317. Beware the Myth

One of the most persistent neuromyths is the belief that students learn more when instruction is tailored to their specific learning style. In this episode, Shaylene Nancekivell and Xin Sun join us to discuss their research on possible negative consequences of the learning styles myth.

Shaylene is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. Xin is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Shaylene and Xin are co-authors of a study entitled “Beware the myth: learning styles affect parents’, children’s, and teachers’ thinking about children’s academic potential,” published in the NPJ Science of Learning journal this fall.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: One of the most persistent neuromyths is the belief that students learn more when instruction is tailored to their specific learning style. In this episode, we examine possible negative consequences of the learning styles myth.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are Shaylene Nancekivell and Xin Sun. Shaylene is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. Xin is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Shaylene and Xin are co-authors of a study entitled “Beware the myth: learning styles affect parents’, children’s, and teachers’ thinking about children’s academic potential,” published in the NPJ Science of Learning journal this fall. Welcome Shaylene and Xin.

Shaylene: Thanks for having us.

Xin: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are. Shaylene, are you drinking tea?

Shaylene: I am drinking a latte actually [LAUGHTER], the Chestnut Praline Latte from Starbucks, I needed coffee. When I do drink tea, it’s usually chai tea.

Rebecca: Alright, sounds good. You’re recovering here [LAUGHTER]. How about you Xin?

Xin: Coffee is my go to.

Rebecca: It’s a very popular flavor of tea on this podcast…

John: It is.

Rebecca: …for sure [LAUGHTER]

Xin: If it’s tea, it’s bubble tea for me [LAUGHTER].

John: I have a Lady Grey tea today.

Rebecca: And I’m back to some blue sapphire tea. I went to the tea store this weekend and I’ve stocked up, so we’ll have some variety soon, John.

John: Okay. [LAUGHTER] We’ve invited you here to discuss your paper that examined the effect of identifying students’ learning styles on perceptions of children’s academic potential. Before we discuss this, though, we should probably just remind everyone about the myth of learning styles. It’s something which has been remarkably persistent, but what does research tell us about the relationship between identified learning styles and how people actually learn?

Shaylene: Yeah, so I’ll field this question. I think the first thing that people should realize is that the learning style myth is really hard to get a handle on Coffield and their colleagues identified about 81 different versions of the myth that kind of float around both academic and non-academic spaces. So when people hear the term learning styles, I think the first thing we should all point out is that everyone sort of means a different thing. That could be true in everyday conversations, that could be true like school to school. And so yeah, what learning styles are is actually really hard to pin down. The element that’s most common to most learning style myths is something called the meshing hypothesis. So this idea that if we figure out the right modality that people can learn in and we match instruction, somehow, to this magical modality, that people will learn better. And this is the thing that’s like, most common across all myths. And the modalities that people talk the most about are things like visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. So learning with your hands, your eyes, or your ears, that’s kind of the version that’s most common. We don’t really know where exactly the learning style myth came from. There was like old books by Dunn and colleagues, talking about how to set up ideal learning environments for children that mentioned this term learning styles, but this whole matching to like visual auditory, kinesthetic version of the myth where researchers aren’t too sure how everyone came to some sort of agreement that this was the version of learning styles that should stick around and we don’t really know where it came from. Regardless, researchers have tried to disprove it. So they’ve done studies where they have given people learning style surveys or tried to identify people’s learning style in some way, and then matched instruction to it and they don’t find any effects on learning. Overall, the best thing to do is to match the instructional style to the kind of content you’re teaching. And that’s kind of the best thing to do instruction wise, and then in terms of studying for students, the best thing to do is try to take in information in as many different ways as possible, and just deploy best practices in studying, so things like spaced practice, and paraphrasing, putting things into your own words, those kinds of things that we know are really good for studying.

Rebecca: So although we have no idea where it came from, why oh why is it so persistent?

Shaylene: I have two other research papers where I’ve tried to dive into that. The one that’s most relevant is actually a paper that Xin also co-authored with me that I did during my postdoc at Michigan. And what we did was we walked participants through an actual research study. We said, like, “Okay, this is the data they’re going to collect, these are their hypotheses, do you agree if they find data against or for the hypotheses that it’s testing the learning styles, and we found that participants agreed it was a good test of learning styles. And then we told them at the end of the study that it turns out, this is a real study or version of it, at least, that researchers have done, and they found no effects on learning outcomes. And there were a proportion of people that were very willing to revise their beliefs upon thinking through this exercise, they’re really kind of open to like, “Okay. I told you that this would prove or disprove it, I’m on board, maybe I’m wrong.” But there was also a pretty big proportion of participants that even after walking through this exercising and agreeing that that was a test of learning styles, did not want to revise their beliefs. And what we found is It seems to be entrenched in their identity somehow. They provide these really personal anecdotes of ways learning styles had helped them or family members. So that actually is kind of what led us to this paper we ended up doing, which is that there seems to be some sort of link between our academic self-construal and our learning styles. And that kind of creates almost backlash against wanting to revise their beliefs, because then you’re not just revising a belief about learning styles, you have to revise a whole host of beliefs about maybe why a family member succeeded or failed at school, or why you yourself succeeded or failed at school. And that’s a little bit harder to do for any person, and not just research participants.

John: We should probably mention an earlier podcast that we had with Kristin Betts and Michelle Miller, who had conducted an international survey of neuromyths. And my recollection was that the learning styles myth was the most widely held myth of any of the neuromyths that they were examining. So it is out there. I know a lot of our faculty on our campus still teach it, despite all the evidence, and despite some of us encouraging them to please stop that. But it’s something that just won’t go away, and most students come into college believing it. So in your study, though, you’re looking at some of the possible harmful consequences of a belief in learning styles. Could you provide an overview of your study?

Xin: So in our paper, we conducted three studies. And the first study, we included a child sample and a parents sample. So the children they were around 6 to 12 years old, so elementary school age. And in the second and third study, for each study, we included a parent sample and a teacher sample. So for all of these five adult samples, they’re all around 100 participants each. So what we did was for study one and for across the studies, we first sort of describe the participants to hypothesize students. So the first one, we wouldl describe them as all the students learns the best with their hands. And the second or the other students would be described as all the student learners the best with your eyes. So basically corresponding to a hands-on learner and a visual learner. And in study one, we asked participants to rate how smart do you think these students are? So one on one, are they very smart, like just smart, a little bit smart, or not so smart. And so parents and children, they went through the same kind of protocol. And what we found in study one is, on average, both parents and children, they believe that the visual learner is smarter than the hands-on learner in terms of their smartness rating. And in study two, instead of asking participants to rate individual learners, we ask them to compare directly, so which learner do you think is smarter? And a lot more participants believe that the visual learner described as like learning best with their eyes, is smarter than the other hands-on learner. This is true across the teacher and the parents sample. And then in study three we wanted to ask “Well, so what do you mean by being smarter? So does that mean that this visual learner would do better in some of the school subjects?” So we then, in study three, asked parents and teachers to predict grades of these two described hands-on and visual learner across like some common school subjects, including math, science, language, social studies, as well as some of the, what we call non-core subjects, like arts and music. So what we found is, on average, both the parent sample and the teacher sample rated grades as being higher in the visual learner compared to hands-on learner in many of the subjects including math, language arts, social studies, and they also rated the hands-on learner as having higher grades in some of the other subjects, like arts and music. This is generally what we found. Shay, do you want to add on to it?

Shaylene: Yeah, sure. And I think kind of the big take home is like a lot of the work that’s tried to argue against learning styles has made like a wasted resources argument, which I think is completely valid. We should be spending instructional time, especially in teachers college pre-service classrooms like teaching teachers best practices, same thing with our students and study practices. But I don’t think that argument has persuaded people. So one big motivation for us to do this paper was I think the learning settlement actually can create more damage than just a wasted time or wasted training session for teachers. When we provide these labels, and we label children this way, it’s providing unintended messages likely to the parents, or if you apply these labels, like teacher to teacher, or even label a child in a classroom of their peers, people are hearing other things than just this kid is a hands-on or a visual learner. They’re making judgments about maybe what that child is going to be good at or not good at, or when or how they’re going to succeed in the classroom. And that, to me, is highly problematic. We want to meet kids where they actually are, not where they are based on construall that’s resultant of a myth.

John: The efficiency argument never troubled me that much in that when instructors believe in the learning styles myth, they tend to use multimodal instruction, which is helpful for everyone. My concern with it had more been the impact on students’ perceptions of themselves in a somewhat different way. I’ve often had students say, “Well, I can’t learn by reading this textbook, because I’m a visual learner” …and encouraging them to use their eyes to read didn’t seem to make much of an impact. Normally, I referred them to some of the studies on learning styles. But it’s something that students really deeply believe… that they can only learn in certain ways, which may deter them from trying new ways of learning and that’s what’s always concerned me. The effect on perceptions is something I hadn’t really thought about until I saw your paper. I’m really pleased to see this avenue of research because it provides a really strong argument against the persistence of the learning styles myth. Ultimately, studies like this might help persuade people to stop doing this.

Rebecca: So given your results, what are some of the implications we need to think about in terms of pre-service teachers, but also, the students that we have in our college classrooms who may have had this kind of impact on them throughout their education so far.

Xin: I feel Shay kind of touched on that point, which is, on the one hand, that what people generally feel that the learning style myth, the consequences are that it’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of energy. But it’s fine to just have it there because I wouldn’t do any other harm apart from that, but in reality from our study, you can really see that it not only like we add these things, it’s just an add on, but also it creates, I would say, biased, thinking about students, like what they can do, what they in the future might become, is sort of ingrained, for example, in parents’ or teachers’ thoughts. So I think this is not a good sign to like students’ development. And I feel you’rr right, John, that there are studies also, like qualitative evidence showing that students like from elementary school, some of the students would say, “I don’t want to do this kind of math, for example, because you showed me in a certain way, like, I’m a visual learner, you should show me in another way or something.” So I feel like the learning style method, if you believe in it, it might set limits for yourself. So I cannot do such and such because I am a certain person. I think this is also an important future direction for us to study, which is what’s you think about yourself in terms of learning self myth and what you can do.

John: What you’re showing is that it’s not just the students’ self-perception, it’s also their teachers and the parents who may be affected by this. And all those things, I think, could have some impact on student major choice, the decision to go to college. Is that one of the things you’re thinking about following up in terms of this study?

