There is a lot of talk about the “science of XYZ” these days. The science of weather…of vaccines…but, especially of interest to we educators, the science of reading. Much of it comes from advocates who champion cognitive science. I’m glad that peeps are paying attention to the works of psychologists and neuroscientists.
Some folks seem to be taking that talk as constituting recommendations about the teaching of reading, methods for helping children with autism, strategies supporting kids with ADHD, methods for promting witten expression, practices to promote arithmetic competence, and etc. I’m not so sure. I think those observations may be a bit askew. If one bases instructional recommendations on cognitive science, one may be missing a far more important set of scientific evidence.
Please understand that I consider many instructional recommendations as BS (bolagna spit). Lots of the data that people use to create recommendations about teaching are, well, not about teaching. Too often, advocates base their ideas about what’s happening in the brain…”cognitve science.”
I have written about the relationships between neurocognitive science and education (Willingham & Lloyd, 2007). I think that educators can learn from neuroscience. I want to be clear, however, that most neuroscience research is simply descriptive. It is not prescriptive. It tells you “what is” but now “how to.”
