Innovation in education. Commentary: Teaching statistics using dance and movement and a case for neuroscience in mathematics education

Citation: Senior C (2016) Innovation in education. Commentary: Teaching statistics using dance and movement and a case for neuroscience in mathematics education. Mathematical expertise is central to our understanding of science, drives innovation throughout all aspects of society and ultimately facilitates the economy of nations (OECD, 2010). There is little doubt as to its importance and as such it is taught to varying degrees of success across nearly all educational systems (Kaiser and Sriraman, 2006). Yet certain cultures regularly still show an advantage over others in developing mathematical expertise (Tcheang, 2014). Take the example of the competencies revealed in Asian cultures that may be due, in part, to the almost ubiquitous use of the abaci throughout Schools in Asia (Brinkworth, 1997). Regular training on the abacus during the formative school years has been shown to recruit cortical regions that are implicated in the computation of visuospatial processing in the service of mathematical computations (Hatano et al., 1977; Stigler, 1984; Ku et al., 2012). Such evidence highlights the effectiveness of certain interventions within school level educational programmes that drive competencies in later life but also shows that interventions do have an impact at the cortical level. What is not known is whether there are other such naturalistic interventions that could be developed to improve mathematical competency. There are obvious advantages to the identification of educational programmes that align themselves to naturalistic behaviors. Notwithstanding the economic benefits of designing student activities that would also occur outside of the classroom there is a clear advantage to the effective delivery of activities that develop a transferable skillset that will eventually benefit the world of work (Bridges, 1993). The alignment of didactic practice to naturalistic social behaviors has been termed mise-en-place. This is a phrase taken from professional catering referring to the manner in which a chef ensures that a workstation is appropriately organized to take advantage of his natural movements to ensure an efficient service (Skolnick-Weisberg et al., 2014). Contemporary educationalists have adopted the phrase to describe the benefits realized by reshaping the physical learning environment so that it supports the execution of more socially relevant and naturalistic behaviors (Skolnick-Weisberg et al., 2014). With regards to mathematic competencies the adoption of a mise-en-place type approach has already been shown to recruit additional cortical regions in the computation of mathematical problems (Grabner et al., 2007; De Smedt et al., 2011). Indeed the interaction between this …