Didactics as a Bioeducational Science. Epistemological Issues, Research Perspectives

Abstract

The need, in the study of the man in situation, to gain a complex point of view, more capable of restoring the whole dimension of problems, opens up to a new idea of scientific rationality and research: a rationality typical of a science able to synthesise or at least to meet other sciences that are complementary to it with a view to interdisciplinary openness. Among these sciences, cognitive neuroscience certainly carves out a relevant space in the relationship with pedagogy and didactics. However, in dialogue with cognitive neuroscience, those who carry on didactic research should avoid falling into both the reductionist application and the posture of the polyglot scientist. In the first case we would end up thinking of Didactics as a peripheral province of cognitive neuroscience: to these it would be the task to study the phenomena and to find the experimental evidences, to the Didactics only to imagine what derives for the work in class from those evidences. Keeping in mind the problematic and evolutionary framework described within the article we are moving towards a meta-analysis research and another that tries to set out on the path of neuroeducational research through the assortment of a multidisciplinary research team. The Located Learning Episode (EAS) responds to a logic of microlearning, or temporal circumscription of the activities to be performed. From this point of view, it can be considered the pivotal element of cognitive anticipation as a bearer of a twofold function of situating student learning and of triggering the mechanism of prediction.