Prof Martin Westwell, Flinders University Educational Neuroscience Science informed education - Policy: Commissioned by DEEWR Youth Attainment

Branch to produce a report Cognitive Neuroscience: Implications for career development strategies and intervention to inform the development of the National Career Development Strategy http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/CareersandTransitions/CareerDevelopment/Pages/default.aspx

Science informed education - Practice: Year-long project entitled Unlimited Potential with Early Years educators to co-develop ways of incorporating core ideas from cognitive neuroscience into their practice. Educators reflections and comments: https://vimeo.com/38955732 Many keynote presentations at education conferences including: Australian Council for Educational Leaders National Conference (then ACEL travelling scholar) Australian Youth Mentoring Network National Conference Australian Secondary Principals National Conference Career Development Association of Australia National Conference ACT Leaders Conference WA Catholic Primary Curriculum Conference Victorian Emergency Management Conference This is a small selection to exemplify the diversity and reach of the Australian education audiences with which I have engaged. Flinders has offered a Graduate Certificate in Neuroscience (Learning) for educators since 2007 (though not offered in 2012). Neuroscientists from all three of South Australias main universities contributed to this course. The South Australia teaching workforce now contains a cohort of neuroscience-savvy teachers. History As Deputy Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University (http://www.futuremind.ox.ac.uk/) I was involved in educational neuroscience in terms of: i. RESEARCH, for example E.J. Dommett, E.L. Henderson, M.S. Westwell, S.A. Greenfield, Learn. Mem. (2008) 15: 580-586 Methylphenidate amplifies long-term plasticity in the hippocampus via noradrenergic mechanisms POLICY, for example Establishment of UK Parliament All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education. http://www.futuremind.ox.ac.uk/impact/parliamentary.html and http://www.futuremind.ox.ac.uk/downloads/2007_brain-science_transcript.pdf EDUCATION PRACTICE, for example E.J. Dommett, I.M. Devonshire, C.R. Plateau, M.S. Westwell, S.A. Greenfield, Neuroscientist (2011) 17: 382-388 From Scientific Theory to Classroom Practice

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As part of the education neuroscience community we helped to build sophisticated interactions between these three areas ensuring that we avoided the pitfalls that previous attempts to link neuroscience and education had fallen into. For example, ensuring sophisticated dialogue between educators and neuroscientists, testing the ecological validity of neuroscience-informed approaches, and resisting attempts to over-interpret neuroscience research findings were some of the key factors that led to success. (See http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/Neuroscience%20Commentary%20FINAL.pdf )This network may be drawn upon to help inform Australian innovations. For example, Paul Howard-Jones (Bristol), John Stein (Oxford), Sarah-Jane Blakemore (UCL UCL has a campus in Adelaide), Usha Goshwami (Cambridge).