By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark
Editor’s Note: This is part four of a five-part series.
In this fourth installment, we examine how neuroscience can help address educational equity by tackling students’ cognitive capacity. This article follows the three-step framework introduced in the first piece:
- Understand each student’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses
- Remediate, build, and strengthen both weaker cognitive processes and those that are already strong
- Design learning environments—technology, instruction, curriculum—grounded in science rather than folklore
Many educators are eager to learn how the brain works and what that means for instruction. Others resist, arguing that neuroscience should be left to specialists. But leaving classroom practice to myths and anecdote leads to persistent misunderstandings about learning and contributes to inequitable outcomes. While excellent teachers achieve great results despite these myths, system-wide data show that only about a third of students perform at grade level, indicating a widespread gap in how learning is supported.
Without a basic grounding in the neuroscience of learning, educators are vulnerable to persistent neuromyths: that we use only 10 percent of our brains, that fixed learning styles are the best guide to instruction, that intelligence is fixed, that “right-brained” or “left-brained” labels meaningfully predict aptitude, that growth mindset and grit are interchangeable concepts, or that listening to classical music boosts learning. These misconceptions shape instruction and policy in ways that can harm students.
Rather than debunking every myth, we will highlight three evidence-based insights from neuroscience that often surprise teachers and suggest practical changes in classroom practice. These points are meant to spark further questions and exploration.
- What is learning? True learning is not merely exposure to information; it is the formation and strengthening of connections among neurons—neural networks. Remembering is not a simple retrieval from a static vault; it is the reactivation of the networks created during learning and of what has been integrated into them since. This leads to the vital principle of neuroplasticity: the brain physically changes with each learning experience. In practical terms, what teachers do in classrooms literally reshapes students’ brains. Understanding how to build robust, well-connected neural networks informs instructional strategies, engagement practices, cross-curricular connections, trauma-informed care, purposeful use of technology, assessment design, and professional learning for educators.
Neuroplasticity means that well-designed experiences strengthen useful connections and make retrieval easier, while neglected connections may weaken or be pruned. That insight reframes the teacher’s role: instruction should systematically support the growth and maintenance of the neural networks students need to access their learning.
- Memory is not one thing. Neuroscience differentiates major types of long-term memory—declarative and procedural—each encoded and retrieved via different processes. Declarative memory stores facts and information you can state—events, dates, names, rules. Procedural memory stores skills and procedures—riding a bike, decoding words, performing math procedures—skills that can move from conscious effort to automaticity through practice. These distinctions imply different teaching and practice strategies: declarative learning benefits from elaboration, meaningful connections, and integration, while procedural learning requires structured, repeated practice to build automatic routines.
Memory also depends on the health and maintenance of synapses—the connections between neurons. Synapses can weaken or be lost through disuse or disease; similarly, unused learning fades. Designing instruction and practice schedules that reinforce important connections helps prevent forgetting and supports transfer of learning to new contexts.
- Every brain is unique and learns differently. Although neuroplasticity is universal, each learner’s brain constructs understanding in its own way. Students rely on a variety of cognitive processes—attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, processing speed, and others—to take in, organize, store, retrieve, and apply knowledge. A student’s cognitive profile—distinct from “learning styles”—determines how easily they can learn and demonstrate mastery.
Many teachers can identify which students struggle and which excel, but fewer can pinpoint the cognitive processes behind those differences or know how to strengthen them. When cognitive skills are weak, even bright students can show persistent gaps: limited attention leads to fragmented knowledge, weak working memory impairs reasoning and demonstration of understanding, and poor cognitive flexibility traps learners in rote approaches unable to adapt knowledge to new problems.
These gaps create inequities: students with less-developed cognitive skills are denied equal access to learning opportunities not because of lack of potential, but because instruction has not been tailored to develop their underlying cognitive capacity. Strengthening these core processes is essential for equitable education.
Understanding neuroscience and cognitive skills equips educators to design learning environments and experiences that give every student a fair chance to learn and to show what they can do. This includes thoughtful use of technology, assessment practices that reveal true learning rather than surface performance, trauma-informed approaches, and targeted interventions that build cognitive capacity alongside academic content.
In the fifth and final article in this series, we will present a case for urgent action to address cognitive capacity as a central issue of educational equity.
About the authors
Betsy Hill is President of BrainWare Learning Company, which applies neuroscience to build learning capacity. An experienced educator, she has studied connections between neuroscience and education and has served in governance and teaching roles in higher education. She holds a Master of Arts in Teaching and an MBA from Northwestern University.
Roger Stark is Co-founder and CEO of BrainWare Learning Company. He has led efforts to make cognitive literacy training and assessment widely accessible, developing an evidence-based online cognitive training tool grounded in decades of clinical research and collaboration.
This article was originally published by The Learning Counsel, a research institute and news media hub focused on the shift in education to digital curriculum.