Azilawati Jamaludin

The center of learning is the brain and the disciplinary science that examines its structure and functioning, and the nervous system as a whole, is called neuroscience. The assimilation of essential neuroscience-related content by educational systems has gained global interest, given the relevance of learning to education. Recognizing the significance of frontline workers, several governmental agencies and educational institutions have launched initiatives to foster the inclusion of neuroscience literacy in educators’ training programs. Their success, however, has depended on collaborative efforts among educators, researchers, and other educational stakeholders, and the process has involved considerable debate. Here, we aim to articulate a rationale to promote neuroscience literacy for educators. In doing so, we revisit prior arguments on the importance of training educators and build up on other reasons to advocate for this kind of endeavor considering cutting-edge research. Following this, we discuss critical elements to advance neuroscience literacy for educators and examine the most important challenges to execute successful initiatives. Finally, we appraise the significance for Asia, reviewing the scholarly literature on educators’ prior experiences, and highlight the case of Singapore as an exemplar initiative that catalizes human capital, infrastructure, and strategies to advance neuroscience literacy. We conclude by arguing that governmental agencies and educational institutions should strengthen their efforts to accommodate their programmatic plans and agendas to embrace neuroscience literacy in educators’ training programs. This global trend has arrived to stay.

Learning is a complex phenomenon where a learner constitutes a system operating at neural, physiological, cognitive and social levels, with interactions between and across processes and levels, effecting neural to cognitive to social levels and vice versa. In tracing historical paradigms, theories of learning have been traditionally fragmented in nature, typically focusing on sub-process or sub–levels of the system. For example, theories of cognitivism focuses on internal processes and connections that take place during learning, negating observed behaviours or outward behaviours of learning, while theories of social constructivism place strong emphasis on human development and knowledge construction that is socially situated, with less attention paid to individual differences and variations. In recognizing inherently complex interrelated learning systems, a more integrated and comprehensive understanding of learning is necessary. Such an understanding entails research endeavours that can harness multiple, complex parameters of the learner system through mapping and understanding interactions between and across learning processes and levels. Such endeavours entail the use of multiple sources of scientific evidence, across multi-modal data capture modes and multi-levels of analyses, informed by multi-disciplinary theoretical framings. In this paper, we argue that an overarching scientific ethos towards learning optimizations need artful implementations of pedagogies and interventions that close the circle—from scientific findings translated into practical applications in education and back to addressing problems in education as impetus for evidence-informed theorizations of learning.