The Persistence of Neuromyths in the Educational Settings: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Neuroscience influences education, and these two areas have converged in a new field denominated "Neuroeducation." However, the growing interest in the education-brain relationship does not match the proper use of research findings. In 2007, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned of the misunderstandings about the brain among teachers, labeling them as neuromyths. The main objective here is to observe the prevalence of the neuromyths in educators over time. After two decades of publications of research on neuromyths among in-service or prospective teachers, this work presents a systematic scientific review. To select the articles, we used the words: "teachers," "preservice teachers," "neuromyths" combined with the Boolean data type "and." The search was filtered according to the following criteria: (a) identifiable author, (b) written in English, Spanish, French, Italian, or Portuguese, (c) word neuromyth in title, abstract, or keywords, (d) research with a participant's survey, (e) sample focused on educators, (f) peer-review publication index in JCR, SJR, or ESCI. The documents were found through Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Dialnet, ProQuest, EBSCO-host, and Google Scholar. After the search, 24 articles were identified as being of sufficiently high quality for this systematic review. This result highlights that neuromyths are still the subject of attention almost two decades after their definition. The findings present neuromyths as the consequence of a lack of scientific knowledge, a communicative gap between scientists and teachers, and the low-quality information sources consulted by teachers. In addition, the data on protectors and predictors of neuromyths is inconsistent. There is also no standard scientific methodology nor a guideline to determine a new neuromyth. The results show the need to improve the scientific content in higher education and the importance of in-service teacher training. This research justifies the requirement for university professors to be active researchers and to establish a close link with educators from other fields and levels. Neuroeducation will be the bridge that unites scientific knowledge and practical application in education, with a rigorous, standard method for the entire scientific-educational community.

Keywords: educators; neuroeducation; neuromyths; neuroscience; pre-service teachers; teachers.

Figure 1

Flow diagram based on Prisma, based on Moher et al. (2009).

Figure 2

Search strategy and results. The eight* database screened in EBSCOhost are: MEDLINE; Education Source, ERIC, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection; APA PsycINFO, SPORTDiscus with Full Text, Teacher Reference Center, PSICODOC.

Figure 3

Inclusion and exclusion criteria: decision tree.

Figure 4

Frequency of appearance of each neuromyth in the 24 articles.

Figure 5

Percentage of articles by sample.

Figure 6

Prevalence of neuromyths and scores in GKAB from 2012 to 2020.