The neuroimaging era has brought an increasingly refined understanding of adolescent brain maturation, yielding insight into the protracted development of social cognition, learning, and executive function beyond childhood. These data have been applied in multiple domains of everyday life, including education. Adolescent brains have emerged as a theater of moral panic over the implications of social media on the one hand and income inequality on the other for mental health, social cohesion, and individual and community life chances. In this setting, neuroscience has been invoked to account for adolescent vulnerability and to develop interventions to mitigate behavioral problems and mental illness. These include the introduction into school curricula of mindfulness-based stress reduction, resilience training, “brain-based” pedagogy, and a neuroanatomical lexicon of introspection in which kids are encouraged to identify experiential states with brain regions. “Neuroeducation” represents a constellation of fluid alliances between the education profession, Silicon Valley tech solutionists, and the human potential movement. Cognitive neuroscience plays a notional role, chiefly via proponents’ invocation of developmental plasticity as physiological justification for interventions that are often based on preliminary research and remain wanting in clinical support. In this essay we explore neuroeducation through the lens of critical neuroscience.

This chapter surveys guidelines for ethical use of human and nonhuman animals in scientific research.

In this chapter, the reader is given a survey of two basic approaches for statistical analysis, the quantitative approach focused on measures of effect size and confidence intervals, and the qualitative approach based on significance values and null hypothesis significance testing.

In this more advanced chapter, the student is introduced to concerns about misuse of statistical tests and various sources of bias.

This chapter introduces the basic principles of experimental design, covering fundamental control groups,such as approaches of control for subject loss or for order of treatments.

Communication takes many forms. This chapter offers guidance for presenting work in a poster or talk, as well as for writing a research article for publication.

This chapter provides a basic introduction to descriptive statistics in the context of neuroscience experiments.

This chapter introduces several common methods used in neuroscience experiments.

This chapter guides the reader in moving from a general interest in neuroscience to a specific testable hypothesis.

In this chapter, the research approaches that involve observation of variables are introduced, ranging from naturalistic studies to multiple correlational designs.

This chapter introduces the reader to definitions of science and to the history of scientific approaches.