Integrating Research on How People Learn and Learning Across Settings as a Window of Opportunity to Address Inequality in Educational Processes and Outcomes

Cognition

How People Learn (HPL) (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999) represented a synthesis of core constructs around human learning through 1999. HPL is currently being updated and we expect greater attention to findings from the neurosciences. The Research Advisory Council of the National Academy of Education has made recommendations about new findings that should be incorporated in syntheses around understandings of how people learn. This brief synthesis will include both findings from HPL and recommendations from the National Academy.

For decades, cognition has been viewed as individual brain functioning. Through evolution, the human brain operates efficiently by structuring knowledge as patterns or structures inferred from experience in the world as schema held in long-term memory (Quartz & Sejnowski, 2002; Rumelhart, 1980). Such schema then serve as frameworks through which we make sense of new experiences (Anderson, 1984). New learning may involve top-down processes of schema activation (e.g., using our prior knowledge to expand our current understandings) or bottom-up processes of restructuring existing schema or building new knowledge structures (Rumelhart, 1980). In both cases, prior knowledge is a powerful resource for new learning. Young children from birth make observations of the natural and social world and infer patterns (Carey, 1985; DiSessa, 1982; Mintzes, 1984). For example, young children come to recognize that if you hold an object and let it go, the object will fall. Research on what are called naïve theories document the ways that children construct explanatory models of physical processes, of number, classifications of living forms (e.g., animals with four legs even when they do not recognize the difference between a dog and a cat; distinctions between what animate creatures can do vs. inanimate objects; of human intentionality; Baillargeon, 1995; Carey & Gelman, 1991; Massey & Gelman, 1988; Starkey & Gelman, 1982). One of the challenges of formal learning, particularly in mathematics and the sciences, is wrestling with tensions between informal naïve understandings inferred from experience in the natural and social world from formal operations in disciplines that may be counterintuitive (Clement, 1982; DiSessa, 1982). This challenge is sometimes conceptualized as conceptual change where the question is what features of learning environments are most robust at helping learners reorganize existing schema (DiSessa & Sherin, 1998; Schwartz, Varma, & Martin, 2008). The broad takeaway is that learners must explicitly examine the tensions or oppositions between one’s current state of understanding of say, a model or process, and the targeted formal understanding. These fundamentally cognitive foci on schema activation and transformations, the role of prior knowledge, and the demands of conceptual change have been taken up in deficit explanations for the persistent gap in academic achievement with the idea that the range of prior knowledge that youth from particular backgrounds bring to learning in school somehow is not a resource for new learning, in fact a detractor (Brottman, 1968; Jensen, 1969; Orr, 1987; see Box 1).

Another dimension of cognition that is receiving increased attention is the role of epistemology as a category of knowledge that is important in how people conceptualize tasks to be learned (DiSessa, 1993; F. E. Hart, 2001; Hofer, 2000; Lee, Goldman, Levine, & Magliano, 2016). Traditional studies of schema including the role of prior knowledge have attended to the structure of concepts. Epistemology, on the other hand, addresses questions around the criteria we use in determining whether something is indeed knowable and what criteria are invoked to assess the truth value of knowledge claims, how do we justify claims, and what counts as evidence. Hofer and Pintrich (1997) focused on two important dimensions of people’s epistemological beliefs: simplicity versus complexity and certainty versus uncertainty. It is interesting to consider how these personal orientations may play out in everyday contexts, for example, as citizens evaluate public policy positions with regard to issues like climate change, immigration, addressing poverty (Gutmann, 1993; Suad Nasir & Kirshner, 2003). It is equally interesting to consider what may be epistemological orientations or dispositions reflected in claims made within the research community—now and historically—and within communities of educational practice (e.g., publications and pronouncements made by educational consultants, educational publications meant for a practice audience) with regard to these two dimensions. I would argue the field—both in research and practice—have tended to assert deficit claims about learning trajectories for particular populations in ways that reflect a disposition toward simplicity and certainty. One goal of this chapter is to suggest that inferences across disciplines now strongly suggest the phenomena in question are more likely to be complex and our claims likely need to be tentative and contextual (see Box 2).

