in the regionand at the same time be active members in the internationaleducational research community. It was also recognized that theLA School, concentrating primarily on basic research, would only

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Trends in Neuroscience and Education

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Trends in Neuroscience and Education 3 (2014) 1–3

be a first step in developing the needed dialog. Eventually, theschools and its graduates would extend the dialog to ministries ofeducation, policy makers, and classroom teachers. The LA School isbeginning to address this second goal.

There is nothing unusual about the structure and organizationof the LA School that would distinguish it from numerous othersummer institutes. The LA Schools offer two-week courses.Approximately 50 students are selected from a pool of severalhundred applicants each year. Two-thirds of the students are LatinAmericans; the remaining students are selected from applicantsoutside the region. The intent is to develop an internationalcommunity of younger investigators interested in translating basicpsychological and neuroscientific research into educational prac-tice and policy. Each year the school has a general theme, e.g.science education and numeracy, reading, applications of technol-ogy to education. Thirty faculty members from institutions aroundthe world, experts in the thematic area, are invited to the school.Faculty members agree to remain in residence at the school forthree days. Each faculty member presents at least one lecture andconducts a journal club. The school schedule allows for extendedperiods each day during which participants can discuss work andresearch interests informally. Students are encouraged to collaboratein designing research projects. There is one rule of social interactionat the schools: any time a student sees two faculty membersconversing, the student is required to join the conversation.

Summer institutes and schools, like the LA School, have anestablished place within the scientific and scholarly community.There are hundreds of them every year in part because they are aneffective and a cost-effective way to build communities and fosterdialog. Some schools, like those at the Marine Biology Laboratoryin Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratoryin New York, having been operating over the past century andhave attained mythic status for their contributions to the biologi-cal sciences. The perceived benefits of schools to both students andfaculty are easily summarized. Summer schools provide advancedtraining for the participants, often advanced training is notavailable at the student‘s home institution. The school facultyprovides expertise drawn from among the best investigators in thediscipline. Student–faculty interaction allows students to discusstheory and research topics and to garner advice on their ownresearch program, with the possibility of future long-distancementorship or collaboration. The concentration of a variety ofrelated research interests at a school can lead to productiveresearch collaborations among students, and their advisors, whohave similar or complementary research interests. The intellectualand social interaction at the school provides networking opportu-nities that can lead to lifetime professional relationships. Schoolsfacilitate the development of research communities and dialogwithin that community. All these benefits serve to bring youngerscientists, who may be on the periphery of a discipline or researchdomain, closer to its center. For longer running schools, formerstudents often become instructors, adding further intellectual andsocial cohesion to the field.

The LA School serves all of these purposes. However, there areadditional factors and challenges that are unique to the LA School.First, consider the research community the LA School is trying todevelop. There are numerous single-discipline or sub-disciplinesummer schools, like Skinner‘s example of the Summer Institute inSocial and Personality Psychology. School attendance results in theskills and knowledge to engage more fully in that research field.Some schools begin as cross disciplinary endeavors. The SummerInstitute in Cognitive Neuroscience is an example. When thatschool started in 1988 there was little dialog between systemneuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, even though theymight have been working on the same topic or system. Indeed,the dialog had to be forced [8]. The original goal of the Cognitive

Neuroscience Summer Institute was to help clear away the “seman-tic underbrush”, as Michael Gazzaniga described it, that preventedeffective communication between the disciplines. Earlier, the goal ofthe school was to train new generations of cognitive neuroscientists,who were as familiar with the vocabulary, methods, and assump-tions of systems neuroscience as they were with cognitive psychol-ogy. As the underbrush was cleared away, a new hybrid disciplineemerged. As the hybrid field matured, the Cognitive NeuroscienceInstitute morphed into a single-discipline school, a school thatcontinues to integrate young scientists on the periphery of cognitiveneuroscience into its center.

There is certainly semantic underbrush to be cleared awayamong the fields of education, psychology, and neuroscience.However, the goal of the LA School is not necessarily to developa single discipline or even a hybrid discipline. The goal is to lay thegroundwork for appropriately translating findings from severalbasic science disciplines into educational policies and practices.Students should certainly depart the school familiar with thevocabulary, methods, and assumptions of the cognitive and neuralsciences. However, students who intend to work at the cognitive–neural–educational interface must also acquire an appreciation ofwhat kind of research at which level of analysis might be mostappropriate to the educational problem one is trying to solve.Some problems might best be addressed at the cognitive orbehavioral level; others might be more susceptible to solution atthe neural level. A brain imaging study is not always the bestanswer to an educational problem, nor is a reaction time study.Neither the cognitive nor the neural sciences alone have theanswers to the variety of educational issues challenging us. Playinga constructive role in the educational environment requires under-standing the strengths, as well as the weaknesses, of the com-plementary disciplines in relation to solving acknowledgededucational problems. Disciplinary parochialism will not do. Thus,a unique challenge for the LA Schools is to foster critical dialogbetween “separate but equal” disciplines.

