Progress in Neuroeducation — Mackey 2019
Sep 28, 2020
Link to talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sOePuqEyqE
For students with learning disabilities, there are two possible criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of education: normalization and compensation. Normalization encompasses the goal of making students more neurotypical as they develop stronger academic abilities. Compensation implies that disabled learners’ brains will become more atypical; they are making up for cognitive deficits using distinct neural mechanisms. A few notable findings shed light on this topic. First, the structure of the left superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF), a white matter tract, predicts success in learning how to read among neurotypical students. Among dyslexics, the right SLF predicts this success. Over an eight-week period, reading intervention for those with learning disabilities caused mean white matter tract diffusivity—measured using diffusion tensor imaging—to decrease, whereas a typical reader exhibits greater mean diffusivity. This evidence supports the compensation hypothesis; neurotypical and atypical learners become more neurologically different when acquiring the same skill. However, a similar study on a math intervention showed the opposite effect. The two groups of learners showed substantial differences in neural activations pre-intervention, but the resultant structural and functional data showed convergence, reflecting normalization.
More recent work, including Dr. Mackey’s research, focus on the neural correlates of curiosity. One study presented a question to participants and then asked them how interested they were in learning the answer. The degree of self-reported curiosity was positively correlated with activation in the nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area (VTA), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and cerebellum. Dr. Mackey looked more closely at two connections: one between the VTA and mPFC and the other between the cerebellum and VTA. For the first (VTA and mPFC), her team administered three tasks to children, each paired with an adult: reading wordless picture books, doing puzzles together, and exploring novel toys. The researchers counted the number of questions the children asked. Via resting state fMRI, the team measured the correlation between BOLD responses in the VTA and mPFC, a proxy for connectivity between the two regions, and found that people exhibiting greater connectivity tended to ask more questions. A second finding was that cerebellum-to-VTA connectivity predicted greater parent reports of child curiosity. A separate study on animals found, using optogenetics, that disruption of the cerebellum-to-VTA connection causes animals to stop socially exploring. The cerebellum—often neglected by social, cognitive, and affective neuroscientists—appears to play a crucial role in curiosity/exploration, which is important for student engagement.
Mackey offers a few interesting perspectives inspired by this research. Students learn much more than reading and math in school such as art, science, and social skills. Moreover, previous research showed that whether normalization/compensation occurs varies according to subject. Perhaps, then, it is more useful to focus on the substrates of curiosity and engagement more generally, two consistent determinants of educational outcomes. Curiosity supports the social, cognitive, and affective skills that educators hope to instill in their students. Animal models are valuable proxies for assessing these broader educational considerations. For example, the finding that cerebellum-to-VTA connectivity is causally related to social exploration is significant and may have implications for how we teach inquisitive or exploratory social skills to humans.
Mackey also notes that educational neuroscience is a translational field and suggests a few issues that are likely to be politically salient. One is ethics. Certain screening requirements may create self-fulfilling prophecies via stigma, which may make identified children feel discouraged. Second, randomized control trials and longitudinal studies are necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of novel interventions. Finally, Mackey expects that neuroimaging will be utilized in more classrooms to assess student engagement across pedagogical formats, and teachers will become trained in neuroeducation. In sum, neuroeducation promises to broaden our understanding of learning processes, and researchers should note the many different criteria and determinants of educational effectiveness.