Dr. Courtney Pollack is a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and a research affiliate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Gabrieli Lab. She works across education research, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to understand and reduce challenges to learning. Her research focuses on how learners process number symbols, how this processing relates to mathematics competence, and the intersection of mathematics and reading domains. More broadly, she is interested in the complexities of interdisciplinary research across mind, brain, education, and related sciences and the effects of whole-child student support interventions on learner outcomes. Prior to her doctorate, Pollack received a B.S. in mathematics and a B.A. in philosophy from University of Pittsburgh, and an Ed.M. in Mind, Brain, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a former mathematics teacher, an experience that continues to motivate her research and teaching today. She believes that interdisciplinary perspectives and bi-directional communication among education stakeholders are necessary to answer important questions in education.
SB: Can you tell us a bit about your trajectory and how you got involved with the field of mind, brain, and education?
CP: A long time ago, I was a middle-school math teacher. When working with students who were having difficulty, I was really interested in how I could better understand the way they were thinking, and how that could help me help them learn better. After teaching, I studied math for a while, and I put that question about how students learn in my back pocket. Then, fast forward some years, I was working as a math standards analyst at an education research organization and there was a new journal, Mind, Brain, and Education. Our organization asked if anyone would be interested in reading it and I said “yes,” and they subscribed. And from there, I fell in love with mind, brain, and education work. I looked up the journal editor, who was Dr. Kurt Fischer. He was a faculty member here at HGSE who co-founded and directed the MBE Master’s program. I reached out to him and asked whether my background and interests were a good fit for the program. He encouraged me to apply. I pulled those questions out of my back pocket, applied, and was accepted into the program. I really enjoyed what I was learning and was fortunate to stay at HGSE for my doctorate to work with Dr. Jon Star, Dr. Gigi Luk, Kurt, and others. I’ve stayed in the field since then.
SB: What would you say changed from when you were teaching math, before learning about mind, brain, and education, and now? How do you think this has influenced you?
CP: I have thought a lot about the settings and the strategies that we use for teaching math. There has been a standard way in the US of having a teacher-centered math classroom. When I was a math teacher, I was also teaching in that way. From all of my learning about how people learn, I have changed my teaching style to be much more about active learning and to be student-centered, which really promotes better learning for students. That's one big change. Another big change for me was thinking about math content. Generally, students gain math skills in a ladder-like fashion. We need to count and know what numbers are before we add, subtract, multiply, and divide. If arithmetic is difficult, it's going to be hard to do math that comes after that. There's this real way that math builds on itself. But we also know from the way that we learn and do math, and the way that the brain supports doing math, that different math skills may draw on different cognitive processes. Just because a student demonstrates difficulty with one particular part of math, doesn't mean they can't engage with more advanced math concepts. We need to be able to hold at the same time that math skills build on each other and that if someone struggles with a particular skill, they don’t need to be stuck until they master that skill. There are some ways in which different aspects of math engage different cognitive processes, and that was really helpful for me to learn.
SB: What would you say is the most important takeaway that students should take from your course on Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, and Education?
CP: I think it’s really important to understand that an interdisciplinary approach is the optimal way to answer complex questions in education. A major takeaway is that different fields ask different types of research questions, have different goals, and are able to give us different parts of the answer. We need to understand what each field can contribute and what the limitations are. By looking across fields and understanding which piece of the puzzle we get from each field, we can make the most valid conclusions about the answers to our research questions. That's the biggest takeaway, and it's a really hard one to get, I think. For example, if I'm looking to cognitive neuroscience research, what can I learn from it? And what’s a limitation of the research itself versus what's a limitation of what I'm asking, which might differ from the actual goal of that research? If I'm asking a question about what's happening in the classroom, I can't put someone in a brain scanner and determine what I should do in class. That's just not something that type of research tells me. But it does tell me something about specific learning mechanisms. Trying to understand what we can and can't learn within and across fields is more than a semester-long process. But we revisit that idea over and over again, throughout the course. The course is really about skill-building through the lens of current topics and initiatives. Students are creating a toolkit to approach interdisciplinary work.
