Unpacking the key conceptual elements of Neuroscience Core Concepts: Plasticity and Evolution

Community-derived higher education neuroscience core concepts were published in 2023 (Chen, Phillips, Schaefer, Sonner. 2023. CBE-LSE). Core concepts are big ideas in a discipline that provide frameworks for understanding and aid student transfer of learning. “Unpacking” core concepts into conceptual frameworks breaks a core concept into its essential conceptual elements, providing important support for teaching and learning through increased clarity regarding what understanding students should take with them into the future. Unpacking also supports assessment and curricular mapping efforts. This works presents the mixed-methods approach for packing each of the eight Neuroscience Core Concepts that includes interviews of neuroscientists with research expertise relevant to a concept, feedback collected at neuroscience education conferences, targeted interviews with neuroscience educators to assess practical useability, and a national validation survey. This work has resulted in a complete Plasticity core concept unpacking and preliminary unpackings for the Evolution, Gene-Environment Interactions, and Structure-Function Relationship core concepts. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.