New brain imaging methods are helping us better understand how children learn, writes neuroscientist John Gabrieli. But "education neuroscience" has become the source of both promise and debate.

Authors of the newly revised Teaching with the Brain in Mind, Liesl McConchie and Eric Jensen offer whole-brain approaches teachers can take to engage students in new learning and retaining that knowledge.

The understanding of fundamental neurological processes that enables the brain to analyze good learning produces physical changes in brain. The use of several regions of brain in the learning process and problem solving techniques are discussed.

New positron emission tomography (PET) and MRI technologies, which allow looking inside the brains, show that the brains of boys and girls differ both structurally and functionally that profoundly affect the human learning. These gender differences in the brain are corroborated in males and females throughout the world and do not differ…

The new consensus on the nature of learning helps educators understand what fosters learning and how to improve ineffective, detrimental aspects of teaching. Science curricula should capitalize on three concepts: learners construct meaning for themselves; to understand is to know relationships; and knowing relationships depends on having prior…

Discusses connections between Madeline Hunter's elements of effective teaching and current brain research. Hunter's emphasis on setting the stage for learning fits precisely with research on the brain's attentional mechanisms. Other Hunter elements, including level of concern (challenge), task analysis, procedural memory, and prior learning, are…

Neuropsychology professor Steven Petersen describes what scientists are finding out about brain development, synaptic growth and wiring, intentional and incidental learning, the role of emotion in learning, and declarative and implicit memory systems. Neuroscience has only the broadest outline of principles to offer today's educators. (MLH)

Interviews with five neuroscientists--Martin Diamond, Pat Wolfe, Robert Sylwester, Geoffrey Caine, and Eric Jensen--disclose brain-research findings of practical interest to educators. Topics include brain physiology, environmental enrichment, memorization, windows of learning opportunity, brain learning capacity, attention span, student interest,…

Whereas prior conceptions treated cognitive development as a sequence of stages, current research points to recurring growth cycles between birth and age 30. Each recurrence produces a new capacity for thinking and learning grounded in an expanded, reorganized neural network. Cognitive spurts are evident only under optimal support conditions.…

Although students' eclecticism can be overwhelming, all students are identical in at least one respect--they are biologically equipped to learn from experiences. Caine and Caine discuss neurological findings about decision-making capacities built into the brain. They describe Elkhonen Goldberg's concept of actor-centered adaptive decision making…

Inquisitiveness is what drives children's learning. Cognitive scientists have devised constructivist theory to explain how an individual progresses from curiosity to new knowledge. Formal schooling has struggled unsuccessfully to simulate real-life learning situations. Emerging brain research supports bringing the community into the learning…

Although neuroscience has much to offer teaching and learning conceptualizations, educators must be cautious about applying lab research to classrooms. Brain research seems hazy, confusing, and contradictory because it is new. Myths about synapses, low-stress learning, memorization, enrichment, and learning styles are debunked. (MLH)

Sylwester says education must begin relying more on biology than social and behavioral science. All brain systems move from a slow, awkward functional level to a fast, efficient level. Contributions of metacognition, self-regulation, emotions, reflective and reflexive responses, comparison, and classification to cognitive development are…

In this interview, psychologist Andrew Meltzoff dispels some popular myths and discusses insights from cognitive developmental psychology to enlighten educators. Studying infants and listening to young children has led experts to revise their ideas about the thought/language relationship. Play activities are profound learning experiences. (MLH)

New neuroscientific knowledge is redefining possibilities for K-12 education. There are five critical variables in the brain's learning process: neural history, context, acquisition, elaboration, and encoding. This article tracks one student's unique brain activity throughout her school day to illustrate these variables. (MLH)