SB: Could you share what are some of the limitations that you see in educational neuroscience research, and perhaps how we can breach those limitations?
CP: Lately, I have been thinking about how to better clarify the difference between the limitations of educational neuroscience research, and what I think are the limitations of what we can expect from that research. Educational neuroscience can't do what a lot of people want it to do, particularly in educational practice. And I don't think that's a shortcoming of the field. It's just a mismatch between expectations and what that type of research affords us. Educational neuroscience is narrower than the broader mind, brain, and education field. Educational neuroscience focuses on the neurocognitive mechanisms of learning. And oftentimes—not always, but almost always—this research is happening in labs in controlled environments, not in classrooms. And that's okay. That research isn't designed to tell us directly what to do in authentic learning environments. It's designed to help us understand specific learning mechanisms. The combination of that research with other research in education can help us better support learning and schooling. But there are limitations to educational neuroscience too, for example, limitations on methods. We might be interested in learning mechanisms, particularly how the brain supports learning, or the relation between brain activation and particular types of learning activities. But, it is resource intensive to put children in scanners, we need to ensure they feel comfortable and safe, and MRI machines aren’t portable. Although there are researchers who are starting to bring portable neuroimaging technologies into classroom spaces, which is very exciting. We talk about this in the course, but the approach is very new and in the very beginning stages. When we zoom out to broader interdisciplinary work, there are more opportunities to emphasize partnerships with educators, or educational researchers, to break down silos of different disciplines. I also think that we need to center questions about diversity and inclusion—how is the mind, brain, education field creating pathways for people to participate and shape the field? Whose voices are represented and whose are not represented or underrepresented? How diverse is our field across many dimensions of diversity? And what are ways that we can improve? This field is not alone in that work. Researchers in psychology and in education are having similar discussions. We too, in this interdisciplinary space, have to work on that, from the psychology perspective, the education perspective, and the interdisciplinary perspective.
SB: What would you say are the biggest changes that should be made to education, or to the way people teach, based on your work?
CP: Some of my research related to math learning can help us better understand relations between constructs or domains. Almost all of that work has been lab-based and isn't directly applicable to teaching yet. For example, I recently led a study examining children’s socioemotional characteristics and performance in the math and reading domains. We found that for both math and reading, motivation within-domain was a stronger predictor of performance than anxiety within-domain. I found this particularly interesting for math, given the focus on math anxiety in research and schooling. We also found that socio-emotional characteristics for reading predicted math performance above and beyond socio-emotional characteristics for math, which illustrates the interrelations of math and reading, and socio-emotional characteristics and performance. If we’re interested to translate that into actual classroom practice, there are additional studies to conceptualize and conduct in authentic learning environments. As a second example, I conducted applied research as a senior researcher at the Center for Thriving Children at Boston College. They ground their school-based interventions in developmental science, how children both affect their environment and are affected by their environment. When we think about learning and schooling, we need to take a holistic approach to understand and support not just what happens in class, but what happens outside of class. That intervention is a really nice example of using existing research and theory to groundwork actually happening in schools. Then, researchers can study the effectiveness of the school-based interventions. There have been several studies showing that the intervention’s holistic support model supports student thriving throughout schooling. This is an example of how research can affect education, when we are talking about education as in-school learning.
SB: Can the insights or the results of these research be applied to public policy? Have you seen examples of that?
CP: Interdisciplinary work across mind, brain, and education fields can definitely affect policy. One example is the work on toxic stress from the Center on the Developing Child here at Harvard. They make the underlying neurobiology and adverse consequences very understandable and accessible to a wide audience and they also engage with policymakers. The Center for Thriving Children also engages with policymakers at the Massachusetts state and federal levels. As one example, I led a study at the Center for Thriving Children on pandemic-related needs for students and families. We learned that access to childcare was a widespread and persistent need. Based on that finding, the center was able to advocate for childcare stabilization funding in Massachusetts. More broadly, the center also communicates to policymakers the ways that out of school challenges can affect school readiness and in-school learning. They advocate for funding for whole-child support, socioemotional learning, physical and mental health services, and so on, to allow students to focus on learning instead of managing barriers to learning that might arise outside of school. Generally, I think there are many opportunities for the mind, brain, and education sciences to affect policy, to take what we know about the science of learning and development and advocate for resources for children in schools to support development and learning.
