Category: neuromyths

358. Essentials of the New Science of Learning

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, equity, first-generation, first-year classes, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, reflective practice, retrieval practice, spaced practice, stereotype threat, teaching
September 11, 2024

Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, Todd Zakrajsek joins us to discuss a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, we explore a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals.

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Todd Zakrajsek. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning. Welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Well, thank you. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Todd, what do you got today?

Todd: Oh, today I have a white ginger pear.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: Very nice. And I am drinking something similar, a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I’ve got Cardamon Cinnamon.

John: Nice.

John: We were just talking to you a few months ago about your last most recent book, but we’ve invited you here today to discuss your newest most recent book of the year. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of The Essentials of the New Science of Learning: The Power of Learning in Harmony with Your Brain.

Todd: When I worked on The New Science of Learning: Learning in Harmony with Your Brain, that book, its third edition has gotten up to be about 265 pages, and the book was actually written for students. It is still for students, but when it started, the whole concept of this book is it would be used as kind of an ancillary text in a class. And a friend of mine out in California used it in a community college in a developmental math class, and they found, actually, when they used the book in the class, that the attrition rate went down. And for developmental math, that’s a very important concept. In fact, the students who did pass for the next semester, the students who had learned about the science of learning, that attrition rate was even further down. So it’s helped out a lot. The problem is, once it gets up to 265 pages, you can’t use it as kind of an ancillary book. You know, “Read this chapter, it’ll take you 10 minutes.” The New Science of Learning is built more to be like a primary book for a first-year seminar course. So this book, being The Essentials, allowed me to come back and add some new things about AI and a few other things. Is kind of a streamlined version of that that can be used in a class, so that you could say to your students, for instance, “Hey, on Wednesday, make sure you read the chapter on sleep,” and then you talk about the content. When Wednesday comes along, you spend five minutes talking about sleep, what did you learn? And then you move on with the content. And that’s how you can infuse it in the class.

Rebecca: Why isn’t this material taught to students earlier in their education process.

Todd: Aaaah… this is a question that we’ve talked about before with other kinds of science of learning things. It’s frustrating. I take the breath because it’s frustrating. It’s funny, across country, if you ask students two questions: “do you like to learn?” and “do you like school?” you tend to find that the students will say yes to both those questions until they hit right about third grade. In third grade, we start picking up some of the testing and really focusing more on content, and at that point, we start telling students, you need to learn these things, but we don’t tell them how. There just is this assumption that because people are learners, that they can learn it. But learning out of a book is very artificial in terms of how we evolved. So the concept is students should be taught that, and I really believe they should be taught that starting in about third grade. And could you imagine a student that comes into college that has spent eight or nine years learning how to learn along with the content that they have? I think it would be amazing, but typically not done, so it should really be done as soon as they get to college and as quickly as possible. And it doesn’t matter who I talk to. I have talked to students from all kinds of disciplines. I’ve talked to students in medical schools, nursing programs, a lot of the health professions, they do a ton of content really fast. I’ve talked to students in philosophy and history and psychology, and almost invariably, people will come up afterwards and say, “Why doesn’t anybody teach us this stuff?” And so the students see value in it too. We get focused on content, and we don’t tend to do it.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, Todd, that you’re saying that there’s a wide range of people that are hungry for this information because before we were recording, I was doing graduate student orientation. I was talking to a couple of MBA students who had been out in the field, into their career 10 years, coming back to school, and I had embedded some of this kind of information in their online orientation. They said, “Oh yeah, I watched this TED talk that you had included [LAUGHTER] about the science of learning, and it was really great. It was so interesting.” And I had included that study from Michelle Miller.

Todd: Oh, yeah.

Rebecca: And he had read it, and it was fascinating. He’s like, “I was so surprised that I didn’t know some of this stuff.” So we’re talking about it at lunch today, and they were all talking about, “Yeah, that was really interesting. I’m so glad you included that.” But it just goes to show that it doesn’t really matter who our learners are. They’re really hungry for this information, and it’s really valuable to them.

Todd: Yeah, I will say quickly, in terms of the book that a lot of this is drawn from, which is The New Science of Learning, the full version of it that I have at the end is, if you find this valuable, or if you’d like to just ask other questions, I put my email address in there and just send me an email. And I got an email like, three weeks ago from a student who’s going into a health professions field, and he’s going in as a post grad. I mean, he’s going in as a master’s student, and they’re all required to read that book coming into the class, so it’s at any level. In fact, faculty find a lot of the stuff new and interesting to them, so we should teach it to everybody. Somebody should write a book about it.

Rebecca: Huh.

