Here are educational neuroscience results I can get behind.

I think educational neuroscience is a fascinating and really promising field. That said, I tend to cringe a bit when I see particular findings or interventions labeled as "brain-based." Unfortunately, there's a lot of educational neuroscience hokum out there whereas the defensible applications of neuroscience to education are, so far, necessarily limited. Again, I think educational neuroscience is a promising and important field, but until we more completely traverse the structure-function gap, we need to be careful about making and believing educational neuroscience claims.

Zhu et al (2024) have conducted a study that incorporates educational neuroscience in ways I can get behind. They asked 99 Chinese college students to read a novel text and then randomly assigned them to one of three conditions: restudying the text, explaining it to themselves, or explaining it to someone else. Thus, this study was designed to contribute to the evidence regarding the power of explanation as a generative strategy for learning. In addition, they posited that the different conditions would lead to increased activity in specific areas of the brain associated with cognition and social interactions, and measured that with fNIRS neuroscience techniques. This is the kind of educational neuroscience that I like: theory (e.g., generative strategies, social presence) driving specific hypotheses about increases in brain activity in particular regions thought to support particular kinds of thinking.

Overall, their findings supported their hypotheses. Explaining (to either oneself or another person) lead to better retention than restudying and the explaining groups showed more activation in the posited brain networks related to cognition and metacognition. People in the explaining to others group did better on the transfer test, and showed more activation in brain networks thought to reflect social processing. Very cool.

Now, I wouldn't say that explaining is a "brain-based" finding; the positive effects of self-explanations and other-explanations have been substantiated well before we started asking people to wear fNIRS caps. But neuroscience findings add further evidence regarding the roles cognitive and social processing play in explanation effects. And that kind of converging evidence matters when you're developing theory.