About the Author
Sarah Borges is a freshman at Harvard College.
SB: Can you tell us a bit about your trajectory and how you got involved with the field of mind, brain, and education?
CP: A long time ago, I was a middle-school math teacher. When working with students who were having difficulty, I was really interested in how I could better understand the way they were thinking, and how that could help me help them learn better. After teaching, I studied math for a while, and I put that question about how students learn in my back pocket. Then, fast forward some years, I was working as a math standards analyst at an education research organization and there was a new journal, Mind, Brain, and Education. Our organization asked if anyone would be interested in reading it and I said “yes,” and they subscribed. And from there, I fell in love with mind, brain, and education work. I looked up the journal editor, who was Dr. Kurt Fischer. He was a faculty member here at HGSE who co-founded and directed the MBE Master’s program. I reached out to him and asked whether my background and interests were a good fit for the program. He encouraged me to apply. I pulled those questions out of my back pocket, applied, and was accepted into the program. I really enjoyed what I was learning and was fortunate to stay at HGSE for my doctorate to work with Dr. Jon Star, Dr. Gigi Luk, Kurt, and others. I’ve stayed in the field since then.
SB: What would you say changed from when you were teaching math, before learning about mind, brain, and education, and now? How do you think this has influenced you?
CP: I have thought a lot about the settings and the strategies that we use for teaching math. There has been a standard way in the US of having a teacher-centered math classroom. When I was a math teacher, I was also teaching in that way. From all of my learning about how people learn, I have changed my teaching style to be much more about active learning and to be student-centered, which really promotes better learning for students. That's one big change. Another big change for me was thinking about math content. Generally, students gain math skills in a ladder-like fashion. We need to count and know what numbers are before we add, subtract, multiply, and divide. If arithmetic is difficult, it's going to be hard to do math that comes after that. There's this real way that math builds on itself. But we also know from the way that we learn and do math, and the way that the brain supports doing math, that different math skills may draw on different cognitive processes. Just because a student demonstrates difficulty with one particular part of math, doesn't mean they can't engage with more advanced math concepts. We need to be able to hold at the same time that math skills build on each other and that if someone struggles with a particular skill, they don’t need to be stuck until they master that skill. There are some ways in which different aspects of math engage different cognitive processes, and that was really helpful for me to learn.
SB: What would you say is the most important takeaway that students should take from your course on Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, and Education?
CP: I think it’s really important to understand that an interdisciplinary approach is the optimal way to answer complex questions in education. A major takeaway is that different fields ask different types of research questions, have different goals, and are able to give us different parts of the answer. We need to understand what each field can contribute and what the limitations are. By looking across fields and understanding which piece of the puzzle we get from each field, we can make the most valid conclusions about the answers to our research questions. That's the biggest takeaway, and it's a really hard one to get, I think. For example, if I'm looking to cognitive neuroscience research, what can I learn from it? And what’s a limitation of the research itself versus what's a limitation of what I'm asking, which might differ from the actual goal of that research? If I'm asking a question about what's happening in the classroom, I can't put someone in a brain scanner and determine what I should do in class. That's just not something that type of research tells me. But it does tell me something about specific learning mechanisms. Trying to understand what we can and can't learn within and across fields is more than a semester-long process. But we revisit that idea over and over again, throughout the course. The course is really about skill-building through the lens of current topics and initiatives. Students are creating a toolkit to approach interdisciplinary work.
SB: Could you share what are some of the limitations that you see in educational neuroscience research, and perhaps how we can breach those limitations?
