Academics
You need to get straight A's in high school to be considered a successful student.
MYTH - Success involves growth, effort, learning, and developing skills, not just perfect grades.
Most people notice your embarrassing moments as much as you do.
MYTH - People generally overestimate how much others notice their mistakes --> spotlight effect.
To fit in during freshman year, you need to join the same clubs and activities as your friends.
MYTH - Exploring different interests can help you find communities that suit you, even outside of your typical friend group.
Teenagers generally need around 6-8 hours of sleep per night.
MYTH - It's actually 8-10. Adequate sleep supports health, memory, attention, and emotional well-being.
Your brain isn’t fully developed until your mid-20s.
FACT - The part of your brain that handles planning and impulse control is one of the last to finish developing.
Studying for 20 minutes across several days is generally a worse studying habit than one long study session right before a test.
MYTH - Spaced repetition helps your brain retain information longer.
Someone can be surrounded by friends and still feel lonely.
FACT - Loneliness depends on the quality of social connections, not just the number of people around you.
Participating in extracurricular activities can help students develop leadership, communication, and teamwork skills.
FACT - Clubs, athletics, and other activities can provide opportunities to develop these skills.
Drinking coffee or an energy drink completely makes up for lost sleep.
MYTH - Caffeine can temporarily increase alertness, but it cannot replace the restorative functions of sleep.
Listening to music while you study helps you focus.
MYTH - It depends. If it has lyrics, it conflicts with the words you're reading or writing. Instrumentals or music in languages you don't understand can bypass that.
Switching between different types of problems in one study session (instead of doing one type at a time) feels harder but leads to better test scores.
FACT - This is called interleaving. It feels harder while you’re doing it, but having to recall different types of information back to back helps you retain information.
People are more likely to conform to a group's answer when everyone else agrees, even if the answer is clearly wrong.
FACT - Social pressure can influence people's decisions, demonstrated in classic conformity studies.
Most high schoolers have had alcohol in the past month.
MYTH - Only about 1 in 5 across all grades. Students consistently overestimate what “everyone” is doing.
Teens getting sleepy later at night is mostly just a habit from staying up on their phones.
Ehhhh - Growing up naturally shifts your body clock later, but phones can delay when you go to sleep through.
Let's say this one's right either way.
Fewer teens get their driver’s license by 17 now than in previous generations.
FACT - The share of teens with licenses has gone down a lot over the past few decades.
Rereading your notes and highlighting are two of the most effective ways to study.
MYTH -Actively retrieving information strengthens memory, even when retrieval feels difficult. Rereading notes and highlighting doesn’t do that. This is supported by research btw.
After a first conversation, people usually underestimate how much the other person liked them.
FACT - This is called the “liking gap,” generally people like you more than you think.
A school's unwritten social rules can influence how students behave, even when those rules are never officially taught.
FACT - Informal norms can shape interactions, expectations, and a sense of belonging.
DOUBLE POINTS! 800
With enough practice, most people can get good at multitasking without their work suffering.
MYTH - Statistically, basically nobody can actually multitask without losing performance quality.
On a multiple-choice test, you should stick with your first answer, since changing it usually makes it wrong.
MYTH - When students change answers, they go from wrong to right more often than right to wrong.
Research shows that students learn best when teachers match instruction to their individual learning style, such as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.
MYTH - Although students have preferences, research does not consistently support matching instruction to a fixed learning style as a way to improve learning.
People sometimes assume everyone agrees with their opinions or behaviors more than they actually do.
FACT - This is called the false consensus effect, a psychological tendency to overestimate how common our beliefs and behaviors are.
Most friendships freshmen make in their first few weeks are still going strong by the end of the school year.
MYTH - Research on teen friendships shows a lot of them shift or fade within a year, and new ones form all the time throughout high school.
On average, it takes about two months for a new habit to become automatic.
FACT - Median of about 66 days for a habit to become automatic, ranging from 18 to over 250 days, according to one well-known study.
Feeling nervous before a test is a good thing.
FACT - Some level of stress boosts focus. But, it can sometimes be too much.