Shaylene: Yeah, I think a really important future direction for this work and something that actively writing grants… so fund us… to look [LAUGHTER] more into, are things like how does labeling someone with a certain learning style affect program recommendations, how I even write recommendation letters? When I get those boxes, and it’s described the students strengths and weaknesses, am I actually describing their real strengths and weaknesses or am I describing strengths and weaknesses based on essentially what the… I use this word a little bit loosely… but stereotype almost and, I think we’re also very interested in a group about how these might intersect with other aspects of people’s identity. So what does it look like if you label someone identifying as a woman or a man with a certain learning style or different racial identities? So, yeah, again, how does that intersect with, because we know there’s a whole host of academic beliefs that can come to the surface, when you find out that someone maybe is a young woman. They might get a double hit, if they’re perceived to be a young woman and a hands-on learner… they’re never destined to be good at math, for example. So we’re also just interested in exploring more about identity because identity, of course, is intersectional, and has more than just this learning style element. We’ve kind of studied it to the best of our ability in a vacuum in this paper, but it doesn’t actually exist in a vacuum in the real world. And the other thing we are looking into right now, planning some projects, looking at more implicit beliefs. So to kind of put another step forward to kind of prove that this is akin to like a stereotype. So there’s certain research paradigms you can do to look at more implicit beliefs, and to look at more people snap judgments, as opposed to like these more reflexive explicit beliefs that we have in our survey. So yeah, those are all promising and I think, really important, future directions to flesh out in the future.

Rebecca: I know that one thing that I was thinking about, while I was reading your paper, is how guidance counselors and others who help students make choices about what they might do, college, or even before that, if they want to do a technical program or something, and how that might inform the decisions or the advice they give. I know that as a student, I excelled in places like math and science, but I also deeply loved art. And if I showed a preference towards wanting to do that more kinesthetic work in art, I was discouraged. It’s like “Oh, you’re book smart.” So it’s almost like those same stereotypes that you’re talking about, or kind of found, I think, sometimes, perhaps lead to odd advice, or don’t necessarily encourage a student to pursue something that might be a worthwhile endeavor for them, because it’s deemed not worthwhile.

Shaylene: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s the fear. And, I think, at least anecdotally, when I talk to people, I get stories very similar to yours. In our one paper, in Cognitive Science, we coded them, but we read like, at least a few dozen online participants. People didn’t have to write that much. It was just like, “explain your thinking.” People wrote us essays about learning styles and how they had affected their life or their child’s life, like completely spontaneously and these are like online workers that were paid a whole dollar for our survey. So I think, at least anecdotally, we kind of have evidence to suggest this is likely happening. And so it will be a very important feature direction. But I also think, as academics, we need to be careful, because I think educators are overburdened, and they’re doing their best. And so I think a real take home for this is that we shouldn’t criticize them for holding beliefs that literally 90% of the population have, and that we should do more to support our educators. And yeah, I don’t want the takeaway here to be [LAUGHTER], teachers are doing bad or evil work or anything like that. They are so overburdened, they have no time for professional development. And so it makes sense that they would hold beliefs similar to their peers that aren’t educators, but we can do more to give them evidence-based ways to support their students. So not just telling them don’t do this, but giving them a replacement. And that’s something I try to do a lot too when I talk to my students about learning styles is, I think, sometimes, especially when you’re busy, it’s easy to say, “Oh, just don’t study in that way.” But like, what are they replacing it with? Because it’s filling a hole that they have. So making sure that we give them something else to put in that spot. So they’re gonna be career counselors, that’s like part of their job, how can they do that in an evidence-based way? So something else I’m very interested in, just in general in the neuromyth literature is, what are the different ways we can communicate neuromyths effectively? That’s something I would love to do more research on as well. Because the message “Don’t do this,” I don’t think is the right one.

Rebecca: No, we know this… just interacting with small children…[LAUGHTER] …you tell them not to do something, that’s the exact thing they want to do. We all do that [LAUGHTER].

Shaylene: Yeah, like try this instead.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Redirection.

Shaylene: I have a list of places that learning styles permeate the educational system. It permeates teacher education, it permeates university learning centers is a big one. So like where post secondary students go to get study advice. It’s like a very common part of post-secondary learning centers. It obviously permeates the classroom. It has global endorsements, so you see it across Latin America, Greece, obviously Canada, the United States, large parts of Europe. And then the other place you see it is, unfortunately, in the academic literature, almost like the education adjacent literature. So it might be someone that isn’t an education scholar, but maybe they’ve published a paper on teaching in their field, because they’ve developed a new teaching technique or something for teaching medical students. And you see learning styles permeate those papers. And we do cite a lot of those, which makes it extra hard for an educator, because if you do a literature search on learning styles, and you don’t know the subtle differences between these fields and these journals, you will find tons of papers supporting learning styles… academic papers, that’s the other place it permeates and you see these field- specific beliefs. And Xin pulled out a great quote for our intro that was like talking about these people thought they discovered this unique learning style of medical students that was a combination of two different learning styles or something, I think. It permeates this education-adjacent academic literature as well.

Xin: Yeah, yesterday, I saw this learning styles quiz on Canada’s government website. They have a job bank, where they help people to do career planning. And then there’s a bunch of career quizzes saying, like “discover your learning styles.” So they officially fill this as a tool for people to find their job, or at least which industry they would ideally work in. So that’s shocking to me. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Step one do no harm [LAUGHTER].

John: Now, in terms of follow up studies, are there any large data sets out there that would have identified learning styles in it to facilitate a study of the impact on major choice or decisions to go to college and so forth?

Shaylene: Not to my knowledge, a lot of the learning style literature kind of falls into a few broad buckets. So the first bucket is this really wonderful rich neuromyth literature that has been around for a long time. And there learning styles is usually just one or two survey items in a broader survey to assess educational literacy like educational sciences literacy, or neuro literacy or that kind of thing. So you’ll see learning myths listed with things like right and left brain learners, and drinking a lot of water can increase your brain size. So just general, like neuro literacy things. And then those are actually are pretty big datasets. And there is some stuff where they’ve correlated that with academic success, or teachers’ prior knowledge of neuroscience and then like willingness to endorse the myths, but it’s more of like a catch all type surveys. And then there is this other literature I’ve talked about that kind of takes learning styles to be real, and looks at how it’s related to major selection and that kind of thing. So they’ve kind of studied this, but kind of the wrong lens. Why do people pick chemistry? …because they have this perception of themselves. So it’s related, but it’s not quite right. And then other literature is actually really small. And that’s kind of where I’d place our paper is kind of diving deeper into the learning style myth itself. And there’s other great researchers doing this work. Newton just had a paper come out this year looking at the endorsement of learning style myths in higher ed. He’s published a bunch of papers, they’re really great. Couple papers by our research group, looking at learning style myth in particular, but that literature is really small, there’s not a lot of people doing that work.

John: I was just thinking, if, there was information on it in the Baccalaureate and Beyond or one of the NCES data sets, for example, that would be a nice way to examine the effect of student perceptions of their learning style on decisions to go to college or majors and so on.

Shaylene: Maybe we should look. It’d be worth looking.

John: I’ve worked with those data sets a lot, but I never specifically looked for that variable, but I might this afternoon. [LAUGHTER] But yeah, it would be nice to be able to examine that.

Shaylene: Yeah. For sure, I mean, even at the institutional level, it would be worth doing something like we have the undergraduate research pools that at least would be a bigger sample then that’s even in our paper included questions like on mass screening or something. But it’s kind of hard, because unless you get into one of these nationally representative surveys, it’s hard, still looking at people that chose a psychology course, or whatever, so your sample is still going to be a little skewed. And the government for the most part thinks they’re real. So I don’t know what they would include if they included it.

John: So, obviously it would be best if we could just get rid of the myth, but we still have whole generations of people who grew up with that. What might be some ways of breaking people from this belief? I think you had a prior study that looked at strategies for trying to encourage students to move away from this myth. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Shaylene: So I guess the prior paper that we did suggests that, for some people, providing them with evidence and walking them through the evidence and helping them think about it is enough, and they will revise their beliefs upon being presented with that evidence. And that kind of fits with other work I’ve done earlier, suggesting there’s a ton of variability in how people think about and construe learning styles. So I think getting the evidence out there and really helping people think about the evidence critically and what it means. Like, “What was the study? What was the hypotheses? How did they test it? Was it a good test? This is what they found…” That went pretty far. Our sample was all online workers that did that study, and they had a variety of educational backgrounds, too. They weren’t all familiar with research or that kind of thing. But there was a huge proportion of people that this belief is like really entrenched in how they perceive the world, how they perceive their academic journey or other people’s academic journey. And so one thing that we actually are really interested in is how maybe stories of personal anecdotes that we could provide people that maybe help them think through the potential harm of the myth. So, “Oh, well, it might have benefited someone in this case, but it could actually create harm in this case, because maybe this person really imagined themselves as being an electrician or being a plumber and those are really great jobs. But now they feel like that’s something they won’t be good at because they’re not the kind of learner, they haven’t been told that they learn in the right way, they should go to more math or science university instead, because that’s what they’ve been pushed to do.” That would be really not great for that person’s life outcomes, because that’s maybe not their interest or passion. So just helping people maybe think through how these stereotypes might unfold and the potential consequences of them, I think, is maybe a promising future direction. Because we know based on that prior work that just giving people this is what the literature has found isn’t going to revise everyone’s beliefs. So maybe like challenging their anecdotes with a thinking exercise almost might be an interesting direction to go.

John: And your study could be a nice basis for that type of thing, because it does describe harm that can take place as a result of a belief in this, which was not something that people generally considered before.

Shaylene: Yeah, it was hidden, I think, but maybe if it becomes more visible, people would be more willing to revise their beliefs. And you see it in like dialogue. I see it even when I get reviews back from my papers on this subject, reviewers will say like, “Well, it’s a preference. And we know that matching instruction to students preferences can benefit them because they feel more motivated. So is it really harmful?” I’ve had reviewers push back and write that kind of thing. And so this is maybe a thing we can point to, that even a preference, it might seem benign, but applying that kind of label is not benign, it’s not neutral.

