School of Educational Studies, Massey University, Palmerston North
Newspapers and popular magazines regularly publish the brain and its influence on school achievement. So, if we are to items about the brain and what we can do to maximise our gain a deeper appreciation of how school achievement relates to cognitive ability. Often these are directed at parents who are family and neighbourhood as well as labour market destination given advice on what they can do to enhance their children’s we need to have a prior explanation of how the brain works and learning and thereby raise their school achievement. Teachers contributes to this complex set of causal relationships. Nelson are also being invited to acquire a better understanding of and Sheridan (2011) base their argument on the following thesis: the contribution of neuroscience to learning and teaching. “Both micro-experiences (such as the care-giving environment) Sometimes what is being offered is reasonable and sensible, and and macro-experiences (neighbourhoods and schools) weave sometimes it is not. their way into the developing brain and, depending on their Ivan Snook (2007, 2012, 2013) has had some insightful things timing, exert different effects” (p.28). to say about the emerging field of philosophy, neuroscience and The formation of the brain comes with the growth of neurons education. While acknowledging that education has something and the synaptic connections made between their singular axons to gain from the findings of neuroscience, he also urges and multiple dendrites to create a massive neural network. As philosophical caution over just how useful these findings can a child develops, many connections are made which are lost be for teachers wishing to improve their practice. In his most in later life through experience as well as natural pruning. The recent reflection on the growth of what he calls ‘educational acquisition and loss of synaptic connections varies by brain neuroscience’, Snook (2013) remarks: region and function, and between childhood “the modern emphasis on the brain is Children’s learning overproduction of synapses and peak quite likely yet another attempt to sheet adult numbers of synapses; for example, home responsibility to the individual is shaped by a very wide childhood synaptic overproduction in the and to ignore the major impact of range of factors. How visual cortex (sight) occurs at around four social class and home background” months and reaches its adult peak from four (p.199). There is a danger that this these factors are to six years while in the prefrontal cortex could happen, but it is not a necessary (cognition) overproduction occurs when consequence of making a connection grouped is of the a child is around one while the adult peak between neuroscience and education. utmost importance. is not reached until mid/late adolescence. There is a way of avoiding the very Myelination of axons, a coating which thing Snook fears. speeds up the neural transmission of information, comes in waves with sensory motor aspects before birth while cognitive The Brain and the Social World: The Etiological and functioning comes very much later in the early twenties of Constitutive adulthood. Nelson and Sheridan (2011) examined the contribution of Nelson and Sheridan suggest that the plasticity of the brain, of neuroscience research to causal explanations of the connection how experience enters into the structure of the brain, consists of between family/neighbourhood factors and school achievement. two types: developmental and adult. By developmental plasticity The importance of their theorising lies in linking the etiological they mean the changes which take place as the brain is developing (the causal structure of the world) and the constitutive (the through childhood into adulthood. Two constraints apply: (1) internal causal structure of some phenomenon) together in a because, as just noted, different neural regions reach maturity at way which illustrates why thinking about neuroscience and different times then once they are fully formed they are that much education must go beyond the constitutive to incorporate the harder to alter through later experience, and (2) some regions etiological as well (Robins & Craver, 2009). The question Nelson require more experience than others and where such experience and Sheridan ask is this: What can neuroscience tell us about is lacking during the developmental phase then later functioning educational inequality, the connections between families and may prove to be significantly reduced. Experience has its greatest their neighbourhoods, and links between school achievement impact on any particular region of the brain during the sensitive and the labour market? period of that region when maximum plasticity occurs, normally Their answer takes the following form. How a child develops during the first few years of a child’s life. This suggests that the has a major impact on their future location in the labour market. family of a child and the neighbourhood s/he lives in must be Understanding child development requires an understanding of of a kind which can provide the sorts of experiences which are
