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.

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…