Education Week‘s coverage of the emerging field of educational neuroscience seems to be generating some great conversations around the state of the field and teachers’ and roles). For those of you who want to continue reading and learning about the field, I’ve put together a list of some additional resources I found useful when I was researching the package. (Please note that this is far from a comprehensive list; if I included individual research papers, we’d be here all year.)
• The American Educational Research Association’s special interest group in brain, neurosciences, and education posts regular updates of AERA-related research in mind, brain, and education, plus a whole host of links to various research labs and organizations.
• The Mind, Brain, and Education Journal, published by the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society, provides quarterly updates on educational neuroscience research. It was launched in 2007 and named the “best new journal” that year by the Association of American Publishers, and has a number of helpful related podcasts.
• Jobs for the Future’s “Students at the Center” project released a series of reports this spring intended to link what is known of educational neuroscience to teaching practice and day-to-day student learning.
• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Center for Educational Research and Innovation has a great overview, a few years old now but still forcefully debunking some of the most prevalent brain science myths.
• Those interested in the field may also want to add to their summer reading list Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa’s Mind, Brain, and Education Science: A Comprehensive Guide to the New Brain-Based Teaching for a basic primer on the issues and Barbara Arrowsmith-Young’s The Woman Who Changed Her Brain for some fun stories of the edges of brain research (There’s an interview with Arrowsmith-Young on the book here.)
• Brainfacts.org, a newly launched collaboration of the Society of Neuroscience and the Kavli Foundation, provides lay explanations of all sorts of brain research, not just related to education and child development but also adult and aging cognition.
• If you want to get more involved, check out the Dana Foundation, which sponsors research and educational outreach programs on brain science and education year round, culminating in the annual Brain Awareness Week festivities each March.
Finally, you can also test your brain science savvy with this quiz.