Neuroscience techniques can only reliably answer “how” people behave or process information, but they should never answer “why” people behave the way they do.

Cognitive science has to do with the mind and mental processes, such as thinking, learning, and problem solving at the human (or other organism) level.<em> </em>Neuroscience has to do with the biology of the nervous system, including how the brain works, at the anatomical level such as neurons.

Bottom line: When you hear claims about <em>neuro</em> or <em>brain</em> related to training, you should ask: Is it cognitive science or is it made up?

Spaced learning usually leads to better recognition memory as compared with massed learning, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain elusive.

Recognition memory tests afterward revealed a significant spacing effect: Participants recognized more items learnt under the spaced learning condition than under the massed learning condition.

For neuroscience to mean something to teachers, it must provide information beyond what is available without neuroscientific methods. It’s not enough to describe what’s happening in the brain, and pretend that you’ve learned something useful.

In general, if you are interested in describing effects at a given level of analysis, you are most likely to make progress by sticking to that level of analysis. If you’re interested in describing ways that students learn best, it makes sense to study classroom situations. To the extent that neuroscience will inform good teaching practice, it seems most likely that this influence will be funneled through the cognitive level of analysis: For example, neuroscience will help us better understand memory, and this improved understanding of memory might be used to improve classroom practice. It’s unlikely that leapfrogging the cognitive level analysis and going straight from the brain to the classroom will work out very often.