As the neuroscience knowledge base, related to how humans read, write and perform mathematical skills grows, so does the understanding about how to ensure the brain is ready to learn from instruction.   It is now known, through neuroscience research, that good teaching is undercut and children learn less efficiently when their brain has to deal with anxiety, attention difficulties and ineffective reading of social cues. The effects of these conditions goes beyond the individual learner, they affect the learning of all in the class.

It has also been learned through neuro-imaging techniques that children who have a diagnosis of developmental dyslexia (inability to learn to read normally in spite of the existence of adequate intellectual capacity and educational opportunity) show that the part of the brain called the right temporoparietal is activated during the process of reading and it shouldn’t be.  In addition it has been learned that the brains of children with this diagnosis show substantially less activity of the typically activated sites of the left hemisphere of the brain.

So what does this neuroscience information mean in terms of teaching children to read? It means that when these children receive intense instruction in phonological skills and in letter-sound recognition, the activity in the left temporal and parietal areas appear to normalize and reading development progresses. The research just discussed has been done only on English speaking children. The next step would be to look at children whose primary language is something other than English.

So far these neuroimaging studies have not said what will work in a classroom. At this point in time, traditional interventions have been applied and the neuroscience research is corroborating that the brain changes as interventions are applied.  As the field of neuroscience progresses, it may be able to identify markers for developmental dyslexia, early in life, and interventions can be started to circumvent the eventual difficulties in learning to read.

At the same time brain imaging is telling us about how the brain processes information related to reading, it is also discovering fascinating things about numbers and the foundation of arithmetic. It has been established that the human brain is designed with circuits that are dedicated to recognizing numerosity or “number sense”.  The parts of the brain that make up this dedicated circuitry have been identified. Teachers should be excited to learn that there is neurological evidence that says not only are we wired to understand numbers; the brain has a preferred mode for representing a spatial mental number line. Both of these pieces of neuroscience information have implications for instruction.

Other areas of neuroscience inquiry are taking place through studies attempting to identify what is going on in the brain related to attention, to emotions and social knowledge or cognition. All of these areas of study will have significant impact on what types of instructional strategies will be most effective for students with Attention Deficit with Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Autism or general developmental issues related to understanding how to read social cues and respond appropriately.

The neuroscience jury is still out on many, many educational issues.  There is neuroscience research on many of the issues discussed in this article but they have been conducted on adults, in only one or two languages and/or cultures and with animals.  What this means is that it is inappropriate to:

• Generalize neuroscience information gathered on adults to children.

• Make giant assumptions about the universality of research findings from a single culture or language.  

• Transfer neuroscience information, gathered by studying animal brains, to how children’s brains work.

As parents, it is important to understand the issues surrounding neuroscience research as it promises to expand educations understanding of the brain and learning. Neuroscience is a very new field of study and it is not appropriate to expect that it have all the answers. What is appropriate is to support Neumind in its interested to understand the findings from neuroscience, and to integrate well researched instructional practices into their educational programming.