most conducive to healthy child development: “If a brain is exposed to good experiences during a sensitive period, then the long-term outcome is biased to be positive. However, if the brain is exposed to bad experiences, then the long-term outcome is biased to be negative” (p.31). Given that the sensitive period of neural plasticity for cognitive development stretches well into late adolescence, then even if a child is given a good start early in life it is always possible that later poor experience will stunt or limit later progress. Adult plasticity, on the other hand, concerns changes to developed brains. Once neural connections are made then they are hard to alter in any significant way. Our visual mechanisms put in place at an early age do not improve with age but can deteriorate; our motor skills may continue to increase over time but later ones tend to have a lower level of performance than those acquired when young; learning and memory have a long period of plastic sensitivity hence we are capable of learning new things and remembering past things well into late adult life. One thing having a significant impact on neural development is stress. Not all stresses are harmful (first day starting school) but some clearly are, such as child abuse in the family, victimisation in the neighbourhood or bullying at school. The hippocampus, functional in the first few years of a child’s life, is critical for learning and memory: extreme or excessive stress can impair the functioning of the hippocampus through the release of glucocorticoids which may inhibit learning and reduce memory, thereby affecting the level of school achievement. One of the stresses children can experience which may significantly lower school achievement over the long term is poverty. Nelson and Sheridan (2011), in their review of various empirical studies, reported that those which used behavioural tests to explore cognitive functioning located in the prefrontal cortex found that a decrease in cognitive performance was associated with lower parental SES. Neuroimaging indicated that children from low SES families tended to have reduced prefrontal cortex functioning. They conclude: During childhood, the plastic brain receives inputs and quickly adapts to the environment as it is. These adaptations become permanent differences in neural structure and function, altering the opportunities of children as they grow into adulthood. By ensuring that early environments are more positive and more equitably distributed, we increase the chance of success that all children have. By ignoring early inequality, we risk permanently altering the chances that some children have. These early differences in environment are etched into the structure of our brains;
the way we think, react and feel in adulthood is necessarily related to the environmental exposures we did and did not experience in our childhood (p.41). Within/Beyond or Proximal/Distal? Children’s learning is shaped by a very wide range of factors. How these factors are grouped is of the utmost importance. The conventional way, used widely in education, is to classify them according to a basic dualism of within school and beyond school factors. This separates two camps: those who argue that it is the within school factors which make the most difference and hence ought to be the focus of attention, thereby ruling out of contention those beyond the school factors as outside the scope of educational concern, and those who consider the beyond school factors to be so important, outweighing the within school factors to such an extent that attending to what lies outside of the
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school must be given the greatest amount of attention. The problem with placing the causes of the inequality of school achievement in a within school/beyond school dualism is that the two sides are then pitted against one another. A focus on within school causes gives little or no regard to beyond school factors while an emphasis on beyond school considerations downplays the contribution of within school influences. The dualism forces an either/or approach when a more encompassing view is required. An alternative, and better, way of conceptualising the issue is to adopt a proximal (close)/distal (distant) continuum. All relevant causal elements are taken into consideration and accounted for, with none being excluded. Regardless of whether they are primarily located within the school or beyond, every effort must be made to identify all those factors which have the most direct and immediate impact (what a teacher says to a child, parents reading books to their children) with a grading off to those far more remote which, nonetheless, play a very significant role in learning (government economic policy, national examinations). Now, no causal feature is eliminated for any arbitrary or ideological reason. Rather, all factors enter the causal mix; how they relate and interact and the weightings to be accorded them remain a matter of considerable debate. So social class and home background come to the fore in explaining learning as a neural process and the inequality of school achievement. Concluding Comment Snook’s worry that educational neuroscience might ignore the impact of social class and home background cannot be lightly
dismissed. It is all too easy for those working in this field to focus inwardly on the constitutive side of things and downplay the importance of the etiological aspects. To do so would be a very serious mistake. Whatever happens in the brain does not occur independently of what happens outside of it. In terms of children’s learning, especially in the classroom, social class and home background play a crucial role in providing the sensory inputs which are processed in the brain and stored in memory for use at a later time in generating learning outputs. To ignore this is to tell less than the whole story of how we learn and why. References Nelson, C. & Sheridan, M. (2009) Lessons from neuroscience research for understanding causal links between family and neighbourhood characteristics and educational outcomes. In G. Duncan & R. Murnane (Eds.) Whither Opportunity: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Opportunities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 27– 46. Robins, S. & Craver, C. (2009) Biological clocks: Explaining with models of mechanisms. In J. Bickle (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 41–67. Snook, I. (2007) Learning styles and other modern educational myths. Teachers and Curriculum. 10, 29–33. Snook, I. (2012) Educational neuroscience: A plea for radical scepticism. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 44(5), 445–449. Snook, I. (2013) Respectability and relevance: Reflections on Richard Peters and analytic philosophy of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 45(2), 191–201.
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