“There's a lot of general implications from the research and very few direct applications,” says Dr. Pat Wolfe, director of Mind Matters, Inc., an educational consulting firm in northern California that specializes in the application of brain research to the classroom. “It's important that you understand the fundamental workings of the mind, but there are few quick and easy solutions.”

In her workshops and presentations, Wolfe discusses the shortsightedness of one of those “quick and easy solutions”: the practice of giving students peppermint candies because of recent news stories that reported on researching showing that glucose aids recall and memory.

"Is it any wonder,” asks Wolfe, “that some neuroscientists are beginning to accuse educators of engaging in pseudoscience or worse, becoming ‘snake-oil salesmen' for products and programs that have no real scientific foundation?”

Even some people who work in the field of applying brain research to the classroom are skeptical of overly simplistic applications of the research. One of these critics is Dr. Paul Grobstein, the Eleanor A. Bliss Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College.

Every summer, Grobstein runs a program called the Summer Institutes for Philadelphia Teachers, a sort of summer camp for educators interested in learning about various pedagogical approaches and ideas. One of the courses offered at the workshop is called “Brain and Behavior.”

“My concern is that people tend to jump on particular research findings,” he says, “and create great edifices of ‘new educational programs' on them whose weight they really can't bear.”

Echoing Bruer, Grobstein says that there is much more cognitive and developmental psychology research that is relevant to education than neuroscience research.