CP: Lately, I have been thinking about how to better clarify the difference between the limitations of educational neuroscience research, and what I think are the limitations of what we can expect from that research. Educational neuroscience can't do what a lot of people want it to do, particularly in educational practice. And I don't think that's a shortcoming of the field. It's just a mismatch between expectations and what that type of research affords us. Educational neuroscience is narrower than the broader mind, brain, and education field. Educational neuroscience focuses on the neurocognitive mechanisms of learning. And oftentimes—not always, but almost always—this research is happening in labs in controlled environments, not in classrooms. And that's okay. That research isn't designed to tell us directly what to do in authentic learning environments. It's designed to help us understand specific learning mechanisms. The combination of that research with other research in education can help us better support learning and schooling. But there are limitations to educational neuroscience too, for example, limitations on methods. We might be interested in learning mechanisms, particularly how the brain supports learning, or the relation between brain activation and particular types of learning activities. But, it is resource intensive to put children in scanners, we need to ensure they feel comfortable and safe, and MRI machines aren’t portable. Although there are researchers who are starting to bring portable neuroimaging technologies into classroom spaces, which is very exciting. We talk about this in the course, but the approach is very new and in the very beginning stages. When we zoom out to broader interdisciplinary work, there are more opportunities to emphasize partnerships with educators, or educational researchers, to break down silos of different disciplines. I also think that we need to center questions about diversity and inclusion—how is the mind, brain, education field creating pathways for people to participate and shape the field? Whose voices are represented and whose are not represented or underrepresented? How diverse is our field across many dimensions of diversity? And what are ways that we can improve? This field is not alone in that work. Researchers in psychology and in education are having similar discussions. We too, in this interdisciplinary space, have to work on that, from the psychology perspective, the education perspective, and the interdisciplinary perspective.
SB: What would you say are the biggest changes that should be made to education, or to the way people teach, based on your work?
CP: Some of my research related to math learning can help us better understand relations between constructs or domains. Almost all of that work has been lab-based and isn't directly applicable to teaching yet. For example, I recently led a study examining children’s socioemotional characteristics and performance in the math and reading domains. We found that for both math and reading, motivation within-domain was a stronger predictor of performance than anxiety within-domain. I found this particularly interesting for math, given the focus on math anxiety in research and schooling. We also found that socio-emotional characteristics for reading predicted math performance above and beyond socio-emotional characteristics for math, which illustrates the interrelations of math and reading, and socio-emotional characteristics and performance. If we’re interested to translate that into actual classroom practice, there are additional studies to conceptualize and conduct in authentic learning environments. As a second example, I conducted applied research as a senior researcher at the Center for Thriving Children at Boston College. They ground their school-based interventions in developmental science, how children both affect their environment and are affected by their environment. When we think about learning and schooling, we need to take a holistic approach to understand and support not just what happens in class, but what happens outside of class. That intervention is a really nice example of using existing research and theory to groundwork actually happening in schools. Then, researchers can study the effectiveness of the school-based interventions. There have been several studies showing that the intervention’s holistic support model supports student thriving throughout schooling. This is an example of how research can affect education, when we are talking about education as in-school learning.
SB: Can the insights or the results of these research be applied to public policy? Have you seen examples of that?
CP: Interdisciplinary work across mind, brain, and education fields can definitely affect policy. One example is the work on toxic stress from the Center on the Developing Child here at Harvard. They make the underlying neurobiology and adverse consequences very understandable and accessible to a wide audience and they also engage with policymakers. The Center for Thriving Children also engages with policymakers at the Massachusetts state and federal levels. As one example, I led a study at the Center for Thriving Children on pandemic-related needs for students and families. We learned that access to childcare was a widespread and persistent need. Based on that finding, the center was able to advocate for childcare stabilization funding in Massachusetts. More broadly, the center also communicates to policymakers the ways that out of school challenges can affect school readiness and in-school learning. They advocate for funding for whole-child support, socioemotional learning, physical and mental health services, and so on, to allow students to focus on learning instead of managing barriers to learning that might arise outside of school. Generally, I think there are many opportunities for the mind, brain, and education sciences to affect policy, to take what we know about the science of learning and development and advocate for resources for children in schools to support development and learning.
About the Author
Sarah Borges is a freshman at Harvard College.
