Understanding Effective Education: Far Transfer from a Sociocultural and Cognitive Neural Perspective

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About this Research Topic

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Background

Educational practices that promote the development and transfer of reasoning abilities and inquiry skills from one educational setting to another or from an educational setting to a real-world setting include such approaches as “dialogical argumentation”, “exploratory talk”, “accountable talk”, “relational reasoning”, among many others. These approaches have often emerged from a sociocultural perspective on education.

Theoretical analyses of the cognitive, computational, and neurological processes that underlie learning and memory have made great progress in the past century of research, but the connection of these theoretical approaches to educational practices remains unclear:
• Do we know how the brain changes when education is more effective as compared to when it is less effective?
• Do we know whether differences in cognitive processing are the result of good educational practices or are instead the foundation for differences in educational outcomes?
• Can we help children become smarter, or can we only measure differences in the cognitive processes of children who are smarter and children who are less smart?

This Research Topic seeks to set out the evidence and identify promising approaches to grounding effective education in principles of cognitive and neurological functioning. The aim of the effort is to provide a picture of where we stand from the perspective of educational, psychological, and neural sciences in developing programs that make education effective for all.

Researchers contributing to this Research Topic investigate educational practices believed to produce general educational benefits or cognitive training practices believed to enhance learning and memory. Their studies are anchored either in sociocultural theories of education or cognitive and neurophysiological theories that yield testable empirical predictions about the cognitive or brain mechanisms that underlie general cognitive functions.

Each paper will attempt to answer, within its domain of inquiry, the following questions:

• What changes in cognitive or neural processing might result from the educational intervention?
• What features of the educational intervention are most critical to long-term/long-range positive transfer from the intervention to other measures of cognition?
• How does a cognitive or neural theory of the intervention lead to improved methods of education, and what is the evidence for benefits of such methods?
• How readily can educators be trained to implement the intervention or to modify their current practices to incorporate the intervention?
• How general is the effectiveness of the intervention? Does it apply to children, to young adults, to middle-aged adults, to aged adults? Does it apply across racially, ethnically, or cognitively diverse populations?

Keywords: Cognition and education, brain-based education, teaching intelligence, far transfer, deep learning

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