John: It might be hard to get past reviewer 2. [LAUGHTER]

Shaylene: Yeah, I mean, the consequence of this permeating academia is that permeates our reviewers sometimes. But, I will say we had a really great experience at NPJ. So this is not about [LAUGHTER] that journal. Just to be clear, we had a lovely experience there. The reviewers were great. They definitely made the paper better. Everything good to say about that journal.

Rebecca: Well, we’ll always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Shaylene: What’s next for us is fleshing out the stereotypes more. So we’ve already talked about some directions, you guys brought some up and we did, looking at how it might affect actual daily practices. So how someone writes a recommendation letter or the kinds of programs children get recommended to. The kinds of careers people think others would excel at. I have learning style surveys where most people that believe in the myth think that learning styles can predict career outcomes, but diving deeper into like exactly what that means, because it was just like a one item on our broader survey. And then also looking at things like we talked about earlier, like how learning styles intersect with people’s identities, because most people aren’t just black shadows.And that’s what we did in our study, we just like provided little black silhouettes. So I think kind of moving our findings into like, a little bit more of an ecologically valid realm, I think, is the next step.

Xin: And building on that is also what we’ve discussed. We could also switch gear from the career guidance to parent or teachers’ perspective on what the recommendations they have on learners, but also towards learners themselves. What do they think? “Oh, I have these kinds of learning styles. What does that mean to me? Am I gonna go for certain jobs, but not the others?” Yeah, if we ask children these kind of questions on “What is your learning style? And, what’s going on, going off of it?” That will be very interesting.

Shaylene: Xin and I have another paper looking at beliefs about… it’s Xin’s work, really, I helped… She has a wonderful paper looking at people’s beliefs about language and language acquisition and policy endorsement. And I actually think that’s also another promising future direction. So I wonder if the degree to which we believe in learning styles, how that affects beliefs in streaming of children from a really young age, which we know isn’t always beneficial, especially if you stream children too young into more academic streams and less academic streams? That does happen in some countries. And so that’s, although less common in Canada, very common in other places. Xin, you talked about like the Chinese education system has different…

Xin: Oh, that’s from high school, though…

Shaylene: Yeah. So even that, the degree to which you might endorse, it’s more extreme streaming of students like different schools even. So that’s probably another important direction is, how does this affect things you would vote for or endorse as a citizen?

Rebecca: Thank you for your really important work and helping us all think about the kind of harm that some of these beliefs can actually cause.

John: Yeah, students face enough barriers that having learning styles serve as a barrier to their learning is something that could be pretty easily avoided. Great work and I’m looking forward to seeing more of your future work on this and other topics.

Shaylene: Great, thank you so much for having us. It’s been a really fun conversation.

Xin: Thank you.

John: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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293. Study Like a Champ

The study strategies that most students use may be helpful in passing high-stakes assessments, but do not generally support long-term recall of fundamental concepts. In this episode, Regan Gurung and John Dunlosky join us to discuss a new resource they have created that is designed to help students develop more efficient study strategies and improve their metacognitive and self-regulatory skills.

Show Notes

  • Hacker, D. J., Dunlosky, J., & Graesser, A. C. (Eds.). (1998). Metacognition in educational theory and practice. Routledge.
  • Gurung, Regan and J. Dunlosky (2023). Study Like a Champ: The Psychology-Based Guide to “Grade A” Study Habits. American Psychological Association.
  • Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119.

Transcript

John: The study strategies that most students use may be helpful in passing high-stakes assessments, but do not generally support long-term recall of fundamental concepts. In this episode, we discuss a new resource designed to help students develop more efficient study strategies and improve their metacognitive and self-regulatory skills.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are Regan Gurung and John Dunlosky. Regan is a social psychologist and is an associate vice provost and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University, He is the author of over 120 peer-reviewed articles and has co-authored or co-edited 15 books. John is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and the Director of the Science of Learning and Education Center at Kent State University. He co-authored the first textbook on metacognition and has edited several volumes on education. Regan and John are the co-authors of Study Like a Champ, which was published earlier this year by the American Psychological Association. Welcome, John and welcome back, Regan!

Regan: Thank you.

John D.: It’s great to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Regan, are you drinking tea?

Regan: Just water because it is a scorcher here in Oregon. So water, and lots of it.

Rebecca: Hydration is important. How about you, John?

John D.: No tea for me for about five years, I used to really be addicted to oolong. And now I’ve gone full espresso. [LAUGHTER] Water for me today too. It’s a little bit late for espresso on the East Coast.

John: And I have an Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, John, you’re really pumping up the caffeine today. Also on the East Coast,

John: My day started at 5:30 this morning…

Rebecca: So did mine.

John: …and it’s going to be going really late. We’re in the midst of grading here, we’re recording this a little bit earlier than it will be released. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss Study like a Champ. What prompted you to create this book?

Regan: So both of us have been teaching for a long time, both of us do research on teaching and learning. And I think both of us really like taking stuff from the lab and testing it in the classroom. And, I think, as passionate teachers, we noticed that we knew the stuff, we knew what students should be doing, we told our students what they should be doing. We even tried to design our classes in that way. But clearly, we needed to do more of it. And the impetus behind this book was let’s put these expert tips in the hands of students everywhere. We didn’t want it to be just those students who had teachers like us who talked about studying, we want it to be in student hands. And that’s where it came from, specifically driven by the fact that even though there’s some really neat stuff out there on learning, very little of that, if any, is written to the student. And that’s something right from the get go when John and I first talked, we agreed that this would be in a voice that would speak directly to students.

John D.: Absolutely. In fact, I think that was the main impetus because of all the wonderful books and volumes out there on learning sciences. And just too many of them, I think, appropriately so written for teachers. And often they tend to be a little bit fact listing because of that. In other words, I’m going to tell teachers everything there is to know about learning, which can be overwhelming. And what Regan and I wanted to do is kind of find the most effective and best little snapshots of the learning sciences to share with students, the things that we think will move the needle the quickest, so to speak. So by no means do we tell students everything there is to know about the learning sciences, but we hope we tell them the best stories to get you back onto the learning track, so to speak.

Rebecca: So you begin your book by discussing a variety of widely believed learning myths. Can you talk about a couple of these myths?

John D.: Sure, one of the biggest and I really don’t think this holds true for college students, but K through 12, definitely, it’s just the myth of learning styles. So, we all have learning preferences. I certainly have preferences. I wish my instructors would sing to me all the time and do my learning through music. It’s just that’s not going to help me learn calculus, and so forth, where really hard work needs to be done. So it’s natural to accept a myth like that, because it makes everyone feel good. It really can also undermine learning because it makes us want to do things that are more aligned with our preferences, but sometimes misaligned with most effective practices. So that’s kind of one learning myth, which I hope, in 10 years, if we were to have this discussion again, it would not come up because it was completely dispelled. But there are a variety of others too, that I think can undermine student success too.

Regan: And I think something else, that we really tried to put ourselves in students’ shoes, and we built on what our students said to us. And another one I wanted to highlight in response to that question is so often I think our students think that learning is up to us, if they have a good teacher they learn. If they have a bad teacher, they won’t learn. And undoubtedly, teacher effectiveness is important, but it’s also up to the student. The student has to do something, the student has to take accountability. And early on in chapter one, we show that at least half of the variance half of the accountability for learning is in the student hands. Teachers are also responsible, but really, if a student isn’t doing their bit, then learning is not going to happen. And now once you are ready to do your bit, well the rest of the book tells you what to do. But you’ve got to realize that don’t just sit back and go “Come on teach. Do your magic.” We all like doing our magic. But we can do all the magic in the world if you are not joining us in this adventure, and I’m thinking adventure a lot, because Zelda Stairs of the Kingdom just got released recently, and my household seems to be quite into it. So yeah, join us on the adventure.

John D.: Absolutely. Let me just jump in with one other learning myth that really gets me, and it literally gets me, because I fall prey to the same thing. That’s if you’re struggling, you’re not learning because it’s frustrating. And I often try to pick up new skills, I’m teaching myself to play the guitar now. And I struggle, and I get frustrated, I want to throw my guitar down because things aren’t happening. And I have to remind myself that sometimes it’s the struggling when you’re doing the most learning. And if we could allow students to realize that if you’re not struggling, you actually may not be learning, and that you should embrace the challenges, the hurdles that are in front of you. And it turns out, some of those hurdles are embracing the most effective learning techniques, which produce struggles in learning, but yet also produce the best long-term outcomes. Whereas other ways to prepare for classes and so forth, the way I’d like to teach myself to play guitar, makes it seem very easy. But then there’s really no progress being made. And if there’s any method I could really want to undermine, that would be a major one, that sometimes struggling is a good thing, not all the time, and it’s up to the students and the instructors to figure out is this a good struggle or bad struggle and how to correct that.

John: Those times when we try to give students desirable difficulties, they often find those to be somewhat undesirable. And I often get comments in my course evaluations that “he’s making us learn it ourselves.” And my response is always “Well, I can’t really learn it for you, I can give you the tools, I can give you resources, I can help you learn this material, but ultimately, you have to do the learning.” Going back just a little bit to your comment, John, about learning styles, I had a discussion in an online class, which is mostly upper-level students. And about three quarters of the students in my class were very strongly convinced of that myth of learning styles. So it hasn’t gone away. We hope it ma, but it is very pervasive, certainly in K through 12, where they’re regularly testing it, but some of the students have mentioned that they’ve been tested here at the college in some of their classes. And it’s again, really frustrating to see that, but it’s pretty pervasive.

Rebecca: Yeah, I was struck too, John, when you were talking about both learning styles and the struggle, because as I was working with mostly graduate students this semester, I had those exact conversations with those students. But it may have been the first time that they’ve really come up with some barriers that they faced in learning, and really had to reassess how they were working towards their goals.

John D.: Absolutely, and nothing but utmost compassion for students and sympathy, because in many ways, the experiences they had before college allowed them to use ineffective strategies and still get by. So things didn’t seem like a struggle, the difficulty now, the first time, then you hit a struggle, when you really have to change strategies or techniques, you may not realize what to do. It might seem frustrating and overwhelming, when in fact, now’s the time when the real learning begins.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I think sometimes when the subject matters new, as well as the strategies are new, students can immediately feel a little cognitive overload. [LAUGHTER]

JOHN D. Absolutely.

