Teachers, faced with conflicting educational research findings, must weigh the arguments carefully to draw their own conclusions. In his Fall 2006 American Educator article, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham speaks to an equally series problem for educators - the educational misinterpretation of neuroscientific claims.
The first research misunderstood by educators was that the right and left hemispheres of the brain might process learning differently. From that many educators surmised that schools were designed for the “left-brained logical, linear processor” rather than the “right-brained special, creative, artistic processor.” However, by the mid-1980’s science concluded that both sides of the brain contribute to nearly all tasks in the normal brain except for language which is mostly localized in the left hemisphere. This conclusion was supported by the MRI and PET scans in the 1990’s. Yet, teachers and articles written for teachers still concern themselves with differentiated instruction for right brain and left brain students.
The second research misinterpreted by educators relates to the learning of males and females. Because girls have, on the average, a larger hippocampus than boys and because the hippocampus supports learning and memory, some educators concluded that girls have a better memory which allows them to perform better in school. This conclusion is not valid for two reasons. It cannot be proven that the larger hippocampus causes the better memory. What is known is that the hippocampus gets bigger if one memorizes a lot. What neuroscience has shown is that males have a slight advantage in spatial tasks like mental rotation and mathematical reasoning while girls have an edge in memory tasks and mathematical calculation. It is also known that both males and females can be helped to succeed in all academic subjects.
The third misconception arose from research done on young animals deprived of sensory stimulation which resulted in a poorly developed sensory system. This caused parents and educators to believe that an excess of stimulation would create a well developed sensory system. Additional fuel was the “Mozart Effect” ignited when classical music temporarily increased the spatial reasoning of college students. Again, parents and educators made connections beyond what neuroscience intended and believed that classical music made children better in math.
Willingham points to important research that, though stronger, appears to have less public appeal:
1. reading to a young child provides them with more background knowledge and story grammar and
2. the vocabulary size of a child is influenced by the frequency and quality of oral communication when they are young.
This relates to the cumulative effect of learning: the more you know, the easier it is to learn more. That is why, Willingham cautions, parents and educators would do better to rely on cognitive and educational studies to inform them than neuroscience.
