
Educational neuroscience brings together insights from education, neuroscience and psychology to enhance student learning.
We can use knowledge about how people learn to develop and test evidence-informed teaching practices that help young people achieve more at school.
Combining expertise from education, neuroscience and psychology can also help to dispel neuromyths(opens in a new tab) – common misconceptions about how we learn and how the brain functions.
In 2014, we launched the Education and Neuroscience Initiative in partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation(opens in a new tab) (EEF).
The initiative aimed to:
Through the initiative we funded projects in the following areas:
These projects are some of the only educational interventions informed by neuroscience to have been systematically tested at scale for academic impact in the classroom.
They all had to demonstrate potential to be effective, scalable and affordable for schools.
These projects connect teachers with research on the science of learning in a variety of ways.
We surveyed teachers and parents to find out their views on how neuroscience affects education. Read the final report [PDF 650KB] and appendix [PDF 225KB].
The EEF's literature review(opens in a new tab) examines the impact of interventions that are, or claim to be, based on neuroscience.
In June 2018 we hosted the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction’s (EARLI) biennial Neuroscience and Education conference(opens in a new tab). The conference brought together researchers from education, neuroscience and psychology to hear about the latest developments in the field. Catch up with the talks(opens in a new tab).
In 2016 we ran the pre-conference at the International Mind, Brain and Education Conference(opens in a new tab) in Toronto. Read more about what we learnt(opens in a new tab).