Chinn, Buckland, and Samarapungavan (2011) have expanded studies of the role of epistemology in learning to zero in on what they call epistemic cognition. They argue for five dimensions of epistemic cognition:

(a) Epistemic aims and epistemic value; (b) the structure of knowledge and other epistemic achievements; (c) the sources and justification of knowledge and other epistemic achievements, and the related epistemic stances; (d) epistemic virtues and vices; and (e) reliable and unreliable processes for achieving epistemic aims. We further argue for a fine-grained, context-specific analysis of cognitions within the five components. (p. 141)

The relevance of these five dimensions will become clearer when I discuss the implications of more recent findings across the multiple domains addressed in this chapter as they provide resources for thinking about the demands of learning in particular academic content areas. These dimensions of how youth perceive what it means to validly know something is in no way limited to academics. And as a consequence, the opportunities for recruiting such epistemological knowledge and dispositions as resources for navigating new spaces for learning, particularly in formal contexts, is an important opportunity window that I argue is not sufficiently explored to address the persistent gaps in academic and life course outcomes associated with race, ethnicity, class, and gender.

Many empirical studies have validated the proposition that epistemological knowledge and dispositions contribute to robust learning around conceptual understanding, text comprehension, analyses of complex issues, among others (Conley, Pintrich, Vekiri, & Harrison, 2004; Hofer, 2004; Kardash & Scholes, 1996; Mason & Boscolo, 2004; Sinatra, Southerland, McConaughy, & Demastes, 2003).

Thus, from a cognitive perspective, the structure of conceptual and categorical knowledge (existing schema, relations across schema, their relations with new targets of learning) as well as dispositions toward what counts as knowledge and what counts as reliable justifications for claims and whether one views such knowledge as simple or complex, as subject to certainty or uncertainty, all matter for what and how people learn. And as a consequence, these need to be considerations in how we conceptualize addressing the challenges in gaps in opportunity to learn, particularly in the context of schooling.

Becoming more prominent in studies of cognition is attention that goes beyond internal cognitive structures to include the role of affect. In prior purely cognitive studies, affect was not considered as a factor in cognitive processing. There are at least two perspectives from which affect and cognition are considered. One is the question of whether affect or emotions themselves are cognitive (Ortony, 1979). The other examines how affective states influence cognition (Dalgleish & Powers, 1999; Zajonc & Marcus, 1984). Clore and Ortony (2000) argue human emotions entail four components: “a cognitive component, a motivational-behavioral component, a somatic component, and a subjective-experiential component” (p. 24). They define the cognitive component as “the representation of the emotional meaning or personal significance of some emotionally relevant aspect(s) of the person’s perceived world . . . [that] may be conscious or nonconscious” (p. 24). The motivational–behavioral component involves the disposition to act on the emotional valence we attribute to experience. The somatic component involves the physiological changes that unfold in our bodies (e.g., chemical release of cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine) that are embodied across multiple systems in our bodies (e.g., cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine). And the subjective–experiential component is the holistic way in which we feel and experience the affect. According to Damasio, “The full range of the phenomenon of emotion, in its most traditional sense, . . . includes 1) evaluation, 2) dispositions to respond, and 3) feelings” (p. 20).

