We created an online survey in Hungarian (using Google Forms), which consisted of a short description of the project, followed by two sets of questions and 44 neuroliteracy statements. The first set included demographic questions about age, gender, degree, and residence. The second set included questions about previous education (including courses related to psychology and neuroeducation), questions about the current interest in neuroscience and neuroscience-based educational methods and questions about the sources used for being informed about the above-mentioned topics. The questions were followed by 44 statements, including 23 statements related to brain function and learning, translated and adapted from the study of Dekker et al. (link) (2012 (link)), and 21 additional statements related to neurobiology of motor development and learning foreign languages.
On the basis of the present article’s research aims, we only analyzed the neuroliteracy responses to the 23 statements adapted from the Dekker et al. questionnaire. Of these, 10 statements are educational neuromyths and 13 are statements related to general knowledge about the brain.
Similarly to the study by Grospietsch and Mayer (link) (2019 (link)), we followed the methodological recommendations of Macdonald et al. (link) (2017 (link)) and replaced the three-choice answer format (Correct/Incorrect/I don’t know) used by Dekker et al. (link) (2012 (link)) with a 4-point Likert scale, and the responders were required to specify how sure they were of their answer (4 = Strongly agree, 3 = Somewhat agree, 2 = Somewhat disagree, 1 = Strongly disagree). (For each statement, the answer ‘I don’t know’ was also an option.)
Statements were translated and culturally adapted from English to Hungarian by the members of the research group with relevant qualifications, content knowledge, and proficiency in English, following the ITC recommendations (International Test Commission 2017 ). Some adjustments were made to ensure clarity of the content and to maintain a balanced ratio of correct and incorrect statements. Finally, we digitalized all survey items, and provided a random order of the neuroliteracy statements.
We conducted a pilot study for analyzing the intelligibility of the statements. Ten students were interviewed after completing the survey about their understanding of each statement. Four experts from the research group were responsible for the interviews, who collected the data about possible misunderstandings or other issues. Each interview took 40–50 min on average. Based on the results of the interviews, the statements were finalized with some minor modifications in the online survey.
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