John: And part of that I think may be related to how they’re often taught throughout their whole career. In general, much of the advice they get in elementary and secondary schools, and sometimes in college, encourages them to adopt strategies that may not be that effective. Often, people still use high-stakes exams. And people don’t do a lot of interleaved practice or spaced practice, which are things you talk about really nicely in your book. And the incentive structure for students is perhaps to favor things that align well with short-term recall without that longer term learning. And your book can help, if we can get students doing this, but it seems to me like we also have to do a bit more work and getting faculty to adopt some techniques that may encourage students to use techniques that are more effective. Might this be something we could build into our classes a little bit?

Regan: Actually the riff over a couple of different things you said, John, I think there are two things going on here. One is, a lot of the issues that we run into with our students are actually pretty easy to pinpoint. And that is high school. And when I say high school, I’m not saying “Oh, high school teachers,” I’m saying the whole high school environment. One of my favorite examples is the syllabus. Many of us college and university faculty complain that students don’t read the syllabus, and I had a great conversation with my 17 year old. I was talking about the syllabus and he said, “Yeah, the syllabus is useless.” I said, “Excuse me?” and he said, “Here’s what we do with the syllabus. We spend a whole day, a whole day, reading through every word on the syllabus, but the syllabus is not really designed to help us learn.” And I looked at his syllabus. And sure enough, the syllabi he had didn’t really map on to the best practices that many of us listening employ. And I could completely see why he had that whole. “Yeah, I’m not going to read the syllabus when I get to college. I said, “And of course, you will now,” but it was a great conversation where I really got to see the mindset. And I think that’s just one example, where a lot of this happened, where it’s like, let’s see, what have they just been used to? Then add on top of that, how learning changed during remote learning. That’s another whole mix to the whole issue. And then, add one more, the misinterpretation of, I think, learning styles. Before we started this call, we were joking about the fact that our book is now in an audio version. Now, because it’s an audio version, does it mean the auditory learners will be better than those….? No, it just means that sometimes when you want to listen to something that works well, other times reading something works better. So it’s not this whole “Oh, look, there’s this one modality and I’m a person of this one modality.” And I think that preference that John D. so nicely used… it’s preference, right? …and we have preferences. But let’s also not forget the take home message of that Pashler et. al 2008 study, which is the more styles that you use…. And here’s where it goes back to desirable difficulties, mixing it up, is actually better for learning, no matter what your preference may be.

Rebecca: Oh, but mixing it up is so uncomfortable. [LAUGHTER]

John D.: It makes things a lot more difficult, right? One advice I would give too, that my teaching has changed dramatically, as I’ve gotten more into learning sciences. And at least for someone who teaches, I hate to say this, a non-essential course course that I love and courses that I love for undergrads, I realized I was teaching them too much. So I put them into almost a defensive mode, where the only way to prepare, because they were overwhelmed, is to cram as much as they could and hope to pass the exam because it was a tsunami of information. So over the years, I’ve followed the model, less is more, it’s up to me as the instructor to figure out what is really essential, and how to give them just as little as possible to make their experience as large as possible. So that they then can use the techniques to learn the content well enough so that they can keep that content with them a lot longer period of time. So it’s really kind of changing styles. Now, don’t get me wrong, if I’m teaching chemistry to pre meds, and you need to know chemistry, then you need a different approach, because there’s a lot to learn, it’s difficult, and aspects of our book really focus on how to meet those challenges too. And I think students, just like instructors, need to pick and choose where they want their battles, you don’t have to ace everything as a student, but decide what you really want to do well at, and then use the most effective practices to nail it as you work forward toward a long career and lifelong learning.

John: One of the things you include early in your book is a list of what research finds to be effective and what research finds to be ineffective, side by side, which for faculty use could be really helpful except for some degree of similarity between those two lists. Could you just talk a little bit about that.

John D.: I like to think about it, as much as I’ve not talked about it like this, as more or less effective versus effective and ineffective. And I’m not gonna like reference to that table necessarily, but let me talk about one that I badmouth a lot, which is highlighting as a learning strategy. And like Sharpie has not contacted me with a lawsuit or something because it sounds like I don’t want people to have highlighters. And what we mean by less effective as a learning strategy here is, is that using a highlighter is just the beginning of a learning adventure and not the end of it. So there are great uses of a highlighter of rereading material, of these things that really don’t lead to a great deal of learning, because they kind of are the stepping off point or the catapult for learning, so to speak. So is using a highlighter ineffective for learning? Absolutely, it doesn’t help you learn the content that well. But what I recommend to students: to highlight everything they want to learn as kind of a different approach to that strategy, so that they then apply the most effective strategies in learning it. Yes. So as much as we kind of play off ineffective to effective, it’s more like every strategy in its right place. And some strategies that can be generally ineffective for very specific uses might be relatively good, and what I think Regan and I try to do, because it’s way too much to think about if you’re not a learning scientist, like one exactly show us the specialty strategy, but we try to focus on are just strategies that students could learn just more generally to do well in any particular content. So kind of low hanging fruit, so to speak, where you don’t have to be a learning scientist to make decisions about which specialty strategy to use in every place. But here’s some kind of fail-proof strategies that can help you anywhere.

Regan: I want to actually say there’s that flipside too and John, this is something you asked about earlier when you talked about teachers changing what they do, and I think John D, and I joke about the companion volume to this is Teach Like a Champion. But I think the nice thing about that table of high utility and low utility strategies is that it’s not just the student who needs to be aware of the fact that some are high and low. But I think we take it further to say why are some of those high and low, and then here’s the key companion piece, which is, we hope that instructors reading this can also take those tips, and be ready to share different options with the students. Because I know both John and I have compared notes on this, when a student comes to our office after an exam who’s not thrilled with their score, who has not scored well, we both do some pretty intensive. “Alright, so tell me exactly what you do.” Just that conversation is so important. We both ask to see their notes. And of course, every once in a while a student says I don’t take notes. Well, let’s start right there. And that’s why we have a whole chapter on note taking, and why take notes and how to take notes. But I think that’s exactly it, is so many of us. and I’ll say us, not just our students, so many of us are so used to doing things just one way that we’re not ready. And we don’t look enough about is this really working or not. And I think that’s what we really push with a lot of very real examples ripped from the headlines of our lives, as it were, where we talk about, look, this is what somebody’s tried, and here’s what they did wrong. And here’s how they can make it better.

Rebecca: I wanted to talk a little bit about that chapter on notetaking. Faculty often make the observation that students don’t take effective notes, but then don’t necessarily respond by teaching students how to take notes or giving them some strategies to improve that skill. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that finally might show students or offer students to take more effective notes?

John D.: Absolutely. So the one thing that I would recommend highly is that if we all agree that taking notes in its own right is not where the learning occurs. And in fact, research comparing people who take notes versus who don’t take notes typically showed no differences between the two. Now, the key is, when you look at these studies carefully, you’ll realize the folks who took the notes, and who didn’t take notes do equally poorly. So it’s not like they do equally well. So the notes are a artifact that in many cases students can use to really learn the content well. So the question is, how do you get all the correct and appropriate information into those notes? So one thing that teachers can do, that research shows really helps well, it’s just flag important content, literally tell students “Okay, time to take notes, this is critical, I need you to know this.” One of my favorite statements, ”The next thing I say, will be on the exam.” [LAUGHTER] And see how many people start taking notes. Now, of course, I would love to see notes that are embellished with examples, with questions, and so forth. But at least getting the rudimentary content down there as an artifact, so students have it to utilize as they’re preparing is so important, or having teams of students take notes and share those things as well is also good. So I think for teachers to be compassionate, but also to help your students sometimes identify what’s most important, by speaking louder by saying, “Hey, this is really critical.” Sometimes I have to even flag it to not only just critical, but it’s going to be an exam, you’d think those two things meant the same thing, but sometimes students need a little help. I think it’s important, and there’s nothing wrong with telegraphing what is most important in your class. In fact, let me restate that. There’s everything not right about not telegraphing. Now, try to parse that. But what I’m saying is, we should be telling the students what they need to learn, how we’re going to test them on it, what we’re going to test on, and allow them to meet those successes. And I think good note taking, and helping students take notes by telegraphing what should be in there, can be very useful, in my own experience, and at least some of the research too.

Regan: Notice what else is in there. If we do want students to take good notes, we don’t want to be talking extremely fast. We want to make sure we have pauses, we want to make sure our slides, to the extent we use them, are not so packed with information that either they want to copy it all down or they get it all as a handout so they don’t have to, but there are all these nuances. And I want to go right back to that finding about the students who take notes and the students who don’t take notes. The bigger issue is what are you doing with those notes? I think far often students just think about it as “I’m going to record what the instructor said.” Well, you’ve got to go back and revise them. You’ve got to go back and check and see if your understanding is right. You need to review them. The issue is, I think, when people take notes, they’re not doing enough with those notes. And there are ways where we can talk about how to take better notes and they’re not. When I teach 100, or intro level classes, every once in a while, I will stop, and I do this during the first week, I will stop. And I’ll say, “Alright, here’s a reality check. If you took good notes, you should have the following. How many of you have it in your notes?” And I do that a couple of different times that first week or the first two weeks to get into that habit of you should be taking notes, you should be doing something about it. I also want to say something that didn’t make it into that chapter on note taking, but it’s gone up another shot, because I’ve seen this so often, in the last year and a half or two years, students taking photographs of the slides. Reality check, people, that’s not taking notes, taking a photograph of a slide is not taking notes. But I think in some students’ minds they’ve taken notes, just more effectively. And there are studies now rolling out that show that the photograph slides versus note taking versus controlled no notes. that the photographs and no notetaking is doing the worst on quizzes. But I think that’s something else we’ve got to take up” how you take notes is important and taking a photograph is not it.

John D.: Let me spin back to something that Regan said that I think is great, too, as far as helping students develop better notes, I begin, and I know Regan does this as well, every class with a no-stakes quiz. And I use that for a variety of different reasons, some of which we talk about in our book, but one of them is first try to answer the quiz multiple choice question without the alternatives from memory. And if you got it from memory, that’s important, because that’s going to help you learn. And then if you don’t get it from memory, now see if you can answer using your notes from the last class. And if they can’t answer the question using their notes, we have issues. So they’re not taking complete notes, they don’t understand their notes, or the issue could be with me. Occasionally, I look at the notes and realize, “Oh, my goodness, I must have said something wrong last class, because everybody’s notes are incorrect.” [LAUGHTER] And if everyone’s notes are incorrect, the source of the error is probably me. So it’s a way to help students understand that the notes are the vehicle to understand the content that we really want them to learn. And there’s ways to reinforce that through no-stakes quizzes, and so forth to help them understand that what we’re doing in the classroom is providing all the scaffolding to help them succeed.

