What happens when an individual spinal nerve is damaged or severed? The loss of function upon nerve damage is a straightforward concept to understand. But what if that spinal nerve contributes to the brachial plexus? The brachial plexus can be an intimidating structure for students, but this structure is also rich in regional anatomy connotations…

Differences in early self-regulation skills contribute to disparities in success in early learning and school transition, as well as in childhood well-being. Self-regulation refers to managing emotional, cognitive, and behavioral processes that are conducive to positive adjustment and social relationships. Researchers have identified that various…

What happens when teachers, neuroscientists, and students combine their perspectives in a three-way dialogue about why selected classroom lessons were highly motivating? They discover that the factors that teachers and students believe important to student motivation are solidly aligned with insights from neuroscience. Author Kathleen Cushman…

Sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system constantly control the heart (sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions) and blood vessels (predominantly the sympathetic division) to maintain appropriate blood pressure and organ blood flow over sometimes widely varying conditions. This can be adversely affected by…

How can children's natural perceptuo-motor skills be harnessed for teaching and learning mathematical structure? We address this question in the case of the integers. Existing research suggests that adult mental representations of integers recruit perceptuo-motor functionalities involving symmetry. Building on these findings, we designed a…

In this article, the author describes the empirical studies that have investigated whether play (mostly social play) is rewarding. He then discusses the brain circuits and neurotransmitters that underlie the pleasurable aspects of play. He concludes that the pleasure of play has the ability to reinforce learning activities and that the brain's…

The implementation of standards and high-stakes testing has increased the pressure on classroom teachers to cover content in what seems like an ever-shrinking period of time. What if there was a way to help students pay better attention and remember more of their learning that could also reduce teacher stress? This article describes one way to…

A series of simple activities not only illustrates how our eyes work but also dramatically shows how the brain interprets the eyes' information. Uses these activities to introduce a study of the eye to elementary students and to motivate their interest. (Author/RK)

Presents both an argument and a suggestion for making the teaching of "thought" a visible and substantial component of the English curriculum. (Author/RK)

In this article, the author discusses the psychosocial benefits of cooperative learning. She discovered that when she relinquished traditional autocratic control and allowed her students to collaborate interactively with classmates to achieve common goals, her students became more invested and engaged in their learning. She also discovered that…

Describes a laboratory experiment designed to give beginning physiology students a successful experience with neurophysiological Techniques and to demonstrate some properties of sensory neurons. Pin electrodes are used to record extracellularly from mechanoreceptors in a cockroach leg. (Author/MA)

What does all the recent and much talked about right brain, left brain research mean to you? Authors conduct a symposium in print in which they discuss the research and its findings, and offer ways to use them in your class. (Editor/RK)

Activities are given for a concept guide to help students improve their thinking skills through conceptual awareness.

Centers on the opinions of Michael Lawlor of the Society for Effective Affective Learning (S.E.A.L.) about "right brain" language learning and includes suggestions (with examples presented about learning Greek) for developing one's power of suggestion and applying it to foreign language learning. (CB)

The relationship between current information processing and prior associative theories of human and animal learning, memory, and amnesia are discussed. The paper focuses on the two components of the amnesic syndrome, retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. A neural theory of chunking and consolidation is proposed. (Author/RD)