Three Things Your Ed Degree (possibly) Got Wrong

The Effortful Educator normally publishes content around retrieval practice, memory processing, spaced practice, etc. But recently, they published an intentionally provocative talk they gave at their school, Three Things Your Ed Degree (possibly) Got Wrong. I couldn’t resist reading or thinking about my own experience during my undergraduate program. Let’s see how the program I completed fairs (tbf it was a long time ago and has changed since I graduated).

The first (and maybe the most rampant in the US?) myth is teaching to preferred learning styles.

Of course this one came up. What I appreciate is the framing of teaching to preferred learning styles as opposed the just the blanket concept itself, because that is often the main issue. This was something that I was taught in undergrad for sure, but I don’t think it was as prevalent in my program as I gather from what I hear about programs in the USA or UK. A related concept the learning styles that was quite prevalent in my training was the idea of Multiple Intelligences. It’s similar to LS in that it’s an appealing idea and feels like it just makes sense. However, I’ll paraphrase Roger Schank here and say that, the multiple intelligences are conspicuously close to the typical subject areas in school, which just happened to be what was taught at Harvard in the 19th century. What these two ideas are reflective of is being caught in a time. They were proposed when we had a certain understanding of psychology, neuroscience, and learning. These research areas continue to progress and therefore need to be updated. Jared Cooney Horvath had a great article in TES on the topic of learning styles. TLDR:

I appreciate their interest and willingness to dive into academic debate while maintaining the importance of what has a practical bearing on practice.

Myth number two involves the learning pyramid. 

Lucky. I was recently in a conference session about how to improve retention, and Dale’s cone (the learning pyramid) popped up on a slide. The presenter asked who in the room was familiar with it, and I’m not sure if it was in response to the expression on my face or me shaking my head in disappointment, but they qualified why they were bringing it up. Thankfully it wasn’t to claim that the stats were correct. Anyway, I can still picture myself in the exact classroom and instructor when I first encountered this idea. I probably hung onto it until grad school too. Most often I encounter this as some way to justify the use of extensive video in elearning, and somehow not simulation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The third myth involves using discovery and/or inquiry learning as a basis for instruction in the classroom.

The Effortful Educator is careful not to completely dismiss the idea that students can contribute to their learning, but this portion of the post reflects the kinds of positioning that I’ve come across throughout Kirschner’s writing since I first encountered it myself. I think the first article I’d encountered from them tackled two of the three items in this post, Learning Styles and Self-Direct Learning, calling them Urban Legends. Usually when I encounter this debate, it is often an all or nothing either inquiry learning has no place in teaching and learning, or direct instruction has no place in teaching and learning.

In Experimental and quasi-experimental studies of inquiry-based science teaching: A meta-analysis, the authors found that the conflation of terms highlights a critical nuance in the debate over reform-based teaching methods (like inquiry-based learning), specifically that guided inquiry, which includes teacher support, is more effective than unguided discovery learning. The meta-analysis supports the argument that structured inquiry approaches (not to be confused with direct instruction), where teachers provide guidance, lead to significant learning gains, challenging the notion that all reform-based teaching fails when it involves student guidance.

The debate has been going for decades at this point, but one thing that is a through line is the positioning of the methods. In Scaffolding and Achievement in Problem-Based and Inquiry Learning: A Response to Kirschner, Sweller, and CitationClark (2006) the authors note that the aforementioned authors, “have mistakenly conflated PBL and IL with discovery learning.”

Overall this one comes again to definition, implications for practice, and implementation. Are there instances where some educators claim to be practicing inquiry-based learning in non-ideal ways? Sure. Are there educators practicing direct instruction that is also not optimal? Also sure (who doesn’t have a story about a terrible park-and-bark lecture?). It’s not discovery or inquiry exactly, but I remember when “flipped learning” was all the rage and I saw in some cases it being used with intention and continuous improvement to make it effective for students. I also witnessed it being applied as a way to double the content load of classes. In some courses learning outcomes improved. In the latter ones, no-significant difference or negative effects. Both educators would claim they were doing flipped learning. So it’s always important to ask a few clarifying questions.

What myths do you see permeating throughout education that has little to no evidence of effectiveness?

One idea I encounter in fits and bursts is that video is the ideal learning medium. This is brought up in comments such as “nobody reads, but they watch video.” Or if you think back to when a particular large social media company lied to everybody about their video engagement prompting media companies to try to convert to video in a move that ended up being devastating to the news industry. You also get all kinds of claims about video being more engaging, or that they magically make content interactive (I guess if you count a place/pause button that’s sort of true).

This myth goes all the way back to friend of the show, Thomas Edison,

and up through to Sal Khan, focusing on the at their own pace argument, (although he’s currently pumping AI tutors),

I think a portion of this idea ties into the visual learner learning styles idea, as well as the myth that people “process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.” See Alan Levine’s journey searching for the origin of that one.

Interestingly, video can produce an effect of overconfidence in viewers about their ability to perform the demonstrated task.

How about you? What myths do you encounter in education or learning?