There is considerable interest in the cultivation of student graphic literacy among educators and researchers, especially in the sciences. Previous research, however, has shown that many students manifest difficulties in using diagrammatic representations. One explanation that has been proposed to account for these difficulties is that certain…

Many concepts have been published relevant to improving the design of PowerPoint[TM] (PP) presentations for didactic purposes, including the redundancy, modality, and signaling principles of multimedia learning. In this article, we review the recent neuroimaging findings that have emerged elucidating the neural structures involved in many of these…

The design of learning spaces is rightly gaining more and more pedagogical attention, as they influence the learning climate and learning results in multiple ways. General structural characteristics influence the willingness to learn through emotional well-being and a sense of security. Specific structural characteristics influence cognitive…

Behavioral studies on bilingual learning have revealed cognitive costs (lower accuracy and/or higher processing time) when the language of application differs from the language of learning. The aim of this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to provide insights into the cognitive underpinnings of these costs (so-called…

The surgical removal of brain tissue for the treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy can be either nonselective, as with an anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL), or selective, as with a selective amygdalohippocampectomy (SAH). Although seizure outcomes are similar with both procedures, cognitive and memory outcomes remain a matter of debate. This study…

The ability to represent numerical quantities in symbolic form is a necessary foundation for mathematical competence. Variables are particularly important symbolic representations for learning algebra and succeeding in higher mathematics, but the mechanisms of how students link a variable to what it represents are not well understood. Research…

Pickering and Howard-Jones (2007) reported educators' enthusiasm for NeuroEducation from a sample of teachers attending neuroscience professional development courses. Their results revealed teachers: (1) are enthusiastic about the role of neuroscience in education; (2) believe an understanding of the brain for educational program development is…

Bringing research into educational practice is necessary but does not happen automatically. The Transfercenter for Neuroscience and Learning, at the University of Ulm in Germany, is set up to transfer (neuro)scientific knowledge into educational practice. In doing so we have learned why this does not happen automatically, and have tried to make…

Advocates of the arts agree that the K-12 curriculum should include dedicated time for arts instruction. Some have argued further that knowledge and skills acquired through the arts transfer to nonarts domains. Others claim that evidence of this kind of transfer is limited and instead argue that the arts cultivate valuable dispositions that help…

Animals cannot teach as humans do. Therefore, we lack the experimental support of animal studies that are so important to understand the evolution of our basic learning skills but are useless to explore the development of the teaching skills, unique to humans. And most important: children teach! We have at least two new challenges in our Mind,…

Recent advances in technologies for neuroscientific research enable us to investigate the neurobiological substrates of the human ethical sense. This article introduces several findings in "the brain science of ethics" obtained through "brain-observation" and "brain-manipulation" approaches. Studies over the past decade have revealed that several…

The relation of stress hormones and activity in stress response systems to the development of aspects of cognition and behavior important for educational achievement and attainment is examined from the perspective of the developmental psychobiological model. It is proposed that research in neuroendocrinology supports three general conclusions,…

Self-regulation ability is an important component of children's academic success. Physiological reactivity may relate to brain activity governing attention and behavioral regulation. Saliva samples collected from 186 preschool children (101 boys, mean age = 53 months, 34% minority) before and after a series of mildly challenging games and again 30…

We discuss the fruits of educational neuroscience research from our laboratory and show how the typical maturational timing milestones in bilingual language acquisition provide educators with a tool for differentiating a bilingual child experiencing language and reading delay versus deviance. Further, early schooling in two languages…

What does contemporary neuroscience offer educational practice? The promise seems immense, as we come to understand better how the brain learns. However, critics caution that only a few concrete implications for practice have emerged, nowhere near a rewrite of the craft of teaching and learning. How then can we understand better the relationship…