Going deep into Socrates? teaching brain: fNIRS, transfer and the Meno experiment

ANDREA P. GOLDIN

Encuentro; X International School on Mind, Brain and Education; 2015

p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; direction: ltr; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); }p.western { font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; }p.cjk { font-family: "DejaVu Sans"; font-size: 12pt; }p.ctl { font-family: "DejaVu Sans"; font-size: 12pt; }a:link { }Learningand teaching are entangled operations. Wedescribe a physiological marker of cortical hemodynamic correlatesinvolved in teacher?studentinteractions during performance of a classical teaching model, theSocratic dialog.Werecorded prefrontal brain activity during dialog executionsimultaneously in seventeenteacher?studentpairs using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Our mainfindingis that students who successfully transferred the knowledge, showedless activitythanthose who did not show transfer. Correlation analysis between teacherand studentactivityindicate that in successful educational dialogs student and teachers?dance at thesamepace?. This is the first study measuring simultaneously brainactivity of teacher?studentinteractions and paves future investigations of brain networksinvolved in complexeducationalinteractions. We are now working to understand what are students(really) learning during this paradigmatic dialog.