Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Byrnes, James P.
• Urdan, Tim
• Sinatra, Gale M
• Harris, Karen R
• Graham, Steve
• McCormick, Christine B
• Sweller, John

Titel

How neuroscience contributes to our understanding of learning and development in typically developing and special-needs students

Ist Teil von

• APA educational psychology handbook, Vol 1: Theories, constructs, and critical issues, 2012, p.561-595

Ort / Verlag

Washington, DC: American Psychological Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

• American_Psychological_Association

Quelle

APA PsycBooks

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In this chapter, I review neuroscientific research that has relevance and information value to both educational researchers and educational practitioners. As I have argued elsewhere (e.g., Byrnes, 2007), neuroscientific research is relevant to the extent that the findings (a) help confirm or disconfirm existing psychological models of learning or motivation, (b) serendipitously lead to new hypotheses that would not emerge from psychological accounts alone (e.g., structural commonalities in the brains of individuals diagnosed with learning disabilities and schizophrenia; Shapleske, Rossell, Woodruff, & David, 1999), and (c) help explain the emergence of competencies through the process of brain maturation. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. I begin by briefly discussing the general processes of brain development to lay the foundation for discussions that follow. Next, I review neuroscientific research pertaining to two foundational aspects of cognition that are relevant to learning in any subject area: memory and attention. Then, I focus on neuroscientific research that informs our understanding of two specific academic competencies: reading and math skills. The discussion of attention, reading, and math skills includes a consideration of disabilities related to these domains. To extend this discussion of disabilities further, the third section provides a neuroscientific account of autism and Down syndrome. In the final section, I draw conclusions. Note that there are other topics that one could examine because they (a) have relevance to education and (b) have neuroscientific evidence associated with them. However, I limit my discussion to these six topics because the neuroscientific evidence for the other topics is either relatively scant or extensive but inconsistent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)