ABSTRACT
The recent interest in mining educational neuroscience and psychological research for methods to improve educational outcomes belies the difficulty of translating research findings into classroom practice. Effective translation crucially relies on a dialogue between educators and researchers: on the one hand, to turn an understanding of how the mind works into techniques to improve learning and, on the other hand, to enable educators to move the research agenda onto issues that are most pressing in schools today. Educational neuroscience is relatively new compared to the psychology of learning, and it is perhaps more controversial. Certainly, most of neuroscience research is not relevant to education, and most of education research is not relevant to neuroscience. Perhaps the most important contribution of neuroscience to understanding adolescence is to lay bare exactly how long many of these sophisticated skills take to develop, revealed by evidence that brain circuits can still be found to be changing into the late teens and early twenties.