John: One of the things you emphasize early in the book, and throughout the book is the importance of students developing their metacognition as well as their self-regulation skills. Could you talk a little bit about why that’s important, because I think that’s something that’s not emphasized enough throughout their educational experience,

John D.: I’m gonna just focus on one aspect of our particular viewpoint on self regulation, and then I’ll let Regan go with the more fun stuff. I want students to really succeed in school and in college. But quite frankly, as a college educator, I want students to succeed in life after they leave here. And one of the most important skills that anyone can learn is time management, that’s about self regulation. And believe it or not, I have actually students tell me, it’s like, “Well, I know, managing my time and developing plans, that’s just not my cup of tea.” (speaking of teaching for tea). But it absolutely should be, because effective people develop goals, plan on how to get them, and manage their time to get there. So if students can take something from this book that I think is highly valuable about self regulation is to look at our examples and our encouragement and inspiration to manage your time, make goals and plans, and develop a time management strategy that works well for you. Because that’s ultimately going to lay the foundations for a successful use of other strategies we discuss in the book, but also for a highly successful life, whether it be success in your job, your hobbies, raising a family, or whatever, successful people manage their time and self regulate. That’s something that we really do push in the book, and some of it’s not necessarily metacognition, per se, but it’s about really taking ownership of your life and deciding how to get things done effectively. So time management, for me is so important aspect of this book.

Regan: I think whenever you think about self regulation, I really try to stress two elements of it on one hand, especially think about metacognition is the: “What do you know? Do you know this stuff?” And there’s that whole “Am I ready for this exam? Do I really understand this concept? Do I know how to do this?” That’s the classic metacognition, but even more broadly, when we talk about plan and monitor and assess your knowledge, that’s, I think, really important as well. And of course, the tips such as retrieval practice is great for the assessment too and to assess yourself. But I think I love the way John talks about time management because when we talk about self regulation, a big issue that I hear from students a lot is where those two things interact, not being able to regulate how they use their time, especially when it comes to social media. And students will say to me, “Yep, I start scrolling Tik Tok, and before I know it’s an hour later. Well, that’s a basic self-regulation issue. That’s a time management issue. That’s a planning issue. And I think in our planning chapter, we recognize this and we tell students “Look, it’s okay to enjoy social media. But guess what? Plan your social media timr. So it’s not like you’re saying, I’m not going to use social media. Be real. If that’s what you enjoy, sure, look at some social media, but plan it out, allocate time for your social media, just like you allocate time for your work so that everything fits into your schedule.”

Rebecca: Allocating time, it feels like have a lot of conversations with students about that on a regular basis.

John D.: Oh yeah.

John: Are there other topics you’d like to emphasize about your book that we haven’t touched on yet?

Regan: Well, I think one thing that if you’ll notice, the last chapter in our book is all about things that, for the longest time, nobody thought related to studying: sleeping, eating, physical activity. But I think that is just so important. That is so important. And gosh, I know, I don’t think I ever shared this with John. But sometimes I almost played with putting that chapter first. We did put it at the end, because I think it’s really important. But I think most students don’t realize how those life things interact. And I think for those of us who read up on higher education, there’s just so much written about burnout among students, among faculty, and all of that relates to those things we talk about in the last chapter. It’s prioritizing sleep and prioritizing good eating and prioritizing physical activity, prioritizing just getting out and getting some air. And some of my favorite comments that I get back from students… it happens a lot when I teach health psych… but even otherwise, where they will say, “you know, yeah, I caught myself scrolling, I went outside for a walk, and it was just five minutes, but I came back and I could tackle things better.” And I think, people, it’s 360 degrees of living is what we’ve got to practice.

John D.: And I love that Regan. Because obviously, we saved the best for last with that chapter. But, come on, to do all these things. It’s a time-management issue. If I’m going to work, all of this in, how can I do so so I have enough time for play and I have enough time for work, which are two important aspects of life. So, totally agree.

Rebecca: Well, they always wrap up by asking: what’s next? [LAUGHTER]

John D.: Wow, that’s a big question. And what’s next, I would say for me, the strategies that I think are most effective, that work the best, unfortunately, have also been investigated the least, because they’re difficult to investigate, they involve multiple sessions for students to engage the same material, and so forth. So as someone who was kind of born and raised in a laboratory, either my own lab or laboratory of the classroom, what I’d love to see is just much more evidence-based research focused on further understanding, not only what works best, but how students can engage in the best practice in the most efficient way. So it’s balancing both an understanding of wanting students to obtain their learning objectives, but also understanding that they want to do so effectively and efficiently. Because there’s so many aspects to life beyond just school. So I’m always going to say more research, although I could totally understand some would say more application too, but I’m gonna go what’s next is some more research and all these really effective techniques and how to use them more effectively.

Regan: And it’s that last part, John, that is what’s exciting me right now, I’ve been learning a lot more about the whole field of implementation science, which is just because something is effective, and something is efficacious, what are the factors that influence its implementation? …because whether it’s a student reading our book and trying to implement our recommendations, or a faculty member, instructor, teacher listening to us and trying to implement what we’re saying, there are still nuances, there are still contextual factors. And I think we’re just getting better at intentionally and systematically teasing apart what some of those issues with implementation are. And for me, that’s been pretty exciting. I was fortunate to read a lot of a fellow Oregon State University, new PhD, Dr. Rachel Schweitzer, who’s done a lot of this work on implementation science, and some of her ideas. I’d love to be able to test them in my class, to dovetail with continuing research on study techniques and how to make it happen more,

Rebecca: Some really important stuff that needs to happen, for sure.

John: And thank you for this book and all the other research and work that you’ve done in support of improving student learning.

John D.: Thanks for having us on.

Regan: Thanks so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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108. Neuromyths

Faculty design their classes based on their perceptions of how students learn. These perceptions, though, are not always consistent with the science of learning. In this episode, Dr. Kristen Betts and Dr. Michelle Miller join us to discuss the prevalence of neuromyths and awareness of evidence-based practices in higher ed.

Kristen is a clinical professor in the online Ed.D. program in Educational Leadership and Management in the School of Education at Drexel University. Michelle is the Director of the First-Year Learning Initiative, Professor of Psychological Sciences and the President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She’s also the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and a frequent guest on this podcast.

Show Notes

  • Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds online. Harvard University Press.
  • Online Learning Consortium
  • Betts, K., Miller, M., Tokuhama-Espinosa, T., Shewokis, P., Anderson, A., Borja, C., Galoyan, T., Delaney, B., Eigenauer, J., & Dekker, S. (2019). International report: Neuromyths and evidence-based practices in higher education. Online Learning Consortium: Newburyport, MA.
  • Mariale Hardiman
  • Tracey Noel Tokuhama-Espinosa
  • Dekker, S., Lee, N. C., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in education: Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers. Frontiers in psychology, 3, 429.
  • Alida Anderson
  • Macdonald, K., Germine, L., Anderson, A., Christodoulou, J., & McGrath, L. M. (2017). Dispelling the myth: Training in education or neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1314.
  • Universal Design for Learning,” CAST website
  • Mchelle Miller, “65. Retrieval Practice” – Tea for Teaching podcast, January 23, 2019.
  • Vygotsky, L. (1987). Zone of proximal development. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes, 5291, 157.
  • Michelle Miller, “86. Attention Matters” – Tea for Teaching podcast, June 19, 2019.

Transcript

John: Faculty design their classes based on their perceptions of how students learn. These perceptions, though, are not always consistent with the science of learning. In this episode, we examine the prevalence of neuromyths and awareness of evidence-based practices in higher ed.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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Rebecca: Our guest today are Dr. Kristen Betts and Dr. Michelle Miller. Kristen is a clinical professor in the online EDD program in Ed.D. Educational Leadership and Management in the School of Education at Drexel University. Michelle is the Director of the First-Year Learning Initiative, Professor of Psychological Sciences and the President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She’s also the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and a frequent guest on this podcast. Welcome, Kristen and welcome back, Michelle.

Kristen: Thank you so much for having us.

Michelle: Hi, it’s great to be here again.

John: Were really pleased to talk to you. Our teas today are…

Kristen: I’m drinking Apricot Oolong, a green Tea. Nice for the afternoon.

Michelle: And, I have a wonderful hibiscus tea.

Rebecca: And, I have… big surprise… English Afternoon tea.

John: And, I have ginger peach black tea.

We invited you here to talk about the study that you both worked on together on neuromyths and evidence-based practices in higher education. Could you tell us what prompted this study?

Kristen: Sure. As a lifelong learner, I decided I would enroll in a wonderful program being offered at Johns Hopkins University several years ago in mind, brain, and teaching led by Dr. Mariale Hardiman. In one of the courses, I read several articles that looked at the high prevalence of neuromyths in K through 12 education. And, one of the things that caught me by surprise was: One, I was a K through 12 teacher early in my career. I was, at the time, a professor in the School of Education, and in looking at some of the neuromyths, they actually looked like things that I had studied as part of professional development. And, I had not assumed they would be neuromyths. And, so it really intrigued me in terms of: Why is there this high prevalence and why are we not more aware of some of the evidence-based practices that are out there? Not just in the United States, but clearly these were studies that were taking place internationally. So, I decided to start looking at this through the lens of higher education, because that’s where I work and it’s my area of expertise, and I reached out to Dr. Michelle Miller. I was at the Online Learning Consortium conference. Her focus is on cognitive psychology. So, I approached her after the session and told her about this interest in looking at neuromyths within the field of education… really, across disciplines, in trying to see was it similar to what the findings were in K through 12 education, and what was really being done to integrate evidence-based practices into pedagogy or even andragogy. So, we decided to connect and start looking at this. I had a wonderful PHD student who I was working with at the time as well, who is from Armenia, very interested in this topic, and we quickly grew our small group to include a total of ten researchers from the total of seven different institutions nationally and internationally across three countries. And, everybody brought different expertise, everyone from two-year colleges, four-year colleges, public, private. And, we also were very fortunate because we were able to find, really some of the seminal researchers in the area of mind-brain education science, such as Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. And, we reached out to the researchers who actually conducted the studies looking at neuromyths like Sanne Dekker, and we reached out to a Alida Anderson who worked with McDonald et. al. in their 2017 publication. So, it quickly grew from a point of interest in trying to identify what was happening in higher education, to really a much broader international study.

