Rita Peterson is currently Director of Teacher Education at the University of California, Irvine and formner Director of Research in Science Education at the National Science Foundation. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Science Education from the University of California, Berkeley, and her B. S. from Califoria State University, Hayward. Dr. Peterson served as collaborator or author of several Science Curriculum Improvement Study publications; has been the botanical illustrator of several books on native plants of California; produced a film on Piaget's Formal Thought with Robert Karplus; and authored numerous articles. She has been active in NSTA, AAAS, and NARST, has received the Outstanding Research Award of NARST, and has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Within our lifetimes, most of us have seen the emergence of several new fields of science: biochemistry, biophysics, astrophysics, and psychobiology are just a few. Even education formed a partnership with psychology earlier this century to create the field of educational psychology. The emergence of new hybrid fields of science or education is more than an affirmation of the interrelatedness of things in Nature or of fields of scientific endeavor, however. With the advent of advanced technology, the production of new knowledge and scientific discoveries have accelerated, and scientific fields have grown in complexity. At the same time, small groups of individuals have searched for the hidden connections between well-defined but clearly different fields of science. Thus, the 20th century has been one of the flowering of science and the merging of many scientific disciplines. In a field as young as ours-research in science teaching-there have been few efforts to reach across the sciences and build upon their knowledge. Miller applied a theory from political science to assess the science literacy of young adults (1979); Stake and Easley used anthropological techniques to conduct a series of case studies that described the status of science education in American schools (1978); and Kraft applied EEG technology from neuroscience to measure young children's interhemispheric activity as a correlate of their cognitive development and performance solving science problems (1977). But these pioneering efforts to bridge science and education have been too few. Yet historically there has been interest in the connection between the human brain and learning or teaching. Early research on learning depicted the brain as a black box while teaching and learning were simulated by electric shocks, food pellets, and so forth. The science fiction and horror films watched by children vaguely allude to the connection between altering the brain and subsequent bizarre behavior. Today the computer industry bears more positive testimony to assumptions about the connection between the human brain and learning or the storage of information. Despite our intuitive acceptance of the relationship between the human brain and learning, there has been little direct contact or collaboration among researchers from the brain sciences and education. In fact, until quit recently, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychobiologists, and educators rarely sat down at the same table to talk about areas of common interest.