The purpose of this position paper is to raise awareness of intriguing interdisciplinary intersections among physical activity, motor learning/development, creativity, and cognition. A major intersection is the potential of physical activity that involves the effortful learning of novel and/or complex movement actions to elicit cognitive…

Now in a second edition, this popular resource shows teachers and childcare providers how to work with young children based on current neuroscience research. Revised and expanded, it contains a wealth of practical and specific activities and materials to use with infants and toddlers to enhance growth and development. For each activity presented,…

This article considers alternatives to the established constructivist approaches to children's literature, exploring instead the potential of two relatively recent areas of inquiry, cognitive poetics and evolutionary literary criticism. The article questions the assumption, implied if not directly expressed by Peter Hollindale in "Signs of…

This commentary reviews and summarises the strides which neuroscience has made in our present understanding of the development of literacy and numeracy in children. Specifically, it draws attention to key insights from studies which have elucidated the possible neural mechanisms that may account for difficulties in the development of these…

The potential of educational neuroscience in teacher training and continuing professional development has been debated extensively, yet knowledge translation is largely absent in this field. Without objective methods for translating and disseminating educational neuroscience evidence, the impact of training on educators and the children they serve…

This commentary serves as an introduction to multiple scholarly fields about the value of digital media for providing contexts for and provoking learning. The author proposes that rather than considering a dichotomy between reading physical books and reading digital media, as encouraged by Cavanaugh et al. (2015), instead consider a scale of sorts…

The author of this thought-provoking article joins an impressive cohort of current commentators and scholars united in their concern over the state of the art of reading. Mostly, they are concerned with the sustained, silent, generally solitary process of reading in which the reader is deeply focused on and immersed in the text. Their fear is that…

Immordino-Yang and Gotlieb provide an elegant and helpful framework that integrates neuroscientific and education research on social affective development in their article, "Embodied Brains, Social Minds, Cultural Meaning: Integrating Neuroscientific and Educational Research on Social-Affective Development." Based on previous research,…

One of the critical challenges that faces societies today is how to educate children and young people to cope with the ever demanding contexts in which they live. This education must include the relationships and support that facilitate socio-emotional development. This writing explores the work of Pestalozzi, a pioneering pedagogue, who, over two…

This integrative text spotlights what educators need to know about children's cognitive development across grade levels (PreK-12) and content areas. The book provides a concise introduction to developmental neuroscience and theories of learning. Chapters on general cognitive abilities probe such crucial questions as what children are capable of…

Neuroscience offers insight into how we learn. Understanding how to leverage neural development pathways is of interest in teaching because the circuits in the brain respond to effective pedagogical practice; therefore, the role of the teacher is critical. Neuroscientific studies (Damasio in The feeling of what happens: body, emotion and the…

New advances in neurobiology are revealing that brain development and the learning it enables are directly dependent on social-emotional experience. Growing bodies of research reveal the importance of socially triggered epigenetic contributions to brain development and brain network configuration, with implications for social-emotional…

Developmental cognitive neuroscience studies tend to show that the prefrontal brain regions (known to be involved in inhibitory control) are activated during the generation of creative ideas. In the present article, we discuss how a dual-process model of creativity--much like the ones proposed to account for decision making and reasoning--could…

This book highlights new scientific research about how people learn, including interdisciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, the social, cognitive and behavioural sciences, education, computer and information sciences, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and engineering. These new developments offer fascinating new perspectives, based on…

The author suggests the brain's cerebellum and cerebral cortex are the origin of culture and considers the cerebellar models that came to constitute culture to be derived specifically from play. He summarizes recent research on the behavioral, cognitive, and affective evolution of the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex that shows the development…