Michelle: Oh, and just echoing what Kristen has said here, we first did meet through the Online Learning Consortium, first at a conference and then they set up calls where we got to talk to each other and realize that even though we came from somewhat different academic backgrounds and published in some different areas, we really had this common ground of interest in how do we bring more evidence-based teaching to faculty in higher education and really throughout the world. And, to me, as a cognitive psychologist, it’s just an inherently fascinating question of, even though we live in our own minds, why do we not sometimes understand some basic principles of how the mind and how the brain works? So, that’s just an intellectually interesting question to me. But then it does take on this tremendous practical importance when we start to look at teaching practices throughout the world and bringing that really quality evidence-based design of teaching and learning experiences for our students.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how, once all of these researchers are now together, how did you put the study together and how was it conducted?

Kristen: I have to say it was not easy. Thank goodness, we reached out to some of the original authors. The survey instruments that looked at neuromyths and general knowledge about the brain. And, what was so interesting is almost all the studies were truly K through 12 focus, so the questions were very different. Even looking at lexicon, “girl and boy,” where we would want to look at male/female. So, we had a look at absolutely every question and make sure that we were able to revise that question within the framework for the lens of higher education. So, it was not an easy process, just in terms of time, because we had to go through so many iterations. And, I think that really helps with the integrity of the research. We had two pilot studies, even down to looking at the Likert scales that we used. One of the things that really stood out was the primary study that we looked at, which was a 2012 study by Sanne Dekker and several other researchers. They had a Likert scale that looked at correct, incorrect and I don’t know. There was a study by McDonald and colleagues in 2017 and they changed it to true and false. So, we decided early on, we would go with true and false. And, when we did that pilot, we ended up with half the participants stopping midway and simply putting, “I’m not sure if it’s true or false…” and they just didn’t complete the survey. And, I think, just looking at how we phrase the questions, it really affected the participation of our respondents. So, we went back, we modified some of the questions based on that, and we change the Likert scale. And, I think being able to have the ability to say whether it was correct, incorrect, or you didn’t know took away from saying it was true or false, because you can base it on knowledge or what you perhaps had been exposed to. And, we ended up having a wonderful pilot making some additional changes. And the feedback that we got, even after sending out the survey, we had a flood of emails saying “Can you please send us a copy of the study, we’re really interested?” So, we really looked at everything. And, I would say one thing that stood out most; and again I go back to the time we spent over two years on this study from point of inception to where we actually send out the survey, collected this study and then published it, was when we looked at the neuromyths, what we quickly realized was we needed to examine evidence-based practices as well. And, we looked at all of this from a metacognitive perspective. The prior studies that were done, looked at what they called “endorsing neuromyths,” and we weren’t so much looking at endorsing, we wanted to look at awareness, because all of us were involved in teaching… professional development. And, so it was a matter of trying to identify what the gaps were, what were instructors, instructional designers, and professional development administrators aware of and, if there is that gap, how could we develop a study where people would say “Wow, I also thought that was correct, but it’s incorrect… but, I would love to find out what the response is and how I can change my knowledge or understanding.” And, so we looked at absolutely everything and wanted to create a study that people would pick up and say, “This is where I am now. Gosh, after going through this in reading the report, this is where I am and my circle of knowledge needs to continue to expand, as things continue to expand through mind-brain education science.”

Michelle: As a collaborative effort, I haven’t been involved really in a study of this scale and scope. And, it’s simply the level of collaboration. You just heard about one of the iterations of the survey instrument that we put together and just how that piece of the study came about. But all the way through the analyses, the writing, it was such an opportunity, even apart from what we were able to share with the rest of the world, just from my own niche piece of the study as well. The opportunity, as a cognitive psychologist, to start infusing what I feel is more attention that needs to be paid to cognitive psychology and learning sciences. The opportunity to infuse that into this field in this area of thinking was also really exciting as well.

Kristen: So, in terms of how it was conducted, we sent the survey out for the Online Learning Consortium. When we originally started, we were just going to look at instructors, we were looking at neuromyth prevalence in instructors because all of the other studies that had been done were primarily K through 12 teachers and pre-service teachers. (although the McDonald study looked at a wider range). Once we started to bring together our team, then we started thinking, “Gosh, well, it’s not simply the instructors. It’s going to be the instructional designers, it’ll be anybody conducting some type of professional development as well because no course is truly an island.” There are so many people today involved in course design, course development and so the Online Learning Consortium was such an amazing partner for us and they touch on absolutely every part of that population. So, we reached out to them early on and said “We’d love to collaborate with you. You’ve got an extensive membership and listserv. Would we be able to develop this survey instrument, send it out through your membership, and ask them through snowball sampling to share it with others who may actually be involved in higher education, in one of these roles.” And, they could not have been a better partner. They’re just incredible to work with. So, that’s how it was conducted.

John: And, we were actually part of that snowball. I sent it out to a list of about 1200 faculty, staff, and professional development people on my campus alone. How large was your ultimate sample?

Kristen: We ended up with approximately 1300 respondents. And, then we actually looked at the full study, we ended up with 929, who met the criteria for inclusion. So, one of the things we wanted to make sure when we looked at the criteria for inclusion that they worked in higher education. You’d be surprised. So many people complete surveys, but they don’t necessarily meet the criteria. Even when you explicitly state you have to be within higher education: teaching or one of these areas. So, we had a total of 929 who met the criteria, and of those they also had a complete 95% of the questions for the neuromyths, and also for the evidence-based practices because we didn’t want to have any gaps. I would say it was an incredible response rate, especially for those completing the survey. They filled out I would say the majority of everything within the survey itself. The respondents were just incredible as well, because you talked about the cross section of participants, but we ended up with really an incredible number of instructors and that was broken down into full-time, part-time, instructional designers, the professional development administrators and it allowed us to run a lot of different tests that we’ll talk about when we look at the findings.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that’s really interesting about how you discuss the setup of the study is thinking about how many different individuals play a role in perpetuating myths, or even perpetuating good evidence-based practices too. That administrators is where funding comes from, so you have to have everybody in the institution on board with what you actually want to essentially Institute.

Kristen: Well, what’s interesting, and you bring up such a great point. One of the top neuromyths out there is learning styles. And, so when you’re looking at learning styles, this is something that almost seems to permeate. It doesn’t matter when you started teaching, whether it’s K through 12, or higher education at some point if you’ve been involved in education, you’ve come across learning styles. Now there are learning preferences and there’s lots of wonderful research on that. But this concept of teaching to learning styles, I think, unfortunately… we talk about this in section seven of our report kind of got mixed in with multiple intelligences. And, that is not at all what multiple intelligence was about, but it was almost the timing of it and so, having been a K through 12 teacher, I remember going through a professional development where we learned about learning styles and how it was something to look at in terms of teaching to learning preferences. And, even to this day when I do presentations, and I know Michelle has run into this as well, especially when we co-teach some of the OLC workshops, somebody will inevitably raise their hand or type in the chat area “Are you kidding? Learning styles is a neuromyth? We just had somebody on our campus six months ago, who taught us how to do an assessment to teach to learning styles.” So, it’s still out there, even though there’s so much in the literature saying it’s a neuromyth. It’s still prevalent within education across all areas.

John: So, you mentioned the issue of learning styles. And, that’s something we see a lot on our campus as well. We’ve even had a couple of podcast guests who we edited out there mention of learning styles and then had a chat with them later about it. I won’t mention any names because they had some really good things to say, but it is a really prevalent myth and it’s difficult to deal with. So, you mentioned learning styles. What are the most prevalent myths that you found in terms of neuromyths?

Kristen: When you look at the report, the first part of our survey had 23 statements. We had eight statements that were neuromyths. If you look at the K through 12 studies, they had many more neuromyths, but we had eight. And, I will tell you, the top five neuromyths in higher education, very closely parallel what you find in K through 12. Now our prevalence is not as high, but it still shows that instructors, instructional designers, and administrators are susceptible to them and that goes back to awareness. So, the top one: listening to classical music increases reasoning ability and that’s really that Mozart Effect. Another one: individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning styles. Some of us are left brained and some of us are right brain due to hemispheric dominance and this helps explain differences in how we learn. So, that’s really that concept of “Oh, I’m right brained. I’m left brained.” And, this again, is something that goes across higher ed and K through 12. Two other really big ones: We only use 10% of our brain. And, if you look at section seven of the report, you will find all of the responses, literally evidence-based practices or research-supported responses to make sure that people aren’t simply saying, “Oh, it’s incorrect. Well, we want people to know why it’s incorrect. So, they can reflect on that and change their understanding, really the rationale and the research behind it. And, then lastly, it is best for children to learn their native language before a second language is learned. This, again, is a big neuromyth. And I think one of the things I’m hoping that will come out of this study, because we talked about this really when we go into evidence-based practices, is this concept of neuro-plasticity, the fact that the brain changes every time you learn something new. When you’re engaged in an experience, the brain is changing. And, sometimes the brain is changing at a cellular level before you might even see that change in behavior, and so we’re able to see now through technology through f-MRI through fNIR so much more than we were able to see before. So, really keeping abreast of what’s happening in the research should be informing our practice because we have more information available than ever before. But, somehow we need to get that into our professional development training, seminars, and workshops or into the classes that we’re teaching in our schools of education or into our onboarding. But yeah, these are the top five neuromyths in terms of susceptibility, and they cut across higher ed and K through 12.

John: In your paper, you also provide some crosstabs on the prevalence by the type of role of individuals, whether they’re instructors, instructional designers, or administrators. Could you tell us a bit about how the different groups due in terms of the prevalence of these neuromyths?

Kristen: Well, the one thing I will say is, everybody is susceptible to neuromyths, so it wasn’t as if there was one group, and I know that’s always in the back of someone’s mind, “Gosh, who’s the most susceptible?” Well, we didn’t find any significant differences, and one of the things that we wanted to do as well was to really be break the participants down and look at other factors. So, when we look at full-time versus part-time faculty, is one group more susceptible to neuromyths. And we found no significant difference in terms of gender, in terms of age, in terms of working at a two-year institution, a four-year institution. And I really think that talks to the amazing reality of the opportunity to integrate professional development in looking at the learning sciences and mind-brain education science in the opportunity to decrease that gap. So, it wasn’t one group over another. But it’s everybody who has this opportunity to increase this awareness across all of these areas.

