The teaching and the learning brain: a cortical hemodynamic marker of teacher-student interactions in the Socratic dialog

ANDREA P. GOLDIN; LISA HOLPER; DIEGO E. SHALÓM; ANTONIO M. BATTRO; MARTIN WOLF; MARIANO SIGMAN

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

PERGAMON

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2013 vol. 59 p. 1 - 10

0883-0355

The study aimed to step into two-person educational neuroscience. We describe a physiological marker of cortical hemodynamic correlates involved in teacher-student interactions during performance of a classical teaching model, the Socratic dialog. We recorded prefrontal brain activity during dialog execution simultaneously in seventeen teacher-student pairs using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our main finding is that students, who successfully transferred the knowledge, showed less activity than those who not showed transfer and that these pattern correlated with teacher?s hemodynamic levels. These results suggest that in successful educational dialogs student and teachers ´dance at the same pace´. This is the first study measuring simultaneously brain activity of teacher-student interactions and paves future investigations of brain networks involved in complex educational interactions.