Some Useful Pedagogical Practices: Educational Neuroscience Perspective

Abstract

We have reviewed the goals of education by approaching them from the direction of educational neuroscience; through education, we have to achieve transfer of learning in order to produce individuals who are better problem solvers and decision makers. To achieve this goal, learners will have to transform what they have learned explicitly into implicit memories and vice versa by attaching sense and meaning, ideally across multiple domain areas. Further, through education, we enhance learner consciousness and/or wisdom that give abilities to spontaneously recall retained memories readily, whenever necessary. A number of pedagogical practices that are useful in achieving the above goals are identified. When new contents are presented to learners, high-level, generalised concepts need to be emphasised; concepts are likely to penetrate through multiple domain areas and last longer in memory, thus helping learners to attach sense and meaning better. In order to reach out to multiple brain regions, inducing creativity, we need to get frontal lobes involved essentially, with an appropriate pace and form of presentation. The important task of motivating learners can be done by presenting learners with educational neuroscience facts that can be enlightening; even difficult content can be mastered by simply paying attention fully and through elaborate rehearsal; human brains have the feature of neural plasticity and neural networks can grow throughout the lifespan through effective learning. When setting assessment, we should focus on open-ended, novel and conceptual/generalised questions so that learners use their frontal lobes, engaging in a higher-order, divergent and/or inductive thinking process to provide answers.