John: Didn’t you also find that some of these myths were less common among instructional designers relative to faculty,

Kristen: We found with evidence-based practices, when we looked at significant difference with evidence-based practices, instructional designers actually had in terms of percent correct, higher awareness of evidence-based practices. It wasn’t a large difference, but there was a significant difference and Michelle can certainly talk to this point as well. But, this is really the importance of having an incredible team when you’re looking at course design, course development, and part of that may have to do with, when you look at instructional design, there is so much new literature and research that’s getting infused in to that area, and so that may have something to do with it. But, I think there’s lots of additional studies that we could do to follow up.

Michelle: Kind of circling back to the point of the design and delivery of instruction in a contemporary university or college is fundamentally more collaborative than it was in prior eras. And, so I think we definitely need to have everybody involved start to really break out of that old school mold of class is identified with the teacher who teaches it and that’s what a course is. And no, courses reflect, today, everything from the philosophy and the support that comes down from the top to the people that the students may never meet, but who put their stamp on instruction such as instructional designers. And, this is something that I get pretty fired up about in my just practical work as a program director and just being involved in these things in the university, that there are still faculty who you say, “Hey, do we have any instructional designers who are working with us on this project to redesign? Is anybody assigned to help us as we develop this new online degree program or something?” …and you sometimes still get blank look.? Or you get “Oh, aren’t those the people who you call when the learning management system breaks down and that’s their specialty?” I mean, this report, I think, just really hammers home that idea that instructional designers are a key part of this collaborative team that goes into really good quality higher education instruction today. And it isn’t just about the technology. I think that they’re getting exposure to and staying abreast of what’s going on in research that relates to teaching and learning. And, what a great opportunity for faculty to not just rely on them for technology, but to learn from them and to learn with them as we build better courses together.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the awareness that you found in general about evidence-based practices? So, we focused a lot on the neuromyths, but what shook out when you started looking at the evidence-based practices?

Kristen: Well, one thing that stood out was awareness was much higher. And, that’s really exciting. I think that’s a huge testament to the professional development that we are offering. But, there were still gaps in areas where there certainly could be a lot of improvement. So, a couple of examples that I’ll give because we literally spent months looking evidence-based practices, and we wanted to make sure that we could support them. So, for example, when we look at percent correct, where most individuals across all three groups were not as aware, like “differentiated instruction is individualized instruction.” So, we know that this is incorrect. But most of the respondents did not put that that was an incorrect statement. So, they either stated it was correct, or they didn’t know. So, again, this is an area that we certainly want to explore. Because differentiated instruction is something that really, I think, adds to the classroom. And, there are other ones. For example, we’ll look at Universal Design for Learning. So, one of the statements we had in there actually comes directly from the CAST website, and it says “Universal Design for Learning is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.” Well, the instructional designers, they were the most aware. So, 87% of them got that correct. Of the professional development administrators 74% got that answer correct. For the instructors, 58% got that correct. So, you can see the difference in the responses and when we share this nationally or internationally…. when we talk about the study, you’ll have a lot of individuals who’ll say “No, universal design for learning, that’s about accessibility.” Well, it certainly is about accessibility. But, most importantly, it’s about learning and how humans learn. It is probably the most dynamic and the most powerful aspect that we can add into pedagogy or into andragogy. But just by looking at the data here, it may not be something that everybody’s aware of, and that’s again a great opportunity to integrate that into professional development. So, there are a number of things. I mean, it’s exciting because when you look at it, there are 28 statements. And, as I mentioned, overall, the awareness was much higher across all three groups, compared to neuromyths or general knowledge about the brain.

Michelle: Just to jump in here, again, from my kind of cognitive psychology perspective, those evidence-based practices that we’re talking about also include, specifically, some items that are related to memory, a topic that’s really close to my heart. So, I think those are just fascinating as well. So, for example, we asked a variation on a classic question that many cognitive psychologists have looked at: “whether human memory works a lot like a digital recording device or a video camera.” So, is your memory basically taking in information that’s in front of you? And, here again, we’ve got 69% of our instructors saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. That’s how it works.” And, that is not how it works. 79% of our instructional designers identify this as an incorrect statement and 74% of our administrators, and we have a few other related things such as we asked people whether testing detracts from learning. And, as Tea for Teaching listeners know, that goes to retrieval practice. Testing doesn’t detract from learning, testing builds up learning. So, these are some as well that I think it’s very interesting to tap into what people know and really think about while these maybe seem like inside baseball, or very metaphorical or philosophical questions, if I’m an instructor, and I believe these things, that students are basically just running video cameras in their heads… well, that is going to lead to some different practices. I might be very puzzled as to why I got up and gave this lecture and the students eyes were pointed at me and yet it didn’t end up in memory. So, those are some of the items that I was particularly interested to see when we got all the numbers in.

Kristen: You know, I would say one thing: when anybody reads the report, what we want them to do is look at how it’s presented in terms of the tables, because everything is looking at the percent of correct or accurate responses. So, as Michelle said, when we look at “human memory works like a digital recording device,” 69% of the instructors got that correct. 79% of the instructional designers got that correct. And, 74% of the administrators got that correct. So, that means we still have a fairly large percentage, basically 20 to 30% that either got the answer incorrect, or they didn’t know. And, even looking at these responses, do they actually know why they knew it? Or did they guess or did they make that assumption like, “Oh, that’s got to be right.” And so, really, the intentionality of this study was awareness, really bringing out statements from the literature to help anybody who’s involved in teaching, course design, professional development to look at these questions, and really think “Do I know this?” And, “If I know it, how do I know this? Is it based on some type of research or literature? Could I defend that? If I don’t know with certainty, where do I find that answer? And how can I learn that? And, how can I integrate those practices?”

John: On the day when your report came out, we shared that on our campus to everyone on our mailing list. One of the nice things about the report is that it has all the questions and also provides references for the answers explaining why the specific answer is true or false. And, it’s a really great resource and we’ll share a link to that in the show notes. It is long. When I shared it two people sent back email saying “Maybe we should use this as a reading group for next semester.” And it’s not a bad idea, actually. But, much of that is appendices and so forth. And, it’s a really informative document. I believe in your survey, you were asking people about their participation in professional development, and you looked at the relationship between participation in professional development and the prevalence of these myths. Is that correct?

Kristen: We did. So, one of the things that we wanted to look at was trying to find out if educators were involved in professional development, whether it be neuroscience, psychology or in mind-brain education science, did that actually increase their awareness of neuromyths, general information about the brain, and evidence-based practices? And it did. We found that that it was definitely a predictor and it was found to be a significant predictor and so, for us, again, it looked at what a wonderful opportunity to be able to say that training does have a positive impact. And, that was really the crux of the study… and it’s interesting, you talked about the length of this study, because originally we had thought about doing two different or three different studies. So, we do one on neuromyths, one on evidence-based practices, one on professional development. Then when we brought the data in, the question was: “Do we separate them out into three different long articles or three different reports?” And, we collectively, across all disciplines said, “No, we need to bring them together.” Because first and foremost, it’s about awareness. You can’t really talk about evidence-based practices, until you’re aware of what the neuromyths might be. What are some of the fallacies that you might actually believe? What are things about the brain that you may or may not know? And, once you’re there, and you have that understanding, you can then move into the evidence-based practices, because it’s all really connected. So, when Michelle talks about memory, you can’t really talk about memory without having some understanding of the mind or the brain. And, so we decided collectively, we would bring it together as hopefully a seminal piece that would really present anyone with a continuum as to: “Where am I? What am I possibly doing in my classroom?” …being able to really do that self assessment and then find the answers, as you said, in that section seven, and realize that they’re not an outlier. I mean, chances are anybody that goes through this is going to fall within that span in terms of their understanding and knowledge.

Michelle: And, what I hope is coming out here is that this study is unusual, not just in its scale, its scope and that we focused on higher education, but that it is so explicitly geared to not just identifying gaps in knowledge or awareness, but addressing those. It’s not like we came along six months later and said, “Oh, by the way, here’s a really nice resource we put together.” It is one stop, it’s right there. And, what an exercise that was, as well. Kristen, I think you’ll remember back just saying, “Okay, in a paragraph… this item, all of us look at this and go ‘oh my gosh, that’s wrong’ or ‘that’s right.’ Why is that? and what are the very best empirical sources that we will trace back to, to demonstrate that?” So, we are trying to provide that and also to really be a model to say: next time that you get that handout or that workshop that says, “Oh, here’s some great stuff about the brain.” What are they backing that up with? Can you trace it back to the solid research sources that makes some of these really powerful principles for learning, and make other things just misconceptions.

Kristen: One of the things that I would say was probably the most exciting and the most challenging. We had 10 researchers, we had 10 researchers from different fields: people from nursing, biomedical engineering, psychology; we had people who work in the area of neuroscience, education (as I mentioned), and we needed to come out with a collective voice, writing a report that would be understood across disciplines. And, so when we wrote section seven, all of us had to be reviewers and we vetted it multiple times. Not just within our group, but outside, to make sure when you read about neural pathways, it actually made sense. Because to write something where somebody would not understand or not be able to connect would be a challenge. And, we wanted people to walk away. I know one of the things that we were looking at: Why neuromyths? Well, a lot of the research out there looks at the fact that when you teach, your teaching and your pedagogy is based on your knowledge, and in your understanding of how people learn, and so we wanted to really look at this area in terms of awareness, because it may impact pedagogy. Our study did not do that. And, I want to make sure it’s really clear. Our study was not designed to say, “Oh gosh, the awareness of neuromyths wasn’t very high in this area, therefore, you must be integrating neuromyths into your teaching. That was not the intentionality of our study and that’s not something that we’ve ever said. There are certainly recommendations we put in the study to look at. If there is a high prevalence of neuromyths,how does that affect pedagogy? But ours was simply looking at awareness and could professional development address gaps? So, we could do this across all different groups that would be involved in course design and delivery.

