Educational Neuroscience in General and Special Education

摘要

In neuroscience, learning can be described as the process of creating neural connections in response to external stimuli; accordingly, education is defined as the process of creating and controlling these external stimuli. The basis of educational neuroscience is that anything that influences learning has its foundation in the human brain. Neuro-scientific methods act collaboratively with the methodology of social sciences and contribute to the field of education. Under this framework, EEG signals were used to investigate how feedback could be best incorporated in a digital educational game. Our findings showed that the auditory feedback was preferred compared to visual, because the alpha and beta brain oscillations of participants were increased. In special education, our results from a study with Auditory Evoked Potentials showed that visually impaired individuals processed auditory stimuli faster, regardless if these lacked semantic content, in comparison to their non-visually impaired counterparts, since the N400 component was presented earlier in the waveforms of visually impaired individuals. Findings like these indicate that the understanding of the way the human brain functions could affect instructional practices and provide a conceptual framework of how the human brain creates cognitive schemata.