Mind, Brain, & Education

Mind, Brain, and Education: Neuroscience Implications for the Classroom is the sixth book in the Leading EdgeTM series. The Leading Edge series unites education authorities from around the globe and asks them to confront the important issues that affect teachers and administrators the issues that profoundly impact student success.

Mind, Brain, and Education is a landmark publication in the emerging science of educational neuroscience. The leading researchers who contribute to the volume use neuroscience s growing knowledge of how the brain functions and develops to explore the field s implications for pedagogy and the classroom. The contributors investigate such questions as the following:

- What are the neurological foundations of learning and of individual differences in learning?

- How did educators get involved with neuroscience, and where might this involvement lead?

- What does neuroscience reveal about the brain s ability to use written and spoken language, to use mathematics, and to think creatively?

- How can educational neuroscience improve the teaching of these abilities?

David A. Sousa explains the origins of educational neuroscience and the impact of brain research on education. Michael I. Posner describes how advances in neuroimaging technology led to deeper understandings of the brain. Judy Willis shares practical classroom strategies for applying what is known about the brain. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Matthias Faeth present a neuroscientific view of how emotions affect learning and suggest practices to improve the emotional and cognitive aspects of classroom learning. Diane L. Williams reviews the neuroscience research and debunks popular myths about learning language. John Gabrieli, Joanna A. Christodoulou, Tricia O'Loughlin, and Marianna D. Eddy examine what we know about how the brain learns to read, why some children struggle to read, and what research tells us about reading interventions. Donna Coch explains what neuroscience has revealed about the interaction of the visual and auditory processing systems, the development of the alphabetic principle, semantics, and comprehension. Keith Devlin explores what we know to date about innate number sense and proposes instructional approaches in mathematics based on recent neuroscience research. Stanislas Dehaene discusses the three networks used to evaluate the number of a set of objects, how humans innately approximate number, and how this knowledge can be used to help students learn mathematics. Daniel Ansari describes how concrete neurological differences contribute to individuals' varying mathematical ability. Mariale M. Hardiman presents neuroscience research about the nature of creativity and how it can be cultivated through the arts, then introduces a framework for integrating creativity across content and grade levels. Kurt W. Fischer and Katie Heikkinen argue that new knowledge about the brain necessitates collaboration between neuroscientists and educators to shift current thinking about teaching and learning.