Mapping perceived training gaps in educational neuroscience among Brazilian teachers

Educational neuroscience has attracted substantial interest from teachers, but professional-development programs are often designed without a formal assessment of the difference between what educators believe they know and what they wish to learn. This secondary analysis of a cross-sectional survey examined perceived training needs in educational neuroscience among 204 active Brazilian teachers. Participants rated, on six-point scales (0-5), their self-perceived knowledge and their desire to learn more about 10 neuroscience-related topics. We defined a training-gap indicator as the within-participant difference between desired knowledge and self-perceived knowledge, ranging from -5 to +5. Positive values indicated a perceived need for further training. Overall self-perceived knowledge was 2.86 ± 1.04, whereas desire to learn was 3.88 ± 1.10, producing a mean global training gap of 1.01 ± 1.15. A positive global gap was present in 69.6% of participants. All 10 topics showed significant positive gaps after false-discovery-rate correction. The largest gaps concerned neurodevelopment and brain plasticity, the adolescent brain, dyslexia/dysgraphia/dyscalculia, learning disorders, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Global training needs did not differ by school sector or teaching level and were not independently associated with age, teaching experience, gender, or disciplinary background. Training-format preferences differed significantly, with individual reading and remote modalities rated more highly than in-person formats, although the overall effect size was small. These findings suggest that perceived demand for educational- neuroscience training is broad rather than confined to specific teacher subgroups. A topic-prioritized, flexible, and scientifically grounded curriculum may therefore be more useful than narrowly targeted initiatives based only on demographic or institutional characteristics.