Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

Human beings construct narratives about the world and their experiences in it--whether in math class or at the dinner table, people tell themselves stories about who they and others are, how the world works and why. Among teenagers, these meaning-making narratives are related to the activity and changing connectivity of the networks in their…

"Brain-Based Learning with Gifted Students" combines relevant research in neuroscience with engaging activities for gifted elementary students in grades 3-6. This book: (1) Teaches how development and learning processes happen in the brain; (2) Helps students and teachers explore specific brain-based concepts together; (3) Includes a…

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…

Modern neuroscience research, including neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has provided valuable insights that advanced our understanding of brain development and learning processes significantly. However, there is a lively discussion about whether and how these insights can be meaningful to the…

Education is a socially structured form of learning. It involves the brains of different players--students, teachers, family members, and others--in permanent interaction. The biological set of mechanisms by which these brains receive, encode, store, and retrieve mutually exchanged information is called "neuroplasticity". This is the…

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…

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…

One of the key questions in education is how the learning process in the classroom takes place and how different environmental and individual circumstances (attention, motivation, nutrition, stimulus presentation, etc.) can enhance the child's capabilities to learn and to remember. These and other cognitive skills are shaped as a consequence of…

In this article, Jennifer Groff explores the role of the arts in education through the lens of current research in cognitive neuroscience and the impact of technology in today's digital world. She explains that although arts education has largely used multiple intelligences theory to substantiate its presence in classrooms and schools, this…

The impulse to investigate the natural world is deeply rooted in our earliest childhood experiences. This notion has long guided researchers to uncover the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of scientific reasoning in children. Until recently, however, research in cognitive development and education followed largely independent…