A number of authors, including Daniel Willingham and Kathy Hirsch-Pasek, have pointed out that current understanding of brain development is not sufficient to provide a scientific approach to education. I would argue, in fact, that knowledge of brain functioning can provide only some plausible ideas about how teaching should be done; to know whether educational methods work, we must collect data about their outcomes and compare methods with each other in ways that allow us to arrive at a valid conclusion. The plausible and the proven are by no means the same thing.
But let's consider another issue here. No doubt the cognitive functions involved in learning are based on brain functions (I don't propose that there is "a ghost in the machine"). However, that may not mean that neuroscience--fascinating as it is in itself--- is the only scientific field that can provide information from which improved educational methods can be developed. The scientific study of infant and toddler behavior may offer ideas that are at least as useful as any that will emerge from neuroscience.
The infancy researcher Andrew Meltzoff and three colleagues recently discussed behaviors related to learning in an article in "Science" (Meltzoff, A.N., Kuhl, P.K., Movellan, J., & Sejnowski, T.J. (2009). "Foundations for a new science of learning." Vol. 325, pp. 284-288). They commented on three social skills characteristic of humans from early childhood, but rarely found in non-humans. These skills may provide a foundation for learning from experience and may be a basis for cognitive development.
The first social skill noted by Meltzoff and his co-authors is imitation. In a simple form, this ability is present in the first hours after birth, when a newborn can imitate facial movements like opening the mouth and protruding the tongue, as these are displayed by an adult. The ability and tendency to imitate helps young children learn many things by observation, without the need to be instructed in the thousands of actions that form part of any human culture. But this basic ability is not like a parrot's imitation of speech. Young children do not imitate everything they see. If a person they are watching makes mistakes or stops before completing an action, toddlers imitate what they think he was trying to do, not what he actually did. At 18 months of age, children are already selective in their imitation and put their ability to work for them in useful ways.
A second social skill is shared attention. This refers to the fact that babies (as well as the rest of us) soon begin to follow another person's gaze-- to want to look at what someone else is inspecting. This skill enables babies to put their learning energies into matters that the people around them consider important, rather than paying equal attention to both important and unimportant things. Shared attention means that William James was wrong in his claim that the world was "a booming, buzzing confusion" to a baby; by at most a year of age, the baby sees what other people are paying attention to, which reduces the confusion a great deal.
A third set of skills has to do with empathy and the social emotions. Emotion plays a role in learning by providing motivation to learn and by making the material to be learned more salient---making it stand out perceptually from the rest of the environment. Empathy, or the ability to understand what others feel, is connected with various forms of learning in that it helps the learner understand to what extent another person is like himself or herself. Taking the perspective of another person is important not only in co-operative behavior, but also in understanding some types of information. For example, if we're receiving driving instructions from a person who often says "right" when he means "left", we get where we're going more effectively by translating the instructions into the words we would choose to use.
Meltzoff and his colleagues did not offer an educational program based on these three social abilities, for no such program has yet been proposed. They did point out, however, that research has reported that infants learn phonemes (speech sounds characteristic of a given language) when they interact socially with adult speakers, but not when they hear the sounds on television or audiotape. This at least suggests some ideas about effective instruction.
Can information about learning in early childhood be applied to instructional programs for older children? We need to be as cautious here as we are about jumping from neuroscience to education. Developmental changes may mean that early learning processes are different from those that occur later. We can only know this by systematic investigation of the results of instructional programs. Nevertheless, Meltzoff and his colleagues have done an impressive job of offering a potential scientific foundation on which to build educational programs.
