Annual Research Review: Educational neuroscience: progress and prospects

We began by noting a comment by a leading educator that there seemed more papers about the potential of educational neuroscience than basic findings. It should now be apparent why this is. The ‘hype’ arises because it makes intuitive sense that insights into brain mechanisms of learning are likely to inform teaching in schools. The mismatch is because the basic science is hard, given the multiple learning systems in the brain and factors that influence their operation, and because translation into the classroom is also hard.

There is a ready model for how that translation may take place. As Roediger suggests, a translational educational science could be like medicine, ‘a field in which new discoveries from the lab in work with animals are tested in small-scale studies with humans and then in clinical trials with larger numbers of people. If the therapeutic practices pass these tests, they are introduced into clinical practice (with results continuing to be monitored for such issues as side effects)’ – and in Roediger's view, it could yield the kinds of advances that have been witnessed in medicine over the last century (Roediger, 2013, p. 2).

The randomised control trial (RCT) is indeed being transferred from medicine into educational neuroscience: the six projects funded in the United Kingdom by the Wellcome Trust and the Educational Endowment Foundation in 2014 were based on this design. Moreover, a forthcoming consensus paper on methodologies to evaluate behavioural interventions for cognitive enhancement (Green et al., 2018) advocates their use, albeit adding the proviso that studies needed to be distinguished hierarchically into those establishing feasibility, mechanism, efficacy and effectiveness. The advantages and disadvantages of RCTs in education are currently being debated (e.g. Gorard, Huat See, & Siddiqui, 2017). For educational neuroscience, a possible downside is that new learning activities or techniques derived from RCTs will tend to be prescriptive in nature – to be delivered by teachers as designed by researchers. This risks undermining the autonomy of the teacher in the classroom as well as the teachers’ facility to adapt techniques to individual learners, which in turn could reduce uptake. Moreover, it is possible that the type of cognitive enhancements suggested by an understanding of neural learning mechanisms will individually tend to have small effect sizes on educational outcomes; many enhancements applied together may generate a large effect on children's educational outcomes; but in isolation, the effectiveness of each enhancement may be hard to establish in an RCT.

Going forward, educational neuroscience will need to resolve the inherent tension between those who view it as a basic science, a kind of developmental cognitive neuroscience relevant to education (e.g. Gabrieli, 2016) and those who view it as a necessarily translational field, as illustrated by the above-mentioned educational neuroscience funding that was only targeted at intervention trials or by the books published by researchers in the field (The learning brain: Lessons for education, Blakemore & Frith, 2005; Neuroscience for teachers: Applying research evidence from brain science, Churches, Dommett, & Devonshire, 2017). Moreover, it will need to address the academic inertia that produces resistance to interdisciplinary research.

Educational neuroscience will also need to address new ethical issues raised by the field (Knowland, in press). Its goal is to enhance the cognitive and so-called non-cognitive abilities of children. In this regard, educators may be sanguine – that, after all, is the goal of education, and many variations on educational techniques are currently in play in classrooms across the globe. But from the perspective of psychology and neuroscience, the participants are children, and more stringent ethical principles apply than for adults. For example, ethical issues arise in the use of predictive measures of educational outcomes, which have potentially lifelong implications for the child but cannot be consented by the child. More broadly, educational neuroscience research has so far been largely restricted to developed countries. But in the developing world, educational outcomes may be more conditioned by social factors, even nutritional factors, and therefore, a broader understanding of social and political factors is required, rather than just cognitive neuroscience factors.

Finally, educational neuroscience as a field needs to decide how to respond to the (welcome) desire for policymakers to include neuroscience evidence in their policymaking. Early critiques of the field challenged premature influence of research, in that instance of work on sensitive periods in brain development on policymaking in early years education (Bruer, 1999). Policymakers are still keen to integrate cognitive neuroscience findings to make evidence-informed decisions (e.g. in the early years: UK Parliamentary Select Committee enquiry into the Foundation years and UK Government's life chances strategy, 2016 [see Thomas, 2017]; in university education: Willetts, 2018). One major roadblock here is the need to build up an evidence base that is sufficiently large and convergent to put scientific (and ideally consequent economic) weight behind policy initiatives. Certainly, in some areas of educational neuroscience, such as the long-term detrimental effects of toxic stress in childhood, evidence is sufficiently persuasive to inform policy (Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 2017). More specific proposals for change may be slower in coming to fruition. For example, experts have recently called for the abolition of the requirement that in order to receive intervention, children with atypically poor language must demonstrate relatively good non-verbal intelligence (see Bishop, 2017 for a summary of this debate). This call has resulted partly from evidence that the mechanisms of developmental language disorder are not different for children with and without average non-verbal ability. Change in guidelines and policy that trickles down to practice in schools and clinics is often slow. Engagement with policymakers is both a future goal and a significant challenge for researchers in educational neuroscience.