Damasio explains the physiological processes embodied in the experience of emotion as such experiences are processed through multiple regions of the brain as well as other body systems:

The body state changes specific to emotions are enacted by neural signals (e.g. autonomic, musculoskeletal) and chemical signals (e.g. endocrine). The brain state changes are enacted by neural signals toward neurotransmitter and neuromodulator nuclei in the thalamus, the brain stem, and the basal forebrain, as well as toward some sectors of the basal ganglia (such as the ventral striatum), which in turn send signals to a variety of neural sites, e.g. cerebral cortex. Direct chemical signaling from the body proper also affects the operation of brain networks. The changes in cognitive mode I mentioned above are the result of these brain state changes. (p. 21)

My point here is not to delve into the details of how we process emotions but to argue the breadth of evidence that emotional states, excited by perceptions that learners bring are essential to human learning and development. As a consequence, the design of robust learning environments (whether in families, in schools, in informal community-based settings) ignore the perceptions and as a consequence, the emotional experience of learners at their peril. Attention in recent years to socioemotional learning in schools is certainly influenced by our understandings about the centrality of emotions (Farrington et al., 2012). However, both the emerging work in socioemotional learning in schools as well as discussions of implications for the neurobiology of emotions typically do not consider how perceptions of experience are deeply influenced by perceptions with regard to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other categorical variations in human experience such as conceptions of disability (Sellers, Caldwell, Schmeelk-Cone, & Zimmerman, 2003; Sellers, Copeland-Linder, Martin, & Lewis, 2006; Spencer, 1985; Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002).

Human Development

One of my overall concerns in this review is to point out the ways that these disciplines so central to understanding how humans learn and develop typically do not talk with one another. Each focuses on a slice or silo of human functioning. Among the arguments I am proposing in this review are the opportunities that developing conceptual frameworks that encompass big ideas from across relevant disciplines may make possible for us to interrogate more deeply and in more complex ways the phenomenon that are human communities.

My personal focus on human development grows from the opportunity I had for 10 years to coteach a seminar with colleagues from Northwestern University’s Human Development and Social Policy Program. That seminar sought to help PhD students explore intersections between the Learning Sciences focus on cognition and the foci in Human Development on identity, motivation, development over the life course, risk, and resiliency as these are socialized in contexts. I have constrained my focus in human development to issues around the role of identity in the context of child and adolescent development, and how issues of motivation are interconnected with identity in the context of life course development. In particular, I am focusing on these issues from a risk–resiliency framework; that is, understanding how life course outcomes are an outgrowth of relationships between the nature of risks faced and supports available (Spencer, 2006). Because this review aims to articulate big ideas in and across relevant disciplines that can help us think in conceptually rich ways about what is entailed in expanding opportunity to learn, particularly in the context of schooling, this human development discussion is framed around understanding what we know about how identity development, at particular life course transition points, intersects with motivation to offer sources of risk and/or sources of support that can influence resilience in the face of difficult life circumstances associated with the experiences of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.

I want to start by framing human development as the unfolding of dynamic relationships among characteristics of the individual as these interact with—shape and are shaped by—features of the social spaces in which the individual operates (e.g., nuclear family, extended family, social networks of peers and adults, socially organized settings outside the home such as church, school, community settings, etc.). Characteristics of the individual include attributes that themselves are an outgrowth of biological factors and the organization of social spaces in which the individual routinely participates (McAdams & Pals, 2006). In terms of the focus of this review around issues of educational equity, some may be concerned about invoking biological factors considering the history of how biological explanations have historically been used in psychology and by extension in popular metanarratives to categorize particular groups of humans as lacking, as less than (e.g., the eugenics movement, assumptions around the construct of IQ; Gould, 1981). However, one of the main goals of this review is to invoke more recent findings around the complex and dynamic relations between the biological and social worlds of human development to make exactly the opposite argument (Wilson, 1998): namely, the human species survives over ecological time precisely because of its variation, and as a consequence, a core scientific enterprise is to understand the functionality of that variation and use such understandings for conceptualizing resources rather than deficits. This proposition, for example, is evident in more recent developments in the deaf community of not viewing deafness as a disability, but simply as a difference that offers other affordances for navigating the social world. This framing of development as the outgrowth of dynamic relations among the biological and the social, between the individual and others—other people, across multiple settings, across people, and artifacts that may be physical and/or ideational (e.g., conceptual systems about number and space)—is a core and central tenet through which the fields of human development, cognition, and the neurosciences now understand how people learn and navigate across time and space. This relational framing is central to conceptualizing what promotes resilience in the face of risks; that is, resilience is an outgrowth of ecological relations and not simply features or characteristics of individuals. Articulating the new focus as developmental science, Damon and Lerner (2008) offer the following as the key contemporary themes (p. 12):

