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Neuroscience Knowledge and Endorsement of Neuromyths among Educators: What Is the Scenario in Brazil?

The field of neuroscience has seen significant growth and interest in recent decades. While neuroscience knowledge can benefit laypeople as well as professionals in many different areas, it may be particularly relevant for educators. With the right information, educators can apply neuroscience-based...

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Autores principales: Simoes, Estefania, Foz, Adriana, Petinati, Fernanda, Marques, Alcione, Sato, Joao, Lepski, Guilherme, Arévalo, Analía
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9221520/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35741619
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12060734
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author Simoes, Estefania
Foz, Adriana
Petinati, Fernanda
Marques, Alcione
Sato, Joao
Lepski, Guilherme
Arévalo, Analía
author_facet Simoes, Estefania
Foz, Adriana
Petinati, Fernanda
Marques, Alcione
Sato, Joao
Lepski, Guilherme
Arévalo, Analía
author_sort Simoes, Estefania
collection PubMed
description The field of neuroscience has seen significant growth and interest in recent decades. While neuroscience knowledge can benefit laypeople as well as professionals in many different areas, it may be particularly relevant for educators. With the right information, educators can apply neuroscience-based teaching strategies as well as protect themselves and their students against pseudoscientific ideas and products based on them. Despite rapidly growing sources of available information and courses, studies show that educators in many countries have poor knowledge of brain science and tend to endorse education-related neuromyths. Poor English skills and fewer resources (personal, institutional and governmental) may be additional limitations in Latin America. In order to better understand the scenario in Latin America’s largest country, we created an anonymous online survey which was answered by 1634 individuals working in education from all five regions of Brazil. Respondents stated whether they agreed with each statement and reported their level of confidence for each answer. Significant differences in performance were observed across regions, between educators living in capital cities versus the outskirts, between those teaching in private versus public schools, and among educators teaching different levels (pre-school up to college/university). We also observed high endorsement of some key neuromyths, even among groups who performed better overall. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a detailed analysis of the profile of a large group of educators in Brazil. We discuss our findings in terms of efforts to better understand regional and global limitations and develop methods of addressing these most efficiently.
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spelling pubmed-92215202022-06-24 Neuroscience Knowledge and Endorsement of Neuromyths among Educators: What Is the Scenario in Brazil? Simoes, Estefania Foz, Adriana Petinati, Fernanda Marques, Alcione Sato, Joao Lepski, Guilherme Arévalo, Analía Brain Sci Article The field of neuroscience has seen significant growth and interest in recent decades. While neuroscience knowledge can benefit laypeople as well as professionals in many different areas, it may be particularly relevant for educators. With the right information, educators can apply neuroscience-based teaching strategies as well as protect themselves and their students against pseudoscientific ideas and products based on them. Despite rapidly growing sources of available information and courses, studies show that educators in many countries have poor knowledge of brain science and tend to endorse education-related neuromyths. Poor English skills and fewer resources (personal, institutional and governmental) may be additional limitations in Latin America. In order to better understand the scenario in Latin America’s largest country, we created an anonymous online survey which was answered by 1634 individuals working in education from all five regions of Brazil. Respondents stated whether they agreed with each statement and reported their level of confidence for each answer. Significant differences in performance were observed across regions, between educators living in capital cities versus the outskirts, between those teaching in private versus public schools, and among educators teaching different levels (pre-school up to college/university). We also observed high endorsement of some key neuromyths, even among groups who performed better overall. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a detailed analysis of the profile of a large group of educators in Brazil. We discuss our findings in terms of efforts to better understand regional and global limitations and develop methods of addressing these most efficiently. MDPI 2022-06-02 /pmc/articles/PMC9221520/ /pubmed/35741619 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12060734 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Simoes, Estefania
Foz, Adriana
Petinati, Fernanda
Marques, Alcione
Sato, Joao
Lepski, Guilherme
Arévalo, Analía
Neuroscience Knowledge and Endorsement of Neuromyths among Educators: What Is the Scenario in Brazil?
title Neuroscience Knowledge and Endorsement of Neuromyths among Educators: What Is the Scenario in Brazil?
title_full Neuroscience Knowledge and Endorsement of Neuromyths among Educators: What Is the Scenario in Brazil?
title_fullStr Neuroscience Knowledge and Endorsement of Neuromyths among Educators: What Is the Scenario in Brazil?
title_full_unstemmed Neuroscience Knowledge and Endorsement of Neuromyths among Educators: What Is the Scenario in Brazil?
title_short Neuroscience Knowledge and Endorsement of Neuromyths among Educators: What Is the Scenario in Brazil?
title_sort neuroscience knowledge and endorsement of neuromyths among educators: what is the scenario in brazil?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9221520/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35741619
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12060734
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