Trends in Neuroscience and Education 3 (2014) 1–3
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Trends in Neuroscience and Education
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tine
Editorial
The Latin American School on Education and the Cognitive and Neural
Sciences: Goals and challenges
John T. Bruer
James S. McDonnell Foundation, St. Louis, MO, USA
art ic l e i nf o a b s t r a c t
Although the institution of summer schools is well established within the scientific community, the LA
Keywords: School is unique in its goals and future challenges.
Education
Neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
1. Introduction
This volume presents papers prepared by participants at the
first three Latin American Schools on Education and the Cognitive
and Neural Sciences (Atacama, Chile, 2111; El Calafate, Argentina,
2012; and Itacaré, Brazil, 2013). Summer schools and institutes
have a significant place in the development of scientific and
scholarly communities. The Latin American School contributes to
the development of an international community of psychologists,
cognitive neuroscientists, and neuroscientists committed to apply-
ing their research to improve educational outcomes for children,
not only in Latin America but also internationally. However, in
addition to fulfilling the typical goals of a summer school, the LA
Schools have additional goals and challenges.
2. Background
The LA School had its genesis in March 2007, when the
University of Chile hosted the Symposium on Early Education
and Human Brain Development. Symposium speakers, several of
whom remain involved with the LA School, presented research in
cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience which had
potential application to educational issues. The audience was
overwhelmingly educators and representatives from ministries of
education. At the final symposium session, the symposium speak-
ers answered questions from the audience. It was evident from the
questions that the attendees were interested primarily in what
neuroscientific research could immediately tell them about early
childhood education, early numeracy, beginning arithmetic, and
the effects of daycare. At the time, there was worldwide interest in
how ideas from developmental neurophysiology – synaptic pro-
liferation and subsequent synaptic pruning, critical periods, and
enriched environments – might contribute to child development
and early learning. Many of the teachers‘ questions assumed the
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central relevance of developmental neurophysiology to addressing
problems in early childhood education. The speakers suggested that
there were other areas of cognitive and neural science that might
have greater relevance to the issues that educators and policy-
makers confront. Work in the social and behavioral sciences, for
example provides models of child development that offer roadmaps
for policy makers, educators, and instructional designers who want
to understand not only what children learn, but how they optimally
learn [7]. Thus, the Symposium indicated that there was an interest
in science-based educational practice in the region and that there
was a need to broaden the perspective of educators and policy
makers on what kinds of research at which levels of analysis might
most contribute to their real-world concerns.
Subsequent discussions with three Latin American neuroscien-
tists – Marcela Peña, Mariano Sigman, and Sidarta Ribeiro – re-
enforced this conclusion. There was a need to develop a commu-
nity of young investigators in Latin America who would have the
scientific backgrounds needed to guide national educational pol-
icy, a community of young investigators well-equipped to enter
into constructive dialog with educators and policy makers. All of
those engaged in these discussions were familiar with or had
participated in the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience.
We decided to develop a Latin American School on Education and
the Cognitive and Neural Sciences, patterned after the Summer
Institute. The immediate goal was to provide young Latin Amer-
ican investigators, already trained in either the cognitive or neural
sciences, with the knowledge, skills, and international professional
contacts that would allow them to turn their research interests
productively toward educational problems. These young investi-
gators would first of all provide an educational research resource
in Latin America to further science-based practice in the region
and at the same time be active members in the international
educational research community. It was also recognized that the
LA School, concentrating primarily on basic research, would only
2 J.T. Bruer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 3 (2014) 1–3
be a first step in developing the needed dialog. Eventually, the
schools and its graduates would extend the dialog to ministries of
education, policy makers, and classroom teachers. The LA School is
beginning to address this second goal.
There is nothing unusual about the structure and organization
of the LA School that would distinguish it from numerous other
summer institutes. The LA Schools offer two-week courses.
Approximately 50 students are selected from a pool of several
hundred applicants each year. Two-thirds of the students are Latin
Americans; the remaining students are selected from applicants
outside the region. The intent is to develop an international
community of younger investigators interested in translating basic
psychological and neuroscientific research into educational prac-
tice and policy. Each year the school has a general theme, e.g.
science education and numeracy, reading, applications of technol-
ogy to education. Thirty faculty members from institutions around
the world, experts in the thematic area, are invited to the school.
