Mapping Neuroscience In The Field of Education.

Bibliometric analysis is a new terminology. It is a statistical evaluation of trends in academic research, “it can be used to clarify the current state of research in a certain field and to predict future development trends” (Xu, et al., 2022, p.2).

One interesting fact about the article is that they used 549 articles from 1995 to 2022 to assess in order to “help scholars to better understand NIE, save research time, and explore new research questions” (Xu, et al., 2022, p.3).

NIE stands for Neuroscience in the field of Education. In this article, the purpose of using bibliometric analysis was to conduct “a comprehensive review and overcome the author’s bias” (Xu, et al., 2022, p.2). And that research in neuroscience started in 1970 which is 53 years ago, indicating the era of the Baby Boomers. Not much had been researched prior, in part due to the costly, imprecise equipment and time consuming nature of human studies.

Now in the 21st century, the book: The Social Neuroscience of Education: Optimizing Attachment and Learning in the Classroom. (Xu, et al., 2022) provides a much clearer view of functioning of the brain during learning, compared to what was possible in the 1970’s.

This paper gives me an overview of where neuroscience in the Education field has been successful. The neuroscience field is still in its infancy stage, as compared to the complexity of the object under study.  What are the technological limitations of the field? Are we being actively misinformed, and rendered over-confident by incomplete truths? What about the limitations of the relevancy of laboratory experiments? This paper comes with the recommendation that in the future, research of neuroscience in the education field should do experiments inside the classrooms with portable experimental equipment, instead of in a controlled lab.

References

Xu, H.; Cheng, X.; Wang, T.; Wu, S.; Xiong, Y. (2022) Mapping Neuroscience in the Field of Education through a Bibliometric Analysis. Brain Sci., 12, 1454. https://doi.org/10.3390/ brainsci12111454