Cognitive Psychology: a Meeting of the Mind and Education

cognitive psychology a meeting of the take heed and nurture To magic trick Bruer, cognitive psychology is the critical bridge mingled with star science and education. A true discernment of how the wit handles acquire tasks will besides be reached with the help of cognitive psychologists, says John Bruer, PhD, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Over the at last decade, Bruer has larnn the rise of a brain-based education exploit with the media, educational consultants and substantiate a bun in the oven intoers nerve-wracking to apply sanctioned brain look into to the education of the nations children.In a much cited 1997 article, Education and the brain a bridge too far, published in the Educational Researcher (Vol. 26, No. 8, p. 416), he criticized a trend to oerinterpret the findings of this kind of research and apply it in schools. Holding much immediate promise for application in schools, he believes, are image technologies that render the human brains processing of maths, reading and different specific learning tasks. muchover potpourri surface imaging research, he says, must halt from quality cognitive science.cognitive psychology, says Bruer, empennage divine service as the bridge between this display case of firmly neuroscience and the schools. In a parley with the Monitor, Bruer, whose background is in philosophy and physics and whose foundation funds mainly biomedical and behavioral sc iences research, c aloneed on psychologists to fall in to a greater extent closely with educators as they coordinate studies of the brain and attempt to apply their findings to education. Q. What fork over been slightly of the most dangerous myths that hurt been spread through brain-based education?A. wholeness is the idea that theres a critical blockage for school-type learning, an optimal period during brain teaching that ends at around 11 or 12 years and after which learning becomes much more difficult. Theres ab solutely no basis in neuroscience for that claim. What a hoi polloi of brain-based consultants dont appreciate is that to turn basic psychological research into effective learning practices you gift to develop interventions based on cognitive science in math, reading and another(prenominal) subject areas and test them in classrooms. Q.Who do you conjecture is in a linear perspective to do that kind of work? A. Cognitive psychologists. What a lot of mess do not realize is that better brain of brain function relies on better understanding of learning and behavior. Our understanding of how psychical tasks are executed by unquiet structures in the brain is crucially helpless on cognitive and behavioral research by psychologists. Q. Are imaging studies relying on this kind of behavioral research? A. Totally. To guide an interpretable imaging depicted object depends on very careful behavioral study of the experimental task.Our imaging technologies have bound temporal and spa tial resolution, so we indispensableness to design studies that optimize our ability to look at the smallest parts of the brain that we perhaps nooky. The counselling to do that is to analyze mental arithmetic, for example, down to its subcomponentsretrieving a number fact, trying to decide which of two numbers is larger. You heap begin to see where those subcomponents might be located in the brain, and from there you can begin to see the circuitry knobbed in doing these tasks. Q.Do you think that findings from brain research on learning disabilityin math and reading, for examplemight apply more generally to educating children? A. The attempt to understand learning and our mental capacities in terms of brain structures is such a new straighten stunned that if they make advances over the next 50 years as they have over the last 15, who knows? It could be very exciting. But until 10 years ago, most cognitive psychologists did not take any rice beer in the brain. Brain imaging helped change that.But still, this hybrid discipline, cognitive neuroscience, that attempts to map cognitive mental functions onto brain areas and circuits, is in its infancy. We all have great expectations, but its hard to make specific predictions about what the ultimate applications might be. Q. Do you think that, at this point, profuse cognitive psychologists are involved in bridging brain research with education? A. Because of the interest in brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience, there are people doing it. But one of the troubles is that there arent enough experimental psychologists thinking about applications of psychology to education.Part of that is a funding problem. But its been our carry out at the foundation that if you make resources easy for psychologists to work with educators to do that kind of work, you can elicit almost very satisfactory proposals. Q. Are you looking more at funding that kind of work? A. Yes. I see an opportunity to work with some cognit ive neuroscientists to ask, What educational problems do you think you might be able to lick because of what you know? I would wish to see the foundations interest moving more in that direction over the next tailfin to 10 years. Q. Is t a problem that most cognitive psychologists dont have as much experience with education as with science? A. Yes. In most areas theres some friction between researchers and practitioners. It happens to be comely evident in education. One way to address that is to encourage long-term collaborations between researchers and practitioners, where theyre working to sither as peers quite than with the scientists going into schools and acting as cut across and educators as their servants. Two affaires have to happen. The researchers have to become a bit more aware of and sensitive to the problems teachers confront in the classroom.And teachers need to begin to think like researchersto at least understand the greatness of experimental controls, eviden ce, this kind of thing. Q. And how do you get that collaboration going? A. One thing we have found is if you send out a request for proposals that requires the teachers, the practitioners and the researchers to come in together on a project, they do it. You want to structure funding programs for research and for improving instruction that incorporate the crush research thinking and the best pragmatic classroom knowledge.