Faculty members agree to remain in residence at the school for
three days. Each faculty member presents at least one lecture and
conducts a journal club. The school schedule allows for extended
periods each day during which participants can discuss work and
research interests informally. Students are encouraged to collaborate
in designing research projects. There is one rule of social interaction
at the schools: any time a student sees two faculty members
conversing, the student is required to join the conversation.
Summer institutes and schools, like the LA School, have an
established place within the scientific and scholarly community.
There are hundreds of them every year in part because they are an
effective and a cost-effective way to build communities and foster
dialog. Some schools, like those at the Marine Biology Laboratory
in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
in New York, having been operating over the past century and
have attained mythic status for their contributions to the biologi-
cal sciences. The perceived benefits of schools to both students and
faculty are easily summarized. Summer schools provide advanced
training for the participants, often advanced training is not
available at the student‘s home institution. The school faculty
provides expertise drawn from among the best investigators in the
discipline. Student–faculty interaction allows students to discuss
theory and research topics and to garner advice on their own
research program, with the possibility of future long-distance
mentorship or collaboration. The concentration of a variety of
related research interests at a school can lead to productive
research collaborations among students, and their advisors, who
have similar or complementary research interests. The intellectual
and social interaction at the school provides networking opportu-
nities that can lead to lifetime professional relationships. Schools
facilitate the development of research communities and dialog
within that community. All these benefits serve to bring younger
scientists, who may be on the periphery of a discipline or research
domain, closer to its center. For longer running schools, former
students often become instructors, adding further intellectual and
social cohesion to the field.
The LA School serves all of these purposes. However, there are
additional factors and challenges that are unique to the LA School.
First, consider the research community the LA School is trying to
develop. There are numerous single-discipline or sub-discipline
summer schools, like Skinner‘s example of the Summer Institute in
Social and Personality Psychology. School attendance results in the
skills and knowledge to engage more fully in that research field.
Some schools begin as cross disciplinary endeavors. The Summer
Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience is an example. When that
school started in 1988 there was little dialog between system
neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, even though they
might have been working on the same topic or system. Indeed,
the dialog had to be forced [8]. The original goal of the Cognitive
Neuroscience Summer Institute was to help clear away the “seman-
tic underbrush”, as Michael Gazzaniga described it, that prevented
effective communication between the disciplines. Earlier, the goal of
the school was to train new generations of cognitive neuroscientists,
who were as familiar with the vocabulary, methods, and assump-
tions of systems neuroscience as they were with cognitive psychol-
ogy. As the underbrush was cleared away, a new hybrid discipline
emerged. As the hybrid field matured, the Cognitive Neuroscience
Institute morphed into a single-discipline school, a school that
continues to integrate young scientists on the periphery of cognitive
neuroscience into its center.
There is certainly semantic underbrush to be cleared away
among the fields of education, psychology, and neuroscience.
However, the goal of the LA School is not necessarily to develop
a single discipline or even a hybrid discipline. The goal is to lay the
groundwork for appropriately translating findings from several
basic science disciplines into educational policies and practices.
Students should certainly depart the school familiar with the
vocabulary, methods, and assumptions of the cognitive and neural
sciences. However, students who intend to work at the cognitive–
neural–educational interface must also acquire an appreciation of
what kind of research at which level of analysis might be most
appropriate to the educational problem one is trying to solve.
Some problems might best be addressed at the cognitive or
behavioral level; others might be more susceptible to solution at
the neural level. A brain imaging study is not always the best
answer to an educational problem, nor is a reaction time study.
Neither the cognitive nor the neural sciences alone have the
answers to the variety of educational issues challenging us. Playing
a constructive role in the educational environment requires under-
standing the strengths, as well as the weaknesses, of the com-
plementary disciplines in relation to solving acknowledged
educational problems. Disciplinary parochialism will not do. Thus,
a unique challenge for the LA Schools is to foster critical dialog
between “separate but equal” disciplines.
