MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION Mind, Brain, and Literacy: Biomarkers as Usable Knowledge for Education Usha Goswami 1 ABSTRACT—Neuroscience has the potential to make some very exciting contributions to education and pedagogy. However, it is important to ask whether the insights from neuroscience studies can provide ‘‘usable knowledge’’ for educators. With respect to literacy, for example, current neuroimaging methods allow us to ask research questions about how the brain develops networks of neurons specialized for the act of reading and how literacy is organized in the brain of a reader with developmental dyslexia. Yet quite how these findings can translate to the classroom remains unclear. One of the most exciting possibilities is that neuroscience could deliver ‘‘biomarkers’’ that could identify children with learning difficulties very early in development. In this review, I will illustrate how the field of mind, brain, and education might develop biomarkers by combining educational, cognitive, and neuroscience research paradigms. I will argue that all three kinds of research are necessary to provide usable knowledge for education. Traditionally, the term ‘‘biomarker’’ (an objectively measurable biological marker) has referred to plasma or protein products, for example, in cerebral spinal fluid (e.g., high levels of tau protein in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease). However, a biomarker can also be a neuroimaging signature, such as the underactivation of a certain neural network or a cognitive signature, such as the cognitive measures of early decline (e.g., impaired memory function) that are strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease (Beddington et al., 2008). These developments offer a window of opportunity for the field of 1 Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge Address correspondence to Professor Usha Goswami, Centre for Neuroscience, Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Rd, Cambridge CB2 8PQ, UK; e-mail: ucg10@cam.ac.uk mind, brain, and education. The identification of biomarkers for educational skills like reading and mathematics offers the potential for the field of neuroscience to contribute usable knowledge to education. However, it is not clear that the field is sufficiently advanced to identify biomarkers based on protein products. I will argue here that, as mind and brain are intimately related, a robust cognitive marker may in fact have more utility or ‘‘usability’’ for the field than a cerebral marker. Nevertheless, neuroscience has a key role to play in identifying cognitive biomarkers, because neuroscience can offer unique insights into causal developmental mechanisms. In this review, I will try to illustrate how neuroscience methods can make a critical contribution to the mind, brain, and education field by deepening our understanding of causal mechanisms. Taking the critical precursor skill for literacy of phonological awareness as an example, I will show how an integrated research program can help us to understand the developmental mechanisms that lead to a learning difficulty such as developmental dyslexia. Developmental dyslexia is usually characterized as a specific problem with reading and spelling that cannot be accounted for by low intelligence, poor educational opportunities, or obvious sensory or neurological damage. Once it becomes possible to agree on the underlying causal mechanisms that give rise to specific problems, the field of mind, brain, and education will have the tools to develop a range of biomarkers for identifying the learning difficulty in question. For developmental dyslexia, these could include biomarkers at the level of brain structure (e.g., Niogi & McCandliss, 2006), brain function (e.g., Eden & Zeffiro, 1998), genes (Dale et al., 1998), and cognition (e.g., Goswami et al., 2002). As cognitive markers are typically cheaper to administer than markers that rely on neural imaging or the extraction of protein products, the most useful ‘‘usable knowledge’’ for education may be better cognitive measures for identifying educational risk. My essential argument is that cognitive measures will be based on firmer foundations if the neural 176 © 2009 the Author Journal Compilation © 2009 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Blackwell Publishing, Inc. Volume 3—Number 3