Cognition and Education: How to Create a Sustainable Bridge

Dear Colleagues,

There is no doubt that cognition and education are two fertile research fields. In recent years, they have contributed to extend theories as well as to help and form practitioners. Cognition has contributed to increase our knowledge of human processes and skills, while education has promoted new and efficient instructional methods and educational programs.

However, in the last decade many scholars have questioned the interaction between these two disciplines. Conferences, papers, and journals addressed the matter, evaluating whether and how a common ground could exist. Moreover, they allowed experts to merge their perspectives around a common table and discuss their own findings.

Although some results obtained in the psychological domain are evaluated and included in the educational field, it often happens that findings are misinterpreted and lead to the creation of false beliefs. In addition, the two disciplines are not offered a concrete and sustainable opportunity to share their methods and results. On the one hand, practitioners are given several "to-do" and "not-to-do" lists; on the other hand, they push researchers to fulfil to their own “desires” lists. This vicious mechanism is detrimental to the development of both psychological and educational research fields. We strongly believe that there must be other ways for the two fields to communicate with each other.

Rather than positing criticism to what is lacking, the main intention of the Special Issue consists in collecting a series of papers which would constructively contribute to create a sustainable virtuous circle. Therefore, this Special Issue is expected to publish papers that provide examples to both researchers and practitioners in psychology and education about how to design learning methods and environments in a sustainable way. Consequently, a secondary aim will be the promotion of wellbeing and of more effective learners.

With contributions from leading researchers in educational psychology, we try to establish a useful and relevant frame of reference about how the two disciplines could converge to each other. Moreover, experts in both psychological and educational domains are asked to find a way to communicate relevant issues in their research to experts in the other reciprocal domain. Therefore, the Special Issue expects not only submissions from the conjunction of the two research fields, but solicits leading experts in their respective fields to submit papers about how their findings could produce relevant outcomes and stimulate research in the other field.

We look forward to receiving your contributions, which would move the discussion between cognition and education onto a more beneficial and fruitful level.

Prof. Dr. Demis Basso
Dr. Milvia Cottini
Guest Editors

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