Another important grounding has to do with how we understand culture (Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 2003). Conceptions of culture are important here because this intertwining of the biological and the social itself entails participation in cultural practices (Lee, 2010). One illustration may be informative from work in the area of epigenesis (Cloud, 2010; Russo, Martienssen, & Riggs, 1996)—the study of how gene expression can change as a function of environmental stimuli. ¹ Researchers have documented transformation of genetic markers of irritability in a liter of mice based on shifts in their experiences in the social world (Francis, Diorio, Liu, & Meaney, 1999; Szyf, Weaver, & Meaney, 2007). With a rat mother who was not nurturing, the mice exhibited erratic behavior under conditions of stress. When transferred to a rat mother who was nurturing—licking them for comfort when they were under stress—the mice not only ceased to exhibit the erratic behavior under conditions of stress (e.g., the expression of a genetic marker), but the moderation of the gene expression passed on to the next generation. The idea here is that the genetic marker is not deterministic, but rather its expression can be modulated by experience. We must be cautious not to read these findings to reinforce claims that particular experiences, particularly associated with poverty, are somehow inherently deficit. Rather, I read these findings as evidence of human adaptability and variation within human cultural communities.

In this framing, cultural experiences entail shared cultural practices (e.g., here mice living in a nurturing environment where positive stimulation is the norm of practice), norms, and belief systems. In human cultural communities, these shared practices, norms, and belief systems are often sustained across generations. Such cultural communities can range from micro-level practices in family socialization practices or practices in youth video clubs to more macro-level practices shared within religious communities, nation states, ethnic enclaves within and across nations (e.g., shared diaspora cultural practices). This conception of membership in cultural communities is important because it makes clear that people never belong to single cultural communities (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). In addition, it is important to understand that cultural communities are complex, being both homogenous and heterogeneous, being both stable and changing. While this is a complex construct to think about, we can easily understand these dimensions in terms of membership in our families. There are practices that we experience in our family life growing up that we know are not the same across all families. Some of those practices are ones that we know our parents experienced in their childhood, but we can see how they may have been adapted from our grandparents’ generation to our parent’s generation. At the same time, we know that there are certain things that the members of our immediate family share, but also know that each member of the family is also distinct, different. Thus in family life, we can see stability and change, homogeneity and heterogeneity all operating simultaneously. This idea then that people participate in multiple cultural communities, each of which has these complex dimensions suggests that studying and examining the influences of culture on learning and development needs to push beyond the boundaries typically invoked in research on learning and development. Currently and historically, such research has tended to either sample particular populations as the norm for comparisons around normative expectations (e.g., White middle-class samples; Graham, 1992) or to sample within social categories (e.g., race, ethnicity, class) as though these categories are homogenous and somehow deterministic (Orellana & Bowman, 2003). Such research also has tended to study learning and development in one setting (e.g., school, in family life, in informal settings) without considering people’s navigation across settings.

Such navigations clearly provide the contexts that influence development. We need then to understand the demands for participation within particular settings, such as schools, examine whether the presumed normative demands for participation are actually necessary for developing competence, and examine the resources that such navigations make available, with the likelihood that such resources likely entail both affordances and constraints. I offer these considerations in light of the ways in which so much research addressing opportunity to learn for particular populations often propose deterministic explanations (e.g., what poverty does to the brain, limits of language resources among children growing up in poverty, lack of executive control among youth living in poverty—where poverty has become the synonym for race). The takeaway is human adaptability.

