Goodbye to Neuromyths

Being able to collect data in digital form has been profound for Neuroscience.  It has led to a rapid increase in knowledge about brain processes. Realising the potential of this knowledge for education i.e. what the brain might be doing while we learn has been bedevilled by neuromyths (interventions that claim to be informed by neuroscience but do not have any scientific provenance). Although these interventions have been challenged by both Neuroscientists and Educationalists they haven't always been dispelled. Yesterday, at the annual conference held by BERA http://www.bera.ac.uk/ Steven Spence from university of Derby and colleagues provided recent evidence (collected from NQTs, and also more senior practitioners) that supports this assertion.

Two other presentations,  one in the context of enabling social interaction for children with autism, the other on virtual social interaction, provided examples of how multidisciplinary work can progress in a principled way and be of value to learning.  There were some notable  similarities between them

•   Iterative development of procedures based on a true synergy between education & neuroscience

•   A pragmatic approach to method

•    Data collected in the wild, i.e. the classroom, the online forum, without compromising the complexity of these contexts.

As the presenter for one of these, virtual social interaction, it was exciting (and reassuring!) to find other researchers subscribing to this approach. Although I have attended a great many events on EdNeuroscience, starting with the TLRP seminar series 2005-2006 http://www.tlrp.org/users/cs5.html

the presentation by Jackie Ravet & Justin Williams, University of Aberdeen, was a first experience for me; a 'hard core ' neuroscientist and practitioner focused drama specialist demonstrating so clearly how they work together to test out the value of a Neuroscience knowledge base in an formal education context.

Presenting to an audience of educationalists, many of who have extensive practitioner experience and also a wide research interests, was a great opportunity to have our  work interrogated. There is real hope that we can say goodbye to the discourse of neuromyths and get on with the business of making neuroscience knowledge useful for Education.

London Virtual Interaction Workshop

This work shop was organised by Antonia Hamilton and  Sylvia Xuini Pan, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience  hamilton lab.

Why did I attend? I study social interaction when it is mediated by a computer and takes  takes place asynchronously between distance students who have no previous knowledge of each other -  I study virtual social interaction. Many of the contributors to this workshop are studying aspects of social interaction (eye gaze, body movement, facial expression, sound) that are not available in online contexts that use computer mediated communication (CMC) but they did address processes that are common to each such as joint attention, affiliation, trust, reciprocity, turn taking (a process that is disrupted when communication is asynchronous) and the most challenging concept of them all,  synchrony. Synchrony was a concept that pervaded most of the talks therefore I was both reassured and disappointed when questions posed later in the conference - why is synchrony important for social interaction? is there a neural explanation? could not be answered by any of the delegates, apparently

What are my headlines from this event.

•   Be alert to circular reasoning (delegate)

•   Realism is not a realistic criterion - realism is a relative notion -challenge the critical parameters and values that matter (Beatrice de Gelder)

•   Joint attention - KNOWING we are both looking is the critical factor (Leonard Schilbach)

•   Important to think about social scaffolds i.e put the social into social interaction (Daniel Richardson)

•   Social interaction is a one trial problem ( Antonio Hamilton)

Ideas that arose for me that I need to pursue in order to study social interaction in a learning context

For joint tasks decision there may be a difference between situations that require a right/wrong answer as opposed to the construction of knowledge and production of a joint artefact ( the processes that underpin group work in FE and HE and organisations ) -an idea stimulated by Bahador Bahrami

An experience that is often voiced by students that use CMC is that the others involved do not seem to be real.  Therefore I need to explore the work on plausibility (as described by Mel Slater).

Antonia Hamilton seeded the final discussion session by suggesting a model for how synergy is achieved between the study of social interaction by psychologists and the HCI folk who provide the technology behind virtual interaction. Could I take anything from this that would help me develop a synergy between virtual interaction in practice ( i.e. students using CMC for group work ) and theoretical models of social interaction that are neuro-scientifically plausible?

Thanks to all those who contributed list of contributors - you  all provided great value