Students
Kids are "digital natives" whose brains have been rewired due to growing up with all this technology.
Alternative explanation: The brain hasn't had time to evolve in the past 20 years; Their brains are the same as our parents'. Also, students won't somehow be better at a technology if they have no experience with that particular piece of technology. Notice how students suck at Word but are great at TikTok.
Teachers should tailor their instruction to students' various learning styles.
Alternative explanation: Learning styles are pseudoscience. Teachers shouldn't label students based on pseudoscience. Teachers should instead let the content determine which modalities are best to use and combine modalities when appropriate.
Teachers are born, not made.
Alternative Explanation: Learning pedagogical skills and strategies until they are automatic is the basis of good teaching. Teacher training can work as long as it's good.
Students are good judges of what they know and don't know.
Alternative explanation: Students are novices who are often overconfident about their abilities. The common sense phrase, "you don't know what you don't know" applies here.
Tasks that require multitasking are authentic and boost learning.
Alternative explanation: People can't multitask. What they actually do is task switch. Task switching leads to a penalty in productivity and learning. It's much better to do one thing at a time than to try to do two or more tasks simultaneously.
It's best to teach A during lesson 1, and then B during lesson 2, and so on.
Alternative explanation: This is called blocked practice, and it is quite ineffective. It's better to use interleaving and spacing. Teachers should bring back old content and mix it in with new content as part of ongoing review and practice.
Students have an attention span that is shorter than a goldfish.
Alternative explanation: What is the attention span of a goldfish, and how would you measure it? Most people mean 15 seconds or so, which is also false. Your attention span depends on the nature of the content and your prior knowledge. This is why a scientist can be enthralled by a lecture that would bore the tears out of a child, but the scientist would themselves be bored watching a TV program for toddlers.
We only use 10% of our brains.
Alternative explanation: There are areas with specific functions —but fMRI and PET scans show we use all of our brains. If it were true, natural selection would have led to our having smaller brains by pruning the remaining 90%.
If we just got rid of the other subjects to focus on reading, we could close the achievement gap.
Alternative explanation: Reading is dependent on background knowledge. After a learner knows how to decode the squiggles on the page, they need background knowledge to be able to comprehend text. Teachers should teach background knowledge through science, social studies, and the other subjects to improve reading scores.
Students learn best when they struggle.
Alternative Explanation: Students need an appropriate amount of challenge (aka the Goldilocks principle). Excessive struggle leads to cognitive overload and it is associated with less learning, not more.
Brain games (like puzzles, chess, or online "brain workouts") make students smarter.
Alternative Explanation: Playing a brain game only makes you good at... that brain game! Chess doesn't make you better at Calculus or strengthen your memory, it just makes you better at Chess. If you want to make someone smarter at something, teach them that thing!
We don't need to teach knowledge because they can just Google it, after all.
Alternative Explanation: You need knowledge to know what to search for on Google. Then you need knowledge to be able to understand what you are reading. Also, knowing things is much more efficient for problem solving and interacting with one's environment than having to look it up.
Students learn best when allowed to discover things for themselves.
Alternative explanation: Discovery learning - when teachers withhold information from learners to allow them to construct their own meaning - has not been shown to work, while direct instruction has. Guidance is required to learn complex material.
Motivation leads to success.
Alternative explanation: While this is true, it's also true that success leads to motivation. In fact, the data we have suggests that this relationship might be stronger in the direction of success -> motivation. Motivation without success is short-lived, while success leads to a virtuous cycle of more motivation and more success.
Re-reading paired with highlighting is one of the most effective ways to study.
Alternative explanation: Re-reading and highlighting are very ineffective, although many students say they feel better doing it than self-quizzing (retrieval practice). Retrieval practice such as brain dumps, flash cards, and spaced out quizzes are a much more effective form of study.