In this multidimensional framing, from a developmental science perspective, identity is not singular. We have identities in terms of personality, as members of families, as members of other kinds of communities of practice (e.g., basketball player, rapper, video gamer), in terms of gender and sexual orientation, and so on. And identity is contextual. That means that particular features of how we self-identify and what values we place on such self-identifications may shift over time—for example, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood to elderhood—and in different contexts one aspect of our identity repertoires may surface as more salient. This contextualization of identity repertoires is not merely an attribute of the individual, but rather an outgrowth of intersections between the ways that social/cultural settings are organized—who is there, what are the tasks to be accomplished, what is available to accomplish the tasks—and particular attributes of the person. And these relationships are bidirectional.

Research on racial identity has documented the multiple ways that people of African descent—at least in the context of the United States—may view race as salient or not, may view race as personally meaningful or not, may have different conceptions of how others view race (Cross, 1991; Sellers, Smith, Shelton, Rowley, & Chavous, 1998). Other researchers have conceptualized racial identity from a developmental perspective, arguing that people of African descent in the United States may go through ideological stages, depending on experience (Cross, 1979). An array of instruments have been constructed and validated to measure these dimensions of racial identity and used in correlational and longitudinal studies to examine how different kinds of racial identity may be connected to particular life course outcomes—for example, grades, college attendance, healthy psychological development, resilience (Bowman & Howard, 1985; Chavous et al., 2003; Mandara, 2006; O’Connor, 1999; Perry, 1993; Spencer, Noll, Stoltzfus, & Harpalani, 2001).

A related body of research has examined ethnic identity. I argue that understanding intersections between race and ethnicity is important. Race is a political construct that creates particular challenges because of the pervasiveness of racism as an ideology. Race is defined on the basis of questionable physiognomy. The skin color spectrum represented among people of African descent (e.g., Black people) is diverse. However, I argue that people of African descent in the United States and diaspora must also be understood in terms of ethnicity, recognizing the many cultural practices and belief systems that have been sustained from their African roots (Asante, 1990; Asante & Asante, 1990; DuBois, 1996). Ethnic identity research has also addressed the complex and diverse ways in which such identities develop—exploration and consolidation, differences in salience, multiethnic identities (Phinney, 1990; Portes, 1995). Studies have also documented relationships between positive ethnic identity and a number of outcomes from self-esteem, lack of substance abuse, academic self-efficacy, and grades (Phinney, Cantu, & Kurtz, 1997).

One important takeaway from the research on racial and ethnic identity is that wrestling with positioning with regard to race and ethnicity constitute developmental tasks across the life course, but especially during adolescence. This is, in part, because it becomes integrated into the normative challenges of adolescence—beginning consolidation of self-construals connected to the health of the ego (Erikson, 1959; Marcia, Waterman, Matteson, Archer, & Orlofsky, 2012). Adolescence is a key transition point in the life course. It is complicated by enhanced social cognition (Flavell & Miller, 1998; e.g., nuances in the ability to read the internal states of others, including the salience of social comparisons), the emergence of sexual arousal, the importance of peer relationships, the anticipation of future adult roles and responsibilities, all heightened by immense physiological changes occurring, much of which are embodied in development as a sexual being. These normative challenges of adolescence are now complicated by identity wrestling with regard to ethnicity and race in societies such as the United States where there are ubiquitous structures that heighten the salience of racial and ethnic identity (Spencer, 2006). They are further complicated by the nature of the academic and social demands of high school—where subject matters tend to become further removed from the everyday, where youth must learn to navigate multiple adults who play consequential roles in how and whether they experience success, and where they already bring well established perceptions about schooling from 8 years of elementary education.

