Yet educators are still thirsty for something they can use in their classrooms. A doctor may understand the limits of his or her abilities to cure a patient's illness, but the patient is still in need of treatment. One might argue a similar line about children. Even if our knowledge is not complete, shouldn't we work with what tools we have?

“The reality is that classrooms are getting more and more diverse,” says Dr. Mary Cameron, professor of education at Findlay College in Ohio. “And some of the teachers that have been out there for 20 or 30 years are teaching in the same old way, where all kids must learn everything the same in lockstep formation. They make students fit the mold, and you can't do that anymore.”

Cameron teaches two classes at Findlay on the brain and learning aimed to help prepare the college's education majors to manage this diverse group of students.

“The more we know about the brain and cognitive processing, the more we understand how unique each child is,” she says. “In the past, we would just teach to an age group and expect that everyone at that age needed to learn at that particular level. Having insight into how the mind works gives us a better understanding of how we need to diversify the curriculum.”

Nearly everyone who talks about brain-based education talks about the University of California at Berkeley's Dr. Marion Diamond. Diamond's work on enriched environments has produced waves of optimism about the ability to positively affect a child's education. Her book, Magic Trees of the Mind, explains in lay terms the impact of environment on forming a child's brain.

Diamond's work with animals showed that those raised in “enriched environments”—receiving lots of handling and touch by care providers and living in cages with plenty of toys and things to do—had denser cortexes than rats raised in empty cages, not handled, and only given food and water. The same, she argues, must be true about children.

Harvard's Fischer points out that another science-based idea that holds up to scrutiny in the classroom is that children generally learn more effectively when they can act on something and build knowledge on what they're doing.