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. What students have a lot of practice with is YouTube and other technologies for passive media consumption.
Teachers should tailor their instruction to students' various learning styles.
Alternative explanation: Teachers shouldn't label students or put them into boxes 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: Teacher training can work as long as it's good and teachers learn. Learning teaching skills and strategies until they are embedded in long term memory makes your, and your students', lives easier.
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.
Multitasking can be an effective way to learn.
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 in parallel.
It's best to teach only A during unit 1, and then B during unit 2, and and C during unit 3.
Alternative explanation: This is called blocked practice, and it is quite ineffective. It's better to use interleaving and successive re-learning. 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.
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.
Alternative explanation: 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 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 got rid of the other subjects to focus on reading, we would produce more readers.
Alternative explanation: Maybe, but reading is highly dependent on what you know. After students learn how to decode the squiggles on the page, their main barrier is specialized vocabulary and background knowledge, which is probably best acquired through exposure to a wide range of subjects.
Students learn best when they struggle.
Alternative Explanation: Students need an optimal amount of challenge (aka the Goldilocks effect). 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!
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.
Discovery learning - when teachers withhold information from learners to allow them to construct their own meaning - has not been shown to work.
Alternative explanation: Guidance from a knowledgeable expert is required to learn complex material. Students can experience the thrill of working independently at the end of an I do, we do, you sequence, but it shouldn't just be "you do."
The mind is like a muscle.
The muscle metaphor is seriously flawed. The mind is really like a bottleneck (our working memory can only handle 3-4 pieces of new information at a time) but this limitation falls away when dealing with familiar information. Another feature of the mind is that it stores infinite amounts of knowledge in webs called schema. So... what does that have to do with a muscle?
Repeated reading paired with highlighting is one of the most effective ways to study.