Research Reviews

Education has developed over the last two-hundred years with some fixed views about learning, for example, learning involves memory training through rote learning or drill-and-practice. More recently, educational research has moved to better understandings of the social and contextual perspectives of learning as distinct from the decontextualized learning of traditional education. The use of technology and device-based interactivity especially using haptics (touch screens) has provided a bridge between the work of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists who have developed new insights into learning based on scientific evidence. Notions that the functioning of the brain was fixed, or that learning styles, popular among educators, affected learning or that the brain was right-sided or left-sided for different tasks came unstuck when the plasticity of the brain was revealed. In the popular best seller The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge (2007) explained how research had shown that the brain changes itself with experience. In a new research report Neuroscience and technology enhanced learning published jointly by STELLAR and Futurelab, the links between elearning and neuroscience are outlined succinctly and precisely. States the report, ‘We know that the brain is plastic and that experience (including educational experience) can change its connectivity, function and structure’ (p. 21).