Issues of identity and motivation then come into play in terms of the perceptions people bring to settings and the ways that settings are organized to also influence perceptions. For example, if I come into a setting with certain preconceived stereotypes about what participation will be like, what it will require in relation to my own ego-related needs, it is possible that what people do, say, how they act, what is available in the setting may stimulate me to rethink my stereotypes, and change my perceptions. Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998) offer a multidimensional framework for academic motivation that is fundamentally ecological in its scope. It includes the cultural milieu with regard to cultural stereotypes about people (e.g., girls are not good at math) as well as subject matter (e.g., math is about right answers); the beliefs and behaviors of those seeking to socialize the child (e.g., teachers, parents), the aptitudes of the child and his or her previous experiences with schooling; the child’s perceptions of those seeking to socialize him or her and the stereotypes in the air to use Steele’s (2004) term with regard to categories of people (likely those that can be attributed to the child) and the academic tasks; to what the child attributes his or her perceptions (e.g., ability, effort, in my control, not in my control); the array of relevant schemata the child brings to the enterprise, expectations for success, and perceptions of the tasks to be mastered; the child’s affective memories around similar experiences, and what they call the subject task value in terms of interests, utility and what costs the child must weigh in putting forth effort. They articulate these factors as situated inside a set of dynamic relationships that together influence what they call achievement-related choices. The framework has been subject to empirical measures. Important caveats that Eccles introduces that are relevant to the focus of this review include how ego-related choices may differ by cultural communities and within cultural communities by gender. For example, research has documented broad cultural orientations distinguishing historical cultural communities that favor interdependence over independence, emphasizing collectivism and family obligation (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). In such societies, for example, stereotypes will differ, causal attributions for choices will likely differ, and the influences on subject task value will differ (Stigler & Baranes, 1989). The Eccles framework is further bolstered by longstanding research around the importance of a sense of self-efficacy (Pintrich & Schrauben, 1992; Zimmerman, Bandura, & Martinez-Pons, 1992); and also Oyserman and colleagues’ work (Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006; Oyserman & Destin, 2010) on the role of perceptions of future selves (who and what can I become) in influencing effort toward a goal and persistence in such efforts in the face of challenge, or what they now refer to as identity-based motivation.

Thus, relevant perceptions include the following:

This framing of motivation in terms of what is entailed in decisions by learners to put forth effort to learn, particularly in the contexts of schooling, integrates in many ways what has been articulated in cognitive studies with regard to knowledge structures (now to include knowledge of cultural worlds and knowledge of self), the role of emotions and the salience of perceptions (Erickson et al., 2007).

There are a number of salient issues in regard to what these propositions mean for how we understand the challenges entailed in inequities in opportunity to learn and educational outcomes associated with race, ethnicity, class and gender. I will illustrate issues in terms of race, in part because race and ethnicity are so intertwined in the social and ideological spaces within the United States. As discussed earlier, particularly at the critical transitions of adolescence, one aspect of identity that must be wrestled with is how youth come to understand the meaning of race in terms of navigating the world beyond their immediate families. Margaret Beale Spencer examined and replicated the famous doll experiment conducted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, evidence from which was used in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Case. The Clarks argued that Black children choosing the white doll as beautiful was evidence of the detrimental effects of segregation on the sense of self-worth of Black children. Drawing on well-established research regarding the egocentrism of very young children (Piaget, 1926), Spencer argued that the choice by young children of the white doll was simply evidence of their recognition that negative stereotypes around Black physiognomy was “in the air,” but because of their essential egocentrism did not make such negative attributions to themselves. When Spencer then repeated the experiment with older children, she found them clearly emotionally burdened in making the decision because at this point in terms of their more advanced social cognition, they realized the negative attributions could now be applied to them (Spencer, 2008). On the other hand, Spencer also repeated the same experiment with young children enrolled in an African-centered preschool, where issues of positive Black identity were centrally socialized, these young children eagerly pointed to the black doll as beautiful, as the smart doll. This replication demonstrates the role of socialization around the meaning and salience of race matters. These implications are also reinforced by the extensive body of research on positive racial socialization (referenced earlier) as a resource for resilience in the face of challenge.

