Davis[10] argues that medical models of cognition, "...have only a very limited role in the broader field of education and learning mainly because learning-related intentional states are not internal to individuals in a way which can be examined by brain activity".
[2][4][5] Scholars, such as Herbert Walberg and Geneva Haertel, trace the beginning of Educational neuroscience to the era between 1800 and 1850 when the scientific study of sense organs began to make advancements.
Neuroscience research into early brain development has informed government education policy for children under three years old in many countries including the US and the United Kingdom.
These policies have focused on enriching the environment of children during nursery and preschool years, exposing them to stimuli and experiences thought to maximise the learning potential of the young brain.
He draws attention to the fact that behavioural research alone was not decisive in determining whether developmental dyslexia was a disorder of primarily visual or phonological origin.
[33] Children who experience difficulties with oral language raise significant challenges for educational policy and practice;[34] National Strategies, Every Child a Talker (2008).
The difficulties are likely to persist during the primary school years[35] where, in addition to core deficits with oral language, children experience problems with literacy,[36] numeracy[37] and behaviour and peer relations.
Over the last decade, there has been a significant increase in neuroscience research examining young children's processing of language at the phonetic, word, and sentence levels.
Intense remediation with an auditory language processing program has been accompanied by functional changes in left temporo-parietal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus.
Mathematical skills are important not only for the national economy but also for an individual's life chances: low numeracy increases the probability of arrest, depression, physical illnesses, unemployment.
Twin[48] and family[49] studies suggest that dyscalculia is highly heritable, and genetic anomalies, such as Turner's Syndrome, indicate an important role for genes in the X chromosome.
The UK's Chief Scientific Advisor, John Beddington, notes that, "developmental dyscalculia is currently the poor relation of dyslexia, with a much lower public profile.
In processing facial expressions the female advantage appears best explained by an integrated account considering both brain maturation and social interaction.
This view emphasizes the importance of bringing together neuroscientific and social constructionist perspectives, in this case in examining the influence of emotion on transferable learning.
[69] Hence, the degree to which school-age children and young adults are aware of their emotions may vary across this time period, which may have an important impact on classroom behaviour and the extent to which certain teaching styles and curriculum approaches might be effective.
Jones et al. (2009)[70] showed that children with callous-unemotional traits revealed less brain activation in the right amygdala in response to fearful faces, suggesting that the neural correlates of that type of emotional disturbance are present early in development.
From the perspective of basic neuroscience, recent evidence suggests that attention skills may be one of the human brain functions that respond best to early intervention and training (e.g.[73]).
Basic neuroscience studies have identified the primary brain structures and circuits involved in executive functions, including the prefrontal cortex, in adults.
However, the primary flaw of the education neuroscience argument in Bruer's opinion is that it attempts to link what happens at the synaptic level to higher order learning and instruction.
Despite Willingham's assertion[22] that the potential for neuroscience to contribute to educational practice and theory is already beyond doubt, he highlights three challenges that must be overcome to marry the two disciplines effectively.
The Goals Problem: Willingham suggests that education is a so-called "artificial science" that seeks to construct an ‘artifact’, in this case a set of pedagogic strategies and materials.
This difference means that some goals set by education are simply impossible to answer using neuroscience research, for example, the building of character or aesthetic sense in children.
Willingham suggests that this ‘horizontal problem’ can be solved only when a rich body of behavioral data and theories already exist,[80] and points out that such methods have already been successful in identifying subtypes of dyslexia (e.g.[81][82]).
Finally Willingham suggests that neuroscience will only be useful to educators when targeted at a specific problem at a fine grained level of analysis, such as how people read, but that these data will only be useful in the context of well developed behavioral theories.
Other researchers, such as Katzir & Pareblagoev[30] have pointed out that neuroimaging methodology as it stands may not be suitable for the examination of higher level cognitive functions, because it relies primarily on the ‘subtraction method’.
However, Varma et al. argue that novel experimental paradigms create the opportunity to investigate context, such as brain activation following different learning procedures[86] and that neuroimaging can also allow for the examination of strategic/mechanistic developmental changes that cannot be tapped by reaction time and behavioural measures alone.
Furthermore, Varma et al. cite recent research that shows that the effects of cultural variables can be investigated using brain imaging (e.g.[87]), and the results used to draw implications for classroom practice.
Timing: Neuroscience, while expanding rapidly, is still in relative infancy with regards to the non-invasive study of healthy brains, and thus education researchers should wait until more data is collected and distilled into succinct theories.
Greenwood (2009)[85] suggests that as the body of knowledge available to educators increases, and the ability to be expert in all areas diminishes, the most productive standpoint would the fourth outlined by,[87] that of cautious acceptance of neuroscientific findings and proactive collaboration.
Periods of intense synaptogenesis are typically correlated with the emergence of certain skills and cognitive functions, such as visual fixation, grasping, symbol use and working memory.