John: That’s one of the things I really like about it, that you do address all these things well, you provide the evidence, and it’s going to be a great go to reference for those of us when faced with neuromyths, with issues about evidence-based practices. We can just go and grab some of the citations and share them back out or refer them to the whole document as I’ve done several times already. These things are really common even in professional development. I was at a session not too long ago, where there were two neuromyths presented during the session. One was the learning styles thing. But the nice thing is, unlike other times when I’ve seen that done, there were two of us who went up and waited until everyone else talked to the presenter. And, we were both ready to do it after other people had gone so we didn’t embarrass her, but it’s starting to get out there. And, I know on our campus, we’ve got a growing number of people who are aware of this partly because of the reading groups we’ve had, where we’ve had a growing number of participants… and that all started actually with Michelle’s book about five years ago now when we first did the group. You came out, you visited, people wanted to do more, so we started a reading group. We’ve done four additional reading groups since then. We’ve had many of the same participants, but it’s spreading out wider. I’m hoping we’re making a difference through these reading groups.

Michelle: And, that’s so gratifying as an author and as a researcher, and I remember well working with your group in Oswego and the great ideas I took away as well. So, I’m a big believer in virtuous cycle. So, maybe we’ve started one.

Kristen: I think what really came out of this study is the passion that everybody has for student success. Everybody from those that are offering the professional development, the instructional designers that want to make sure that the students are successful, even though they might not be teaching the course. And, then the instructors themselves… and so to be able to work with that many individuals who are not only subject matter experts across their disciplines, but so passionate about making a difference. But I think being able to integrate all of this new research relating to neuroscience, psychology and education, it’s going to transform not only how we teach, but it’s going to transform pedagogy, andragogy, and this whole concept of learning.

Rebecca: I really appreciate the bringing it together and that you decided to keep it all together and not to make three separate reports. I think it’s actually really important to understand how these are all connected and related. And, I think that’s one of the most unique things about the report. I think the community is probably very grateful that we have this resource available now.

Kristen: Oh, thank you.

John: One of the things I’ve often been concerned about is how some of these neuromyths, particularly the left brain – right brain thing, and the learning styles belief, often serves as a message to students that they can only learn in certain ways or they only have certain types of skills, and they’re not able to make progress in other ways. And, it can serve as a barrier and can lead, perhaps, to the development of a fixed mindset in students which may serve as a barrier.

Rebecca: …or not even allow those students to feel like they can enter particular disciplines.

John: If people become more aware of this, perhaps it could lead to more opportunities for our students or fewer barriers placed in the way of students.

Rebecca: …or maybe even just more inclusive pedagogy in general.

Kristen: You bring up such a great point. So, if you believe in learning styles, and you believe that you are truly a visual learner, Michelle and I’ve talked about this a lot, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But you probably are an incredible visual learner because you’ve been told you learn better in this learning style, so you’re going to seek materials in that learning styles. So, the challenge with that, especially when you’re looking at younger students or anybody during their education, you’re precluding really other ways to enhance your learning. So, when you look at Universal Design for Learning, it’s so important because you’re looking at multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression. And, when you’re looking at learning styles, if a student believes they’re a visual learner and suddenly asked to go in and take a Spanish oral exam, it could trigger, all of a sudden, stress. Well, what do we know about stress? And, Michelle can talk more about that. But, when you’re stressed, it affects working memory. And, so just that thought of, “Oh my gosh, it’s an oral exam. I’m a visual learner. How can I perform well on that?” And it’s really creating, as you talked about, a barrier or it may decrease, possibly, performance. I know that Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinoza is very passionate about this. And, you’ll see in her presentations, she’ll come out and say “Neuromyths do harm.” And so, I think it’s certainly something that needs to be explored. And, Michelle, from a psychological point, I’d be curious to find out what you have to say as well.

Michelle: When you say “self-fulfilling prophecy” and things like that, it also kind of reminds me of a placebo effect, in a way… and learning styles, and continuing that as an example, yeah, I might go: “Oh, visual learning. It is absolutely me,” like “Now I feel like I can tailor all this to myself. I’ll just find teachers, opportunities, and disciplines that are right there in visual learning.” And, I might have some subjective impression that that’s helping me, or from the teacher’s perspective, I might feel like “Well, I brought in some different materials and engaged different modalities and, what do you know, because of learning styles, we’re doing better.” Well, there’s lots of different reasons why that might be happening. An individual may walk away, and maybe they weren’t individually harmed. I just feel like… just like in modern medicine, there’s sort of a promise that we can do better than mere placebos. I think that ought to be the promise of modern pedagogy as well, that we can do better than simply trying to build up expectations or giving people a false sense that they have something based on science that’s going to help them individually do better. And, I hear so many kind of missed opportunities that really kind of get me activated as well. I think about, for example, the energy that goes into faculty professional development. These things come from good impulses. I really believe that. I believe that people who really pursue something like learning styles or things like that, they want to do better and they want to be more inclusive, but that effort is directed down the wrong path simply because of this gap in knowledge and gap in information in getting the right information to the right people at the right time. And, I can’t stand the thought of faculty, especially as limited as faculty time is and as spread as thin as faculty are, to think that they might try to pick up on some better information about teaching and learning and go down the wrong path. I never want that to happen again. And, maybe our report will be a step in the right direction.

Kristen: I’ll say one thing that we’re trying to do with the report, is really to align the report with best practices and evidence-based practices. So, when you look at the concept of neuromyths the wonderful study that was written by McDonald (and this was in 2017) and her colleagues, the title is “Dispelling the Myth: training and education in neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths” and so professional development is not a silver bullet. Simply offering one workshop that’s going to address neuromyths is not going to necessarily get rid of neuromyths. So, we have to do what? We have to look at spacing. We have to look at interleaving. So, with professional development, how do you take information related to evidence-based practices and integrate spaced practice into our own professional development? How do we integrate interleaving? How do we integrate low-stakes assessment? So, maybe when faculty or instructional designers come in, you do a quick self assessment and find out what that baseline knowledge is, and then at the end to say, “Okay, at the end of professional development, we need to get to 95% or higher.” But, they’re able to actually test their own knowledge. So, we need to kind of turn professional development upside down and make it active learning and really engage everybody in what we’re looking at within pedagogy and andragogy.

Rebecca: Yeah, I always find it really ironic that a lot of training and things on evidence-based practices is not using evidence-based practices… or using really traditional formats: lecture or getting lectured at and not really engaging with the material. And, it’s no different when we’re working with our students. And, if they’re practicing in a way that’s not going to be effective for them, and they’re not successful. They could spend tons of time on something and just not really make progress. The same thing can happen with our faculty and staff who are designing curricula and what have you as well. They can be really invested.

Michelle: Absolutely.

John: We do have an excellent podcast on retrieval practice. In fact, it’s one of our most popular episodes. We’ll share a link to that in our show notes. We don’t yet have any podcasts on interleaved and spaced practice, but I’m sure we’ll be asking Michelle to come back and talk about these things at some point in the future, if she’s willing. So far, we’ve been focusing on the types of neuromyths that are common. What can we do to reduce the prevalence of these neuromyths?

Kristen: Professional development is certainly key. But, I would look at things such as onboarding, making sure that when people are getting hired on, that they’re really introduced to evidence-based practices from the very beginning. And, even individuals that would say, “Gosh, I’ve been in instructional design for 20 years, I’m familiar” …there may still be those gaps. And, it’s almost like adaptive learning. Everybody that comes in very much like the Vygotsky’s work of zone of proximal development, they may have all been teaching for 20 years, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have neurodiversity in terms of experience, knowledge about different practices. So, it’s important that it’s from the very onset of when people get hired and making sure it’s understood that we’re committed to best practices, evidence-based practices and what we do builds upon the literature and the research. Not only do we introduce it here, but we move it forward and integrate it into our pedagogy and what we’re doing in our classrooms.

Rebecca: So, we always wrap up by asking: What’s next?

Michelle: Conference season is upon us. We’re recording this fall of 2019. I’m gearing up to go to the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate conference in November. And so, I will just personally say come find me if you’re there and you want to talk more about this. I will be presenting on a related but different topic having to do with our ongoing Attention Matters project, which is also the subject of another Tea for Teaching episode. So, I’m really working on getting ready for that, and also the upcoming POD network conference. So, for those educational developers who will be attending that, I’ll be speaking there and hopefully having lots and lots of sidebar conversations with plenty of other people who are interested and fired up about these very topics. So, I/m working on those. I’m working on what I will now call a forthcoming book. It’s under contract with West Virginia University Press, tentatively titled Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology. So, maybe someday in the not too far off future, we’ll be talking about that project as well.

John: We should note that this podcast will be released during the OLC conference. In particular, it’s coming out on Wednesday of the conference.

Kristen: Oh, that’s exciting.

John: And, I should also note that we’ll be presenting there as well. I’m hoping we’ll get some people to listen to this podcast because we’re presenting the next day. So, we might get some new listeners. [LAUGHTER]

Kristen: Oh, that’s exciting. In terms of projects that I’m engaged in and working on. We’ve just launched a new lab in our School of Education at Drexel University. So, we’re bringing everything together and trying to align projects coming up for 2020. But it’s a lab called ELABS, Education, Learning, and Brain Sciences Research Collaborative. So, we’ll be looking at different studies related to the learning sciences and mind-brain education science. I am wrapping up an article with several researchers at Drexel University, some of our PhD students, that looks at immersive virtual reality and practice as well as transfer of learning. We also have a report that I’m working on. It’s an update to research that I conducted earlier on online human touch. So, I’m wrapping up that study and putting together an article there. And, then also looking at two publications for books looking at neuro plasticity and optimal learning. One would be for students to really understand neurodiversity, neuroplasticity, how you can optimize the stress response, and then looking at neuroplasticity and optimal learning from the instructor or instructional design perspective. How do you integrate this into your practice? So, those are the initiatives that I’m working on.

Rebecca: Sounds like lots of things for all of us to look forward to.

John: Thank you very much for joining us. This was a fascinating conversation. And, we’ve been looking forward to this report since I first heard a bit about it when you initially did the survey, and when I saw a preliminary presentation at all see last year.

Kristen: Well, thank you so much for having us. It’s such a pleasure to discuss this topic with you. And, I’m looking forward to listening to many of your upcoming podcasts that clearly is connected to this report.

Michelle: Thank you so much. It makes all the hard work worthwhile and we love the opportunity to get the work out to exactly the people with the power to spread it to faculty and instructional designers and leaders in universities today.

Rebecca: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.