Bibliographies du service Veille et Analyses, IFÉ

It has become a common view in the interdisciplinary area of neuroscience and education, or mind, brain and education, that there must be a balanced dialogue, or ‘two way street’, between the contributing disciplines. It is argued in this paper that a formal commitment to such balance is, in practice, frequently combined with implicit assumptions that ensure imbalance, giving dominance to the concepts and methods of neuroscience. In this paper it is argued that such an approach will not only hinder the development of the interdisciplinary field; if it is left unchallenged, long-term damage will be done to research in education as a whole. This de facto imbalance in the presumed relationship between neuroscience and education research is traced in only a small number of papers, so that it is possible to drill down to sources, and show that there is a systematic tendency to give credit to neuroscience for results that actually derive from behavioural studies, to ignore important weaknesses in the methods currently employed in neuroscience, and to overlook such areas as interpersonal differences and differences in strategy which are the strengths that can be provided by educational research.