NeuroVisions: Teaching Neuroscience Research Methods with Neuroimaging Data

Center For Image Processing In Education, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Neurovisions is creating, evaluating and disseminating a prototype lesson called "The Path to Recovery". The prototype helps integrate technology into undergraduate education and responds to a need for resources that incorporate neuroimaging into neuroscience curricula. NeuroVisions involves students in discovery-based explorations of addiction, memory, language, emotion, and consciousness with real data provided by leading neuroimaging scientists. Students formulate hypotheses, design experiments, process and analyze brain imaging data, perform statistical analyses, draw conclusions based on their analyses, and write up findings in research reports. NeuroVisions employs WebImage, a Java-based image processing and analysis program developed by key personnel on this project, as an educational technology. WebImage enriches the undergraduate educational experience by giving students a chance to examine real data, make their own discoveries, and see neuroanatomical structures and neurophysiological processes first-hand. The lesson is being tested in undergraduate research methods, neuroscience, and general psychology courses, and changes in student understanding about neuroscience, neuroimaging, and research methods will be measured. Evaluation results will be disseminated in journals and at a Society for Neuroscience meeting; a plan will also be devised to evaluate NeuroVisions in courses taught by members of the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience.