Brain rules

is an excellent book by John Medina (isbn 978-0-9797777-4-5). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far apart on the page or screen.
Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.

When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue than a fully exercising quadricep.

Charles Darwin noted… the brains in wild animals were 15 to 30 percent larger than those of their tame, domestic counterparts.

Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.

Spaced learning is greatly superior to massed learning.

A great deal of research shows that thinking or talking about an event immediately after it has occurred enhances memory for that event.

Students are expected to known certain things by certain grades. Curiously absent from this model is how durable that learning remains after the student completes the grade.

When people become sleep-deprived, their ability to utilise the food they are consuming falls by about one-third.

Sleep loss cripples thinking in just about every way you can measure thinking.

Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain's resources.