COMMENT ON THE EDUCATIONAL RELEVANCE OF RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

Byrnes and Fox present a sophisticated approach to the development of useful relations between cognitive neuroscience and education. Their a pproach, which is similar to approaches advocated by other educational psychologists, emphasizes the importance of findings in cognitive neu roscience to the building of educationally useful models of learning. In contrast to that defensible approach is a popular but simplistic ap proach that tries to relate the results of individual cognitive neuros cience studies directly to the improvement of teaching. The advantages of the sophisticated approach presented by Byrnes and Fox are discuss ed and supported for their important roles in the development of produ ctive relations between cognitive neuroscience and education.