Returning to Spencer’s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory model, the research indicates that Black, Brown, and youth living in persistent intergenerational poverty must learn to engage the normative challenges of development at particular points in the life course (early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, young adulthood)—learning language, learning to manage one’s body, learning to read the internal states of others, regulating emotions, setting goals, interpreting ego-related needs, establishing and maintaining attachments, constructing knowledge that allows one to engage in meaningful new tasks—as well as the complications and ego-related challenges that emerge in the risks that racism, gender bias, ethnocentrism, and homophobia structurally pose. These structural risks include exposure to violence, facing a culture of low expectations in schools, living in food deserts, lack of green space, inadequate housing, insufficient community based spaces for youth development, inadequate health care. These are structural risks because they do not emerge randomly but systematically, structured into public policies and institutional configurations. And they are particularly pernicious psychologically as embodied in metanarratives of deficit, of being less than, and as a consequence pose significant threats to the ego. We know from decades of research on identity that the ego drives self-concept, drives engagement, as ego defines what we think we need to be centered, to be whole (Maslow, 1943).

These propositions, empirically supported, from the field of human development suggest that efforts to transform schools into places where Black, Brown, and youth living in persistent intergenerational poverty thrive must explicitly address the ways that racism, ethnocentrism, gender bias, homophobia, and stereotypes around the experience of poverty are enacted in the lives of young people and in the practices and organization of schooling. Schools must develop tools that allow teachers and administrators to understand how perceptions of ability and of resources for coping are enacted even in the ways that curriculum content and instruction are structured. Such orientations can help us move away from the tendency to “blame the victim” rather than to examine the ways that ecologies of learning can address the fundamental human development needs that all youth face.

The Neurosciences

I want to close this review of findings from disciplines in the social and biological sciences that can expand how we conceptualize the challenges and opportunities of addressing the persistent achievement gap associated with race, ethnicity, and class with a brief review of big findings from the neurosciences. Just as early work in cognition focused on individual mental functioning, so early work in neuroscience focused on cognitive activity within the individual brain. In more recent years, however, the field has expanded into a number of specializations—cultural neuroscience, social neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, among others. It is not the intent of this review to provide a detailed synthesis of research in these subdisciplines (Cacioppo & Berntson, 2004; Chiao, Cheon, Pornpattananangkul, Mrazek, & Blizinsky, 2013; Han et al., 2013; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007). However, my goal is to extrapolate big ideas emerging that converge with findings in cognition and human development that open up broader conceptions of human learning and development. These central propositions include (a) dynamic relations between biological and cultural resources, (b) the inherent plasticity of human development, (c) the centrality of culture in human development, (d) how human learning and development unfold within and across ecological spaces and time, and (e) the ways that human thinking and development are connected to contexts.

These particular subfields of cultural, social, and developmental neuroscience converge around the framing of human development unfolding within and across ecological spaces, and not merely as deterministic biologically driven trajectories. Cultural and social neurosciences in particular stress the fundamental interdependence of the biologic and the cultural. Chiao and Ambady (2007) define cultural neuroscience as “a theoretical and empirical approach to investigate and characterize the mechanisms by which [the] hypothesized bidirectional, mutual constitution of culture, brain, and genes occurs” (p. 238). Han et al. (2013) go on to say,

CN research does not study culture as a set of biologically determined predispositions/constraints that can be used to rigidly categorize collections of people. Instead, the CN approach emphasizes the flexibility of the human brain that enables humans to adapt to sociocultural environments. (p. 351)

This is important considering the history of attributing particular cultural practices as determining and fixed. An important emerging consensus argues for the inherent neoplasticity of the brain. In addition to empirical studies (Starlinger & Niemeyer, 1981), we know from everyday experience the ways that blind persons develop enhanced auditory acuity. Cultural neuroscience works from propositions shared in fields of cultural psychology and anthropology that culture consists of shared belief systems embedded in routine cultural practices. Sampling from cross-cultural studies examining how neural processing of culturally congruent and culturally incongruent stimuli differ have shown that categorizing people by pan ethnic identities (e.g., Chinese Americans and Chinese from the Mainland) does not account for differences in processing, suggesting rather it is the actual participation in routine practices over time that counts (Han et al., 2013).