![]() Since then, a number of publications have argued that education can be informed by neuroscience, as many believe that the findings from brain research can be transformed into practical strategies teachers could use to improve their teaching (e.g., Geake and Cooper, 2003 Goswami, 2004 Blakemore and Frith, 2005 Posner and Rothbart, 2005 Ansari and Coch, 2006 Immodino-Yang and Damasio, 2007 Pickering and Howard-Jones, 2007 Varma et al., 2008 Howard-Jones, 2014 Ansari, 2015 but also see Willingham, 2009 Horvath and Donoghue, 2016, for more skeptical accounts). However, in 1997 Bruer argued that education and neuroscience are “a bridge too far.” He claimed that the distance between the two disciplines was too far to make meaningful extrapolation from neuroscience to educational application, and that this distance could only be covered with the introduction of a third discipline, psychology (Bruer, 1997). The term “brain-compatible teaching” was first put forward in 1978 (Hart, 1978), who suggested that neuroscientific developments could provide a radical new way of looking at learning with enormous potential for helping teachers bring about major gains in their students' achievement. At the same time, there is growing concern about the limited knowledge of brain facts and the rapid proliferation of neuromyths among teachers (e.g., Goswami, 2006 Pasquinelli, 2012). Teachers are showing great interest in the advances of neuroscience and in translating neuroscientific findings into their classrooms (e.g., Pickering and Howard-Jones, 2007 Zambo and Zambo, 2009, 2011 Bartoszeck and Bartoszeck, 2012 Serpati and Loughan, 2012 Rato et al., 2013 Karakus et al., 2015). Neuroscience literacy amongst the general public (e.g., Herculano-Houzel, 2002) and specifically amongst teachers has been receiving increasing attention (e.g., Dekker et al., 2012 Deligiannidi and Howard-Jones, 2015). We propose that such instruction takes place in undergraduate courses of Departments of Education and that emphasis is given in debunking neuromyths, enhancing critical reading skills, and dealing with topics relevant to special education. ![]() Based on our results we suggest that prospective teachers can benefit from academic instruction on neuroscience. Findings further indicate that general knowledge about the brain was found to be the best safeguard against believing in neuromyths. Prospective teachers were found to believe that neuroscience knowledge is useful for teachers (90.3% agreement), to be somewhat knowledgeable when it comes to the brain (47.33% of the assertions were answered correctly), but to be less well informed when it comes to neuroscientific issues related to special education (36.86% correct responses). We used a 70-item questionnaire aiming to explore general knowledge on the brain, neuromyths, the participants' attitude toward neuroeducation as well as their reading habits. We surveyed 479 undergraduate (mean age = 19.60 years, SD = 2.29) and 94 postgraduate students (mean age = 28.52 years, SD = 7.16) enrolled in Departments of Education at the University of Thessaly and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Although very often teachers show a great interest in introducing findings from the field of neuroscience in their classrooms, there is growing concern about the lack of academic instruction on neuroscience on teachers' curricula because this has led to a proliferation of neuromyths. ![]()
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