I agree with Dorothy Bischop that neuro often isn’t that practical relevant yet for education (although Daniel Willingham has found a relevant study). This doesn’t mean that neurological research isn’t interesting. For instance this piece of research that shows that structural and functional changes in the brain may predict future memory performance in healthy children and adolescents.

From the press release:

Working memory capacity — the ability to hold onto information for a short period of time — is one of the strongest predictors of future achievements in math and reading. While previous studies showed that MRI could predict current working memory performance in children, scientists were unsure if MRI could predict their future cognitive capacity.

In the current study, Henrik Ullman, Rita Almeida, PhD, and Torkel Klingberg, MD, PhD, at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden evaluated the cognitive abilities of a group of healthy children and adolescents and measured each child’s brain structure and function using MRI. Based on the MRI data collected during this initial testing, the researchers found they could predict the children’s working memory performance two years later, a prediction that was not possible using the cognitive tests.

“Our results suggest that future cognitive development can be predicted from anatomical and functional information offered by MRI above and beyond that currently achieved by cognitive tests,” said Ullman, the lead author of the study. “This has wide implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of cognitive development.”

The scientists recruited 62 children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 20 years to the lab, where they completed working memory and reasoning tests. They also received multiple MRI scans to assess brain structure and changes in brain activity as they performed a working memory task. Two years later, the group returned to the lab to perform the same cognitive tests.

Using a statistical model, the researchers evaluated whether MRI data obtained during the initial tests correlated with the children’s working memory performance during the follow-up visit. They found that while brain activity in the frontal cortex correlated with children’s working memory at the time of the initial tests, activity in the basal ganglia and thalamus predicted how well children scored on the working memory tests two years later.

“This study is another contribution to the growing body of neuroimaging research that yields insights into unraveling present and predicting future cognitive capacity in development,” said Judy Illes, PhD, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia. “However, the appreciation of this important new knowledge is simpler than its application to everyday life. How a child performs today and tomorrow relies on multiple positive and negative life events that cannot be assessed by today’s technology alone.”

Abstract of the research:

Human working memory capacity develops during childhood and is a strong predictor of future academic performance, in particular, achievements in mathematics and reading. Predicting working memory development is important for the early identification of children at risk for poor cognitive and academic development. Here we show that structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging data explain variance in children’s working memory capacity 2 years later, which was unique variance in addition to that predicted using cognitive tests. While current working memory capacity correlated with frontoparietal cortical activity, the future capacity could be inferred from structure and activity in basal ganglia and thalamus. This gives a novel insight into the neural mechanisms of childhood development and supports the idea that neuroimaging can have a unique role in predicting children’s cognitive development.