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The answer depends on the question: a reply to Eric Jensen: Mr. Sternberg does not doubt that brain science has implications for education. The problem, he shows, is that brain research has yielded too many contradictory findings for educators to know with certainty which policies and practices to adopt.

Article Excerpt
THE QUESTION that Eric Jensen addresses in his article is whether brain research can provide a basis for educational practice. He debates John Bruer, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and argues that brain research can, in fact, provide a basis for what educators do. Most of Jensen's article is devoted to showing ways in which brain research can provide a basis for educational interventions.

Wrong question. The question is not whether educators can take brain-based or other biological research and derive educational implications from it. The right question is whether they can take such research and derive unequivocal educational implications. If not, then we have metaphor, but we do not really have science--or at least, not the kind of science that prescriptively is going to help us design educational interventions.

Consider an important example. Is there a general ability that dominates over all others, (1) or are there multiple intelligences, each relatively independent of the others, that work in tandem with one another, but that are coequal in importance? Howard Gardner has presented an impressive array of neuropsychological evidence in favor of multiple intelligences. (2) This work is cited and discussed in the Jensen article. At the same time, John Duncan has supplied targeted evidence in support of a general factor and has even identified in the brain the alleged loci in the lateral frontal cortex. (3) Duncan's initial article was published in Science, one of the most prestigious journals in all of the sciences. A second article was published in another highly prestigious journal, Cortex. There is actually a much more extensive literature claiming that general intelligence can be localized in one part or another of the frontal cortex.

So what can we conclude from brain research? We can conclude either that children can be ordered on a unidimensional scale that pretty much captures their different abilities to succeed in school, or we can conclude the opposite. Thus brain research does indeed have implications for...

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