An Innovative Curriculum Where the Lab and the Classroom Meet: Sustained Attention and Learning

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

Mind, Brain and Education (MBE) research has long been advocated for embracing transdisciplinary learning and scientific inquiry (Gosavi and Toomarian, 2024), but it has been found a huge gap between research findings within the lab and real classroom practice (Faraone et al., 2021; Xu et al., 2022). Most students have limited exposure to brain science due to lack of curricular resources and lack of teacher knowledge (Saravanapandian et al., 2019). Here, we describe an innovative curriculum as the product of a researcher-practitioner collaboration between neuroscientists and educators, aiming to offer young minds a front row seat to frontier neuroscience research and imaging technology, as well as a novel neuroscientific perspective to approach cognitive science processes. Specifically, our program focuses on the topic of sustained attention highly pertaining to the interest of both students and practioners, empowering them to develop a critical understanding of the attentive brain through authentic, immersive, hands-on neuroscientific inquiry.