John: And fortunately, you have.

Todd: Hey, [LAUGHTER] me and a couple other people have too.[LAUGHTER]

John: So you mostly focus on effective learning strategies and how students can use the time more efficiently in learning. You also provide a lot of other advice to students about challenges that might arise for different students or students in different categories. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other advice you provide in addition to those directly related to learning?

Todd: Yeah, there’s a lot of other things that I think are really important. There’s a chapter on how we learn and a chapter on how we remember things, which learning and memory are separate, and those talk about the structures and the way we do that, but there’s so many other things that come into play, and a lot of things from social psychology. Everybody talks about cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology, but if a person understands exactly how to learn. If you’re really, really frustrated at the time you’re trying to learn, it doesn’t matter the actual cognitive structures, because the social part of it just wipes that out. And so things like microaggressions, how we perceive other people and how we interact with other people, has a huge impact on learning. Stereotype threat, whenever we get in a situation, if we’ve got a person who is a minority within a class. So it could be a male in a nursing program with mostly women. It could be in some discipline that has mostly men with a woman. It could be a student from an underrepresented group. When there’s an individual there that doesn’t typically come into the play, they’re under this pressure all the time that if they do poorly, then it reflects on “Well, maybe men can’t do nursing,” and so there’s extra pressure on them, and they tend to struggle with that. And things like imposter syndrome, almost everybody I’ve talked to at some point or another says that I don’t feel like I really belong, or I don’t feel like I know as much as other people think I know. And so those types of things, along with goal setting and dealing with or helping people who are working. I mean, what happens when you’re trying to work? Huge proportion of our students now work part time, but there’s a large portion also that work full time in addition to being full-time students. So a lot of those things can be drawn into this whole concept, and all those things are in the book.

Rebecca: One of the topics that you discuss is managing cognitive load. Can you talk about some of the recommendations you make related to this?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is one of the foundational things. And if you’re a listener and do not understand what cognitive load is, one of the best things you can do is get up to speed on that a little bit. A place to start, I always say, is Wikipedia. And if there was a motto that I would throw in there, it would be Wikipedia, great place to start, and a hideous place to finish. And I just want to point that out there, because there’s some stuff you can get pretty quickly. But here’s the thing with cognitive load, is it basically boils down to there’s only so much information your brain can process at any given time. And if you try to do too much, then it pretty much shuts down enough in one area so that it can process a different area. Be a little bit like if you’re putting together an IKEA bookshelf for the very first time, and your significant other comes into the room and says, “Hey, where do you want to have lunch?” And you may very well say, “Not right now,” and your brain’s just full with all of these parts and how things are supposed to fit together. Once you put 10, 15 IKEA bookcases together, you could carry on a conversation with somebody else while you’re doing it. And that’s an all cognitive load issue. The first time you do something, it is taxing, and it takes extra energy for your brain to sort out all the pieces. But the more you do something, the easier it becomes. And this is why, as an expert, you have to be careful. Because as an expert, I might say to my students, read this article, this 10-page article, and I might read that 10-page article very, very quickly, because I’ve read this kind of stuff over and over and over again, but the novice is going to take way more time because it’s their first time doing it. So we can talk to students about the fact that this is going to be hard when you start, and then as you do it, more and more, it’ll be easier, and that’s a cognitive load issue. As you actually work on things as combinations, as things come together, you build what are called schemas, and those are like scripts that all come together, and as you activate a whole schema, then that’s just there. If I go golfing, I don’t have to think about every little piece of that. Or if I’m driving, I don’t have to think about how hard I turn the wheel and turning on a turn signal and everything else. I have a schema for being in a car and the types of things you do. So as we practice and go through these things, that’s the cognitive load issue. There’s going to be heavy cognitive load, which we have to be cognizant of, and then, as we do it, it becomes easier. And then there’s another piece to this. Is if there’s things in your environment that don’t help you to learn, but they take up cognitive energy, so a conversation by people on the other side of the room, pretty much everybody in here listening this has probably, at some point been reading something, and people are talking, and you either say, “Excuse me, could you quit talking?” Or you pack up and go someplace else. If you’re reading a hard article, that will happen. If you’re reading something like a novel, people can be all over the room talking, and you don’t care. That’s a cognitive load issue. Hard article, high cognitive load, an easy thing, lower cognitive load. This is one I will jump in there and say, too, this is an area that AI has me very concerned. Because as you start anything, you start at the foundational level, and it’s challenging, but as you work with it over and over again, it becomes less and less challenging, then you can move up to more complex things. If AI is doing the simple foundational stuff for us, then we don’t develop that base that allows us to kind of automatically process something, so that we can move to a higher, more complicated thing and then practice that and go to a higher, more complicated thing. If AI is doing a chunk of it, we don’t ever develop the base of it. And so I’m concerned with respect to cognitive load development and how AI might come into play with that, but that’s the two-minute version of a topic that we spend two or three class periods on [LAUGHTER] in a course in psychology.

