Advances in genetics can help kids learn

Education was becoming a no-brainer, some people at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) complained.

Kurt Fischer and his colleagues looked at the revolution in brain scanning, genetics, and other biological technologies and decided that most teachers and students weren’t getting much benefit from them. Brain scans are now available to watch what’s going on when someone is learning — or not learning. Finding genes that are involved in leaning disabilities is a hot area. Why, they asked, aren’t the powers of such technologies helping teachers in classrooms?

“There’s a long history of biology being excluded from education,” says Fischer, Charles Warland Bigelow Professor of Education and Human Development. “Not in the teaching sense, but in understanding learning. We are not taking full advantage of how information from neuroscience and genetics can be used to motivate kids to learn, and how to deal with learning problems such as dyslexia and attention deficits.”