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

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Abstract

The study aimed to step into two-person (teacher–student) 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. Correlation analysis between teacher and student activity indicate 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.

Highlights

► Physiological marker of successful educational dialogs is described. ► Study of the hemodynamic correlates involved in teacher–student dialog. ► fNIRS recorded simultaneous in pairs of teachers and students. ► Significantly hemodynamic responses during dialog as compared to control. ► Significant effects of transfer of learning between teachers and students.

Introduction

There is a remarkable gap between our understanding of the mechanisms by which we learn (Gilbert, Sigman, & Crist, 2001) and those by which we teach (Battro, 2010), with the notable exception of some works that suggested that teaching is a natural cognitive ability which develops spontaneously in children (Strauss, 2005, Ziv and Frye, 2004). The enormous growth in understanding human cognitive brain development has created an entirely new way to consider how learning, teaching and the achievement of knowledge take place in education. Educational environments therefore present unprecedented opportunities for cognitive science (Goswami, 2006).

Teaching is a social interaction involving a pupil and a teacher. This is in fact an intrinsically related process as noted by Seneca's famous quote: docendo discimus, ‘when we teach we learn’. With the development of portable and wearable equipment it is now possible to investigate the teacher–student dialog in its natural niche. In line with Schilbach et al. (in press) who recently suggested that social cognition is fundamentally different when we interact with others rather than merely observing them, investigating teacher–student interactions may therefore contribute to a better understanding of the neural correlates underlying educational practices and, in the long term, to draw conclusions on how to implement improvements in current classroom practices and teachers education.

Previous neuroimaging studies have conducted experiments in interacting subjects. As recently reviewed by Babiloni and Astolfi (in press), several studies applying hyperscanning methodologies using both hemodynamic or neuro-electric modalities have shown how different brain recording devices have been employed in different experimental paradigms to gain information about the subtle nature of human interactions. However, so far, no studies investigated the interaction between two brains in an educational setup.

The current work is a first step in this direction. A natural caveat to the investigation of the teacher–student dialog is its intrinsic variability. An educational dialog can in fact follow an indefinite number of different paths. Our solution to this potential difficulty is to rely in a classical model of teacher–student interaction, the so-called Socratic dialog. Two thousand four hundred years ago Plato wrote Meno his celebrated dialog where Socrates discusses about whether virtue could be acquired by way of teaching or whether it is given to man by nature (Crane, 2000). Socrates gave a remarkable lesson of geometry, perhaps the first detailed record of a pedagogical method in vivo in history. In brief, Socrates asked Meno's slave 50 questions requiring simple additions or multiplications. The boy answered mostly by yes or no. At the end of the lesson the slave discovered the solution by himself, i.e. how to duplicate a square using the diagonal of the given square as the side of the new one.

In a previous study (Goldin, Pezzatti, Battro, & Sigman, 2011), we demonstrated the universality of this classical model, confirming that a contemporary version of the Socratic dialog shows remarkably similar trajectories, reflecting the same pattern of errors and correct responses. This showed that the dialog was built on an intuition of human reasoning which persists more than twenty-four centuries after its conception. In particular, the consistency of the dialog allows repeating the same paths across subjects, and hence makes it an ideal experimental vehicle to explore the physiological correlates of learning and teaching brains.

Section snippets

Subjects

17 pairs of subjects were included in the analysis; all subjects (70% females; mean age 24, range 18–74) were Spanish native speakers and right-handed (mean laterality quotient = 76.5; range 47–100; mean decile = 5.8, range 1–10), except one left-handed subject (laterality quotient = −87, decile = 7), according to the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldfield, 1971). Five additional pairs were excluded from analysis due to missing data recording in one of the subjects. None of the subjects had any

Behavioral data

The duration from the beginning to the end of the total Meno dialog was 11.6 min averaged over all dialogs. Averaged durations (mean ± SD) for the teachers’ questions and for the students’ responses were 7.85 ± 7.39 s and 5.03 ± 4.72 s, respectively. Averaged durations for the other conditions are: rest periods (2.73 ± 0.57 min), Meletos dialog (5.29 ± 2.21 min). On average, students answered 32.18 ± 8.94 out of 50 questions (63.09%± 17.53%) (Fig. 2 (middle)). The responded questions were categorized as

Discussion

We present the first measure of brain activity in a teacher–student interaction. We relied on one of the most celebrated examples in pedagogy, the Meno dialog which has the virtue of producing a highly stereotyped educational trajectory. A second fundamental advantage is that this dialog elicits knowledge which can transfer beyond the specific context in about 50% of the students. We capitalized on this to investigate brain activity distinctively for educational experiences in which students

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that reliable brain measures signaling relevant pedagogical variables (transfer) can be obtained in a realistic educational dialog. These results may pave the path for a program investigating brain activity in real educational setups where knowledge is acquired in a complex entangled process involving an interaction between a student and a teacher.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all participants for assistance in this research and the Nachwuchsförderungskredit and Stiefel-Zangger-Stiftung, University of Zurich, the Swiss Foundation for Grants in Biology and Medicine (SFGBM), and the Stiftung für wissenschaftliche Forschung, University Zurich for financial support.

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