ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that advances in neuroscience can give insights into learning in the classroom. The individual differences approach draws focus to the limiting factors on a child’s progress, at the expense of understanding the learning mechanisms and environments that are needed to learn a skill at all. Educational neuroscience is consistent with the wider ambition of accumulating an evidence base of what works in education. The heart of educational neuroscience must remain a dialogue between educators, policymakers, and those working in the learning sciences. The dialogue needs to involve teachers influencing the direction of research as much as researchers communicating science findings, and the translation of individual techniques into forms that are useful in the classroom is an enterprise that can only be achieved collaboratively. Critics of educational neuroscience have sometimes portrayed neuroscience and psychology as being in competition for which discipline should inform education.
