The US Department of Justice released the final report on school violence and showed that middle school is the age when violence is high, accounting for more than 70% of all violence cases (Zweig et al., 2013). After having perpetrated, the probability that the perpetrator will commit violence again will increase significantly (Office of the…

In this response, I agree with much of what Schrag says about the principled limits of neuroscience to inform educators' decisions about approaches to learning. However, I also raise questions about the extent to which discoveries about "deficits" in brain function could possibly help teachers. I dispute Schrag's view that externalism/internalism…

Neuro-education, a new frontier for educational researchers, has its passionate advocates and equally passionate detractors. Some philosophers, including Noel Purdy and Hugh Morrison, Andrew Davis, and Ralph Schumacher, have argued that the entire enterprise is misguided. I evaluate and challenge their arguments. This permits me to articulate my…

Computational models are powerful tools--too powerful, according to some. We argue that the idea that models can "do anything" is wrong, and we describe how their failures have been informative. We present new work showing surprising diversity in the effects of feedback on children's task-switching, such that some children perseverate despite this…

While there are hypotheses and theories about which portions of the brain appear to regulate which types of thinking and emotion, people aren't sure how to "change" those parts of the brain to improve critical thinking. Furthermore, while recent studies point to something called neuroplasticity, which hypothesizes that what one does, what one…

Health risk behaviors (HRBs) in adults with spina bifida such as poor diet, reduced physical activity, increased television viewing time, and substance abuse often have their genesis in early childhood. They are potentially preventable but if not addressed aggressively may continue to progress across the lifespan. Findings from a population-based…

By means of an ethnographic project, Sarah Goode's Understanding and Addressing Adult Sexual Attraction to Children aspires to better understand the self-conception and self-identification of pedophiles, with the ultimate aim of deconstructing the phenomenon by which culture demonizes pedophiles in order to better protect children. However, the…

In this paper, we argue that second language (L2) reading research, which has been informed by studies involving first language (L1) alphabetic English reading, may be less relevant to L2 readers with non-alphabetic reading backgrounds, such as Chinese readers with an L1 logographic (Chinese character) learning history. We provide both…

This article is a transcript of a conversation that took place with Edwin Shneidman, PhD, on August 19, 2008. Recent advances in machine learning, particularly neurocognitive computing, have provided a fresh approach to the idea of using computers to analyze the language of the suicidal person. Here this notion and many others are discussed.

Bowers challenged the common view in favor of distributed representations in psychological modeling and the main arguments given against localist and grandmother cell coding schemes. He revisited the results of several single-cell studies, arguing that they do not support distributed representations. We praise the contribution of Bowers (2009) for…

In this article, I review recent findings in cognitive neuroscience in learning, particularly in the learning of mathematics and of reading. I argue that while cognitive neuroscience is in its infancy as a field, theories of learning will need to incorporate and account for this growing body of empirical data.

The commentaries on my article contain a number of points with which I disagree but also several with which I agree. For example, I continue to believe that the existence of many cases in which between-person variability does not increase with age indicates that greater variance with increased age is not inevitable among healthy individuals up to…

The paucity of research on learning and development may seem surprising, but it is a pervasive fact. Research relating brain science to learning and development is even sparser, with scant evidence investigating connections between mind, brain, and education. Indeed one reason for the prevalence of neural myths is that so little research links…

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…

This essay explores how viewing a single Theatre for Young Audiences production might affect the attitudes, values, and/or beliefs of adolescent spectators. Data is drawn from a mixed-methods case study performed with middle school students who viewed a professional performance for young people, and is considered through the lens of cognitive…