John: One of the many other topics you address in this book is metacognition. Why is developing metacognition so important? And what are some strategies that students can use to increase their metacognition?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is huge. Metacognition is right in there next to it. And metacognition basically boils down to knowing how much you know, knowing how much you’re thinking about something. It’s the process of thinking about the process, and we often don’t do that. It’s actually kind of fascinating when you chat with people, is they’ll engage in a behavior and not think anything about what they’re doing. So we fall into patterns. And so I’ve had students for years that will come in and say, “You know, Dr Z, I’ve read the chapter like four times and I’m still struggling.” And I’ll say, “Well, why did you read it four times?” It’s like, “Well, I need to to learn it.” “Isn’t there any other way you could learn it?” And as I’m asking these questions, I’m trying to bring up a metacognitive concept of let’s reflect on your learning process. If you’re struggling with the material when you read it, it may very well be that two, or three, four more times… In fact, research has shown that you’re probably not going to learn anymore, because if you’re not paying attention to your cognitive functioning, you may very well be reading while you’re daydreaming about something else. And the reason I mention that is that that is not being aware of your processing of information. So again, something that all of us have done, you finish reading a chapter of a book, or you finish reading an article, and just as you get to the end of it, it’s like, “Oh, my word,the entire time I was thinking about bacon or lunch of some kind.” And if that’s the case, you’ve just wasted that time. So for metacognition, it’s kind of thinking about how you’re studying, evaluating it, to what extent are you successful When you sit down and study for an hour, and if you quiz yourself, do you know more or don’t you? So practicing with that, thinking about while you’re studying, what’s going well and what’s not going well. If you’re frustrated in your surroundings and you’re having trouble processing, then you can make changes. If you don’t think about it, you can’t and then also thinking back. So after I take a test or after I study, I can think what went well and what didn’t go well. And that’s all kind of metacognitive things that, because of the way we live, we just don’t tend to do them. And so you know people who will repeat the same pattern over and over and over again, and we use phrases like, “You’ve done this four times, it’s always failed. What were you thinking?” And when we say “What were you thinking?” we’re actually asking a person, to what extent are you engaging in metacognition. But quite frankly, the “What were you thinking?” it’s such an automatic statement that it really doesn’t pertain to thinking.

Rebecca: Feel like a next interesting leap might be to talk about the myth of learning styles, which is something that people often cycle through and say often as well, like, “I’m a visual learner, and this isn’t in a visual style, so I can’t possibly learn it.” And this is something that you address in your book as well.

Todd: Yeah, I think foundationally, first of all, for anybody listening, I’m pretty sure you probably know about learning styles, but if you don’t, there’s a whole concept out there by Neil Fleming came up with this in terms of the learning styles index. And essentially, you take 13,14 quiz questions and you answer these questions, and based on how you answer them, you’re categorized as typically, either a visual learner, an auditory learner, or a kinesthetic learner. A couple of foundational things. Number one, anytime there’s some kind of a test that you can take on Facebook or online or in a quiz book or someplace or even somebody reading 13 items to you, and that’s supposed to tell you how you function as a human being. We’re way more complex than that. Psychologists will ask hundreds of questions to come up with a response that says based on the hundreds of questions that we have, all these validated questions, we believe you will tend to do this. Now, think about that for a second. That’s after a whole battery of tests. They’re saying we think you tend to do this, which has got a lot of hedging in it, which is different than 13 items, “Oh, you’re a visual learner.” So keep in mind that it doesn’t work that way. Number two is that there’s nobody who scores like every item is all on visual or every item is on kinesthetic. If you tend to answer, let’s just say 40% of your answers are on visual learning, and 30% are on auditory learning and 30% are on kinesthetic learning, you’d get categorized as a visual learner because that had the highest percentage. But really it’s a 40-30-30. Why wouldn’t you be categorized as all three? But boxes are easier to deal with, so the learning styles has lots of concepts behind it. Research will also indicate or show you pretty quickly if you read through this stuff, it’s just not how learning works. I would just love to say this, because I don’t want to just say learning styles isn’t good. Here’s the concept Is basically the best way to learn is to practice with the material in a way in which you want to retrieve it. If you want to actually dance, the best way to learn is kinesthetically, by dