By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark
For most of history the brain was treated as a black box—an organ whose workings were mysterious and largely inaccessible. Only in the late twentieth century did science begin to reveal how the brain processes information and adapts. As Leslie Hart writes in Human Brain and Human Learning, educators who lack a holistic understanding of the brain’s organization and functioning are as out of date as an automobile designer who does not understand engines.
Neuroscience-informed education offers a practical pathway to truly “leave no child behind.” By applying what we now know about brain development and cognitive processing, schools can make changes that are not merely incremental but potentially disruptive—improving the capacity of every student to learn. These changes fall into two main streams: strengthening the brain’s underlying cognitive skills and designing learning environments and instruction that are brain-friendly.
The potential for disruptive change lies in improving basic cognitive functioning
Classroom quality, facilities and technology are important, but they are external supports. Real, lasting improvement in learning often depends on the internal capacities each student brings: attention, memory, visual processing, sequential processing and other fundamental cognitive skills. Neuroscience shows that the brain is plastic—continually building and reshaping neural pathways in response to experience. Intelligence is not fixed; the brain’s structure and effectiveness can be improved with the right kinds of practice and training.
Many learning challenges stem from weaknesses in these underlying processes. For example, reading requires efficient decoding, which depends on automatic visual discrimination, sequential processing and working memory. Students who struggle with reading often have deficits in one or more of these areas. Similarly, math disabilities frequently relate to weaknesses in cognitive processes that support numerical reasoning, spatial thinking and working memory. Modern math curricula emphasize communication, data interpretation and estimation, which make strong underlying cognitive skills even more essential—weaknesses in any cognitive area can impair performance across subjects.
Although these cognitive skills are foundational to all learning, they are rarely taught explicitly in schools. The common assumption is that students arrive with whatever cognitive capacity they will have. That assumption is contradicted by decades of clinical research showing that basic cognitive skills can be developed. Advances in neuroscience have enabled scalable, computer-delivered cognitive training programs that can be implemented in classrooms and have produced measurable, meaningful gains in attention, memory, spatial reasoning and other critical processes.
Make schools and teaching more brain-friendly
Education that honors how the brain actually learns improves both efficiency and effectiveness. If learning is more than filling a vessel with facts—if, as Plutarch suggested long ago, the mind is a fire to be ignited—then we must understand what sparks engagement and durable learning. Neuroscience suggests several practical instructional strategies:
- Present information so sensory input is captured effectively by short-term sensory memory, enabling the brain to process the right information.
- Design lessons that align working memory demands with long-term memory encoding and consolidation.
- Integrate multiple sensory modalities and media, since the brain processes information in parallel and benefits from varied inputs.
- Use emotion, storytelling and mnemonic strategies to strengthen long-term memory storage.
- Make curriculum meaningful by connecting new material to students’ prior knowledge and real-life contexts.
- Differentiate between declarative memory (facts and knowledge) and procedural memory (skills and actions) and teach so both can be retrieved and applied.
Engagement matters not because it merely makes lessons more enjoyable, but because attention and emotional relevance are central to learning. Projects, problems, simulations and real-world tasks foster the kind of deep engagement that enhances retention and transfer of skills to new situations.
Developing 21st-century skills requires developing the brain
Employers increasingly ask for problem-solving, communication and creative thinking—skills that reflect how the mind works, not just how much content a student has memorized. These capacities cannot be delivered through lecture alone; they are developed through experience, practice and the cultivation of cognitive processes that support reasoning, flexible thinking and collaboration. Just as you cannot learn to pole-vault by listening to an explanation, you cannot create critical thinkers purely through direct instruction of principles. Neuroscience can guide how we develop and measure these mental processes, shifting assessment away from mere content recall toward the effectiveness of cognitive skills in producing real-world results.
If we truly value educating every child, our system must do four things: a) maximize each student’s learning capacity, b) design learning experiences that take full advantage of that capacity, c) ensure that instruction and school systems are efficient and effective in producing learning, and d) evaluate outcomes in terms of an individual’s ability to engage in productive, value-creating activity. Applying current knowledge about brain development and plasticity will be essential to achieving those goals.
About the authors
Betsy Hill is President of BrainWare Learning Company, an organization that applies neuroscience to build learning capacity. An experienced educator, she has studied the neuroscience–education connection with leading experts and has served on the board of trustees at Chicago State University. She teaches strategic thinking in the MBA program at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and holds a Master of Arts in Teaching and an MBA from Northwestern University. Betsy has been recognized for her contributions to learning excellence and for sharing neuroscience-based practices in classrooms nationwide.
Roger Stark is Co-founder and CEO of BrainWare Learning Company. He has dedicated years to making cognitive literacy training and assessment broadly accessible, drawing on more than five decades of clinical research and development. Roger led the team that created BrainWare SAFARI, a comprehensive, research-based cognitive training system delivered online, and has focused on building an affordable tool to improve foundational cognitive skills at scale.
This article was originally published by The Learning Counsel, a research institute and news media hub that focuses on the transition to digital curriculum in education.