These are about one-third of the books for sale at the Learning & the Brain conference this weekend in DC. It’s a great conference (which the Dana Foundation helps sponsor), but I was appalled at the number of how-to teaching and learning books that have “Brain” in the title (and what isn’t a “brain-compatible activity”?). Very few of them offer any research, neuroscience or otherwise, to back up their claims, but I’ll bet the title helps them sell. Makes me simmer, since the stuff we at Dana put out (for free, in many cases) does, in fact, have a basis in brain science and is, in fact, vetted by panels of neuroscientists and educators. Ugh.
It reminds me of that study from 2008 that showed people found scientific papers more believable when they included brain scan than they when they didn’t. Caveat emptor.
Otherwise, the conference was interesting and fun and, of course, very educational. Look for more reporting on it soon on www.dana.org.
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