Educational Neuroscience: Defining a New Discipline for the Study of Mental Representations

ABSTRACT— Is educational neuroscience a “bridge too far”? Here, we argue against this negative assessment. We suggest that one major reason for skepticism within the educational community has been the inadequate definition of the potential role and use of neuroscience research in education. Here, we offer a provisional definition for the emerging discipline of educational neuroscience as the study of the development of mental representations. We define mental representations in terms of neural activity in the brain. We argue that there is a fundamental difference between doing educational neuroscience and using neuroscience research results to inform education. While current neuroscience research results do not translate into direct classroom applications, educational neuroscience can expand our knowledge about learning, for example, by tracking the normative development of mental representations. We illustrate this briefly via mathematical educational neuroscience. Current capabilities and limitations of neuroscience research methods are also considered.