Teaching Undergraduate Neuroscience with Brain Teaser Experiments

SUMMARY

Neuroscience knowledge is of fundamental importance to the occupational therapist and other health care professionals, but neuroscience courses are often viewed in schools of health sciences as among the most arduous of the curriculum. To enhance student learning, the author has developed a series of in-class activities, “brainteasers,” that are integrated into each subject module of a semester-long undergraduate neuroscience course. In the brain teaser activities, students experience intriguing sensory and motor phenomena, then use inductive reasoning to generate plausible hypotheses concerning the underlying neural mechanisms. Students profit doubly from these activities, learning neuroscience while practicing critical thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Neuroscience teaching
• problem-based learning
• active learning
• inductive reasoning