Papers by Martin Westwell
The …, Jan 1, 2010
The importance of neuroscience in education is becoming widely recognized by both neuroscientists... more The importance of neuroscience in education is becoming widely recognized by both neuroscientists and educators. However, to date, there has been little effective collaboration between the two groups, resulting in the spread of ideas in education poorly based on neuroscience. For their part, educators are often too busy to develop sufficient scientific literacy, and neuroscientists are put off collaborations with risk of overinterpretation of their work. We designed and led a successful 6-month collaborative project between educators and neuroscientists. The project consisted of a series of seminars on topics chosen by both parties such as the neuroscience of attention, learning, and memory and aimed to create a dialog between the two. Here, we report that all teachers found the seminars relevant to their practice and that the majority felt the information was presented in an accessible manner. Such was the success of the project that teachers felt there were direct changes in their classroom practice as a consequence and that the course should be more widely available. We suggest that this format of co-constructed dialog allows for lucrative collaborations between neuroscientists and educators and may be a step to bridging the waters that separate these intrinsically linked disciplines.
Page 1. Who's teaching science in South Australia? August 2009 Associate Professor Debra Pan... more Page 1. Who's teaching science in South Australia? August 2009 Associate Professor Debra Panizzon Professor Martin Westwell Katrina Elliott Page 2. Who s teaching science in South Australia? i Contents Executive Summary ii Acknowledgements iv ...
Book Chapters by Martin Westwell
Creativity and Giftedness: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Mathematics and Beyond, 2017
Creativity and giftedness have long been linked together in the literature, particularly where gi... more Creativity and giftedness have long been linked together in the literature, particularly where giftedness is conceived, not in the analytically focused sense of schoolhouse giftedness (e.g. Renzulli, 1978), but in the sense of creative-productive giftedness that emphasizes the generation and production of ideas. Creativity has a well-established foundation in the psychological literature, and a growing body of work derived from neuroscientific approaches. How do these contrasting psychological and neuroscientific approaches inform our understanding of creativity as a component of giftedness in general? How is giftedness manifest in mathematics in the creative-productive sense? What do psychology and neuroscience tell us about the process of fostering mathematical giftedness specifically?
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Papers by Martin Westwell
Book Chapters by Martin Westwell