A second challenge is to constructively channel the enthusiasm
for brain science that is pervasive among both educators and
researchers. Historical contingencies started educational neu-
roscience off on the wrong foot. Starting in the mid-1990s early
childhood advocates began to argue that findings in developmen-
tal neurophysiology – developmental synaptogenesis, critical per-
iods, and the effects of enriched environments on rodent brains –
provided a biological basis to transform our understanding of early
childhood development, teaching, and learning. The impact of this
argument was evident in the questions educators asked at the
March 2007 Symposium. Although the specific educational impli-
cations claimed for this science have been rejected by the scientific
community as “neuro-myths” [1,3], those implications are still
alive among teachers and thriving among those providing com-
mercial products to support “brain-based” education. Educational
neuroscience must actively engage in addressing these misunder-
standings. Maybe one of our goals should be the training of
effective communicators of science to the education community
as Goswami [6] has argued. Among teachers and teacher educators
espousing a “mind, brain, and education” perspective, there is also
a tendency to point to findings in cognitive neuroscience that
appear to justify particular educational practices, effective or not,
that happen to cohere with the individual‘s philosophical or
ideological predispositions. However, in these expositions rarely is
it the case that brain-based data is provided to support the particular
intervention. For example, that rote learning strengthens one‘s rote
learning circuits is not very informative. Also, it is highly unlikely
that Hebbian learning justifies teachers‘ intuitions that effective
learning requires repetition [4]. Indeed what kind of instruction
and practice is required to facilitate learning of facts is a rather long
and complicated story, as Roediger and Karpicke [10,11] among
 J.T. Bruer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 3 (2014) 1–3
others have shown. Educational neuroscientists should foreswear
neuroscientific “just so” stories. LA School graduates should be able
to successfully engage with the teacher–educator community in
attempts to limit the spread of neuroscientific pseudo-explanations.
There may also be a need to channel the enthusiasm of
educational neuroscientists engaged in basic research. Within this
research community there is a tendency to talk about the educa-
tional implications of cognitive neuroscience and neuroscience
and rightly so. However, students should leave the LA School with
an understanding that there are implications and there are
possible implications. One of the conclusions endorsed by some
of the speakers at March 2007 University of Chile Symposium was
that at present neuroscientific research was very much a promis-
sory note that in the future might help support and refine models
of child development and learning. In most instances those
implications are not yet at hand. The future promise of educational
neuroscience is becoming an increasingly common theme in this
literature [1, 5–7]. One might say the educational neuroscience
literature mostly talks about possible implications of neuroscience
research for education. This literature is peppered with perhaps,
maybe, and it is possible that. On the negative side this indicates
the relative paucity of real-world implications of the research
discussed. On the positive side, it indicates that there is interesting
and important work to be done to turn these possible implications
into real-world, classroom implications. Students come to the LA
Schools highly enthusiastic and they leave highly enthusiastic, but
with an understanding of the theoretical, methodological, and
political hurdles that they must negotiate to reach their goals.
Finally, an eventual goal of the LA Schools is to further develop
the researcher–educator dialog to the point where the School
would become a forum for collaborative research involving both
scientists and educators in classroom studies. Again the implica-
tions of neuroscientific research for education as found in the
scholarly literature are possible implications as seen from the
perspective of the researcher. Do these possible implications
resonate at all with classroom teachers? For around 15 years
starting in the late 1980s, the James S. McDonnell Foundation ran a
program called Cognitive Studies for Educational Practice (CSEP)
[2,9]. This program provided three to six years of research support
to collaborative teams consisting of a researcher and a classroom
teacher. The program guidelines required the collaborators to
describe an acknowledged classroom problem (e.g. failure to learn
first formal arithmetic, failure to transfer physical science knowl-
edge from the classroom to everyday problems, early reading
problems), state a hypothesis about how cognitive research might
address the problem, develop a classroom intervention based on
3
the hypothesis, and test the intervention in classrooms. Some of
these projects succeeded but others did not. However, this type of
research program directly linked the basic research knowledge
base to a real-world, practical and educational problem. The
projects provided data on the success or failure of the intervention
and even sometimes on the inadequacy of the original hypothesis.
Moreover, the projects also provided insights into what was
required to translate basic research into educational practice.
Classrooms, as opposed to laboratories or imaging centers, are
noisy places, requiring interventions that have a strong signal. This
program also suggested that there may be need for a new type of
education professional whose professional role is to assist teachers
in applying research in the classroom. Basic scientists are not
generally well-suited to this task. At any rate, one hopes that the
LA School might be a first step toward a new educational research
initiative, Cognitive and Neural Sciences for Educational Practice.
The need to appreciate the complementary nature of the
cognitive and neural sciences in the educational arena and the
need to extend the dialog beyond the confines of the research
community are fundamental to the LA School. The papers in this
special edition represent the first steps toward these goals. We
expect that the LA School will become a permanent fixture on the
international science calendar, providing opportunities for career
development and international collaboration in applying the
cognitive and neural sciences to education.
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