A second challenge is to constructively channel the enthusiasmfor brain science that is pervasive among both educators andresearchers. Historical contingencies started educational neu-roscience off on the wrong foot. Starting in the mid-1990s earlychildhood advocates began to argue that findings in developmen-tal neurophysiology – developmental synaptogenesis, critical per-iods, and the effects of enriched environments on rodent brains –

provided a biological basis to transform our understanding of earlychildhood development, teaching, and learning. The impact of thisargument was evident in the questions educators asked at theMarch 2007 Symposium. Although the specific educational impli-cations claimed for this science have been rejected by the scientificcommunity as “neuro-myths” [1,3], those implications are stillalive among teachers and thriving among those providing com-mercial products to support “brain-based” education. Educationalneuroscience must actively engage in addressing these misunder-standings. Maybe one of our goals should be the training ofeffective communicators of science to the education communityas Goswami [6] has argued. Among teachers and teacher educatorsespousing a “mind, brain, and education” perspective, there is alsoa tendency to point to findings in cognitive neuroscience thatappear to justify particular educational practices, effective or not,that happen to cohere with the individual‘s philosophical orideological predispositions. However, in these expositions rarely isit the case that brain-based data is provided to support the particularintervention. For example, that rote learning strengthens one‘s rotelearning circuits is not very informative. Also, it is highly unlikelythat Hebbian learning justifies teachers‘ intuitions that effectivelearning requires repetition [4]. Indeed what kind of instructionand practice is required to facilitate learning of facts is a rather longand complicated story, as Roediger and Karpicke [10,11] among

J.T. Bruer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 3 (2014) 1–32

others have shown. Educational neuroscientists should foreswearneuroscientific “just so” stories. LA School graduates should be ableto successfully engage with the teacher–educator community inattempts to limit the spread of neuroscientific pseudo-explanations.

There may also be a need to channel the enthusiasm ofeducational neuroscientists engaged in basic research. Within thisresearch community there is a tendency to talk about the educa-tional implications of cognitive neuroscience and neuroscienceand rightly so. However, students should leave the LA School withan understanding that there are implications and there arepossible implications. One of the conclusions endorsed by someof the speakers at March 2007 University of Chile Symposium wasthat at present neuroscientific research was very much a promis-sory note that in the future might help support and refine modelsof child development and learning. In most instances thoseimplications are not yet at hand. The future promise of educationalneuroscience is becoming an increasingly common theme in thisliterature [1, 5–7]. One might say the educational neuroscienceliterature mostly talks about possible implications of neuroscienceresearch for education. This literature is peppered with perhaps,maybe, and it is possible that. On the negative side this indicatesthe relative paucity of real-world implications of the researchdiscussed. On the positive side, it indicates that there is interestingand important work to be done to turn these possible implicationsinto real-world, classroom implications. Students come to the LASchools highly enthusiastic and they leave highly enthusiastic, butwith an understanding of the theoretical, methodological, andpolitical hurdles that they must negotiate to reach their goals.

Finally, an eventual goal of the LA Schools is to further developthe researcher–educator dialog to the point where the Schoolwould become a forum for collaborative research involving bothscientists and educators in classroom studies. Again the implica-tions of neuroscientific research for education as found in thescholarly literature are possible implications as seen from theperspective of the researcher. Do these possible implicationsresonate at all with classroom teachers? For around 15 yearsstarting in the late 1980s, the James S. McDonnell Foundation ran aprogram called Cognitive Studies for Educational Practice (CSEP)[2,9]. This program provided three to six years of research supportto collaborative teams consisting of a researcher and a classroomteacher. The program guidelines required the collaborators todescribe an acknowledged classroom problem (e.g. failure to learnfirst formal arithmetic, failure to transfer physical science knowl-edge from the classroom to everyday problems, early readingproblems), state a hypothesis about how cognitive research mightaddress the problem, develop a classroom intervention based on

the hypothesis, and test the intervention in classrooms. Some ofthese projects succeeded but others did not. However, this type ofresearch program directly linked the basic research knowledgebase to a real-world, practical and educational problem. Theprojects provided data on the success or failure of the interventionand even sometimes on the inadequacy of the original hypothesis.Moreover, the projects also provided insights into what wasrequired to translate basic research into educational practice.Classrooms, as opposed to laboratories or imaging centers, arenoisy places, requiring interventions that have a strong signal. Thisprogram also suggested that there may be need for a new type ofeducation professional whose professional role is to assist teachersin applying research in the classroom. Basic scientists are notgenerally well-suited to this task. At any rate, one hopes that theLA School might be a first step toward a new educational researchinitiative, Cognitive and Neural Sciences for Educational Practice.

The need to appreciate the complementary nature of thecognitive and neural sciences in the educational arena and theneed to extend the dialog beyond the confines of the researchcommunity are fundamental to the LA School. The papers in thisspecial edition represent the first steps toward these goals. Weexpect that the LA School will become a permanent fixture on theinternational science calendar, providing opportunities for careerdevelopment and international collaboration in applying thecognitive and neural sciences to education.

References

[1] Blakemore S-J, Frith U. The implications of recent developments inneuroscience for teaching and learning. London: Institute of CognitiveNeuroscience; 2000.

[2] Bruer JT. Schools for thought: a science of learning in the classroom. Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press; 1993.

[3] Bruer JT. The myth of the first three years: a new understanding of early braindevelopment and lifelong learning. New York: Free Press; 1999.

[4] Geake J, Cooper P. Cognitive neuroscience: implications for education. West-minst Stud Educ 2003;26(1):7–20.

[5] Goswami U. Neuroscience and education. Br J Educ Psychol 2004;74:1–14.[6] Goswami U. Neuroscience and education: from research to practice? Nat Rev

Neurosci 2006;7(5):406–11.[7] Hirsh-Pasek K, Bruer JT. The brain/education barrier. Science 2007;317:1293.[8] LeDoux JE, Hirst W, editors. Mind and brain: dialogues in cognitive neu-

roscience. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1986.[9] McGilly K, editor. Classroom lessons: integrating cognitive theory and class-

room practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1994.[10] Roediger HL, Karpicke JD. The power of testing memory: basic research and

implications for educational practice. Perspect Psychol Sci 2006;1:181–210.[11] Roediger HL, Karpicke JD. Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests

improves long-term retention. Psychol Sc 2006;17:249–55.

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