RESUMEN
The field of neuroscience has seen significant growth and interest in recent decades. While neuroscience knowledge can benefit laypeople as well as professionals in many different areas, it may be particularly relevant for educators. With the right information, educators can apply neuroscience-based teaching strategies as well as protect themselves and their students against pseudoscientific ideas and products based on them. Despite rapidly growing sources of available information and courses, studies show that educators in many countries have poor knowledge of brain science and tend to endorse education-related neuromyths. Poor English skills and fewer resources (personal, institutional and governmental) may be additional limitations in Latin America. In order to better understand the scenario in Latin America's largest country, we created an anonymous online survey which was answered by 1634 individuals working in education from all five regions of Brazil. Respondents stated whether they agreed with each statement and reported their level of confidence for each answer. Significant differences in performance were observed across regions, between educators living in capital cities versus the outskirts, between those teaching in private versus public schools, and among educators teaching different levels (pre-school up to college/university). We also observed high endorsement of some key neuromyths, even among groups who performed better overall. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a detailed analysis of the profile of a large group of educators in Brazil. We discuss our findings in terms of efforts to better understand regional and global limitations and develop methods of addressing these most efficiently.
RESUMEN
The field of Neuroscience has experienced a growing interest in recent decades, which has led to an exponential growth in the amount of related information made available online as well as the market for Neuroscience-related courses. While this type of knowledge can be greatly beneficial to people working in science, health and education, it can also benefit individuals in other areas. For example, neuroscience knowledge can help people from all fields better understand and critique information about new discoveries or products, and even make better education- and health-related decisions. Online platforms are fertile ground for the creation and spread of fake information, including misrepresentations of scientific knowledge or new discoveries (e.g., neuromyths). These types of false information, once spread, can be difficult to tear down and may have widespread negative effects. For example, even scientists are less likely to access retractions of peer-reviewed articles than the original discredited articles. In this study we surveyed general knowledge about neuroscience and the brain among volunteers in Brazil, Latin America's largest country. We were interested in evaluating the prevalence of neuromyths in this region, and test whether knowledge/neuromyth endorsement differs by age, region, and/or profession. To that end, we created a 30-item survey that was anonymously answered online by 1128 individuals. While younger people (20-29-year-olds) generally responded more accurately than people 60 and older, people in the North responded significantly worse than those in the South and Southeast. Most interestingly, people in the biological sciences consistently responded best, but people in the health sciences responded no better than people in the exact sciences or humanities. Furthermore, years of schooling did not correlate with performance, suggesting that quantity may surpass quality when it comes to extension or graduate-level course offerings. We discuss how our findings can help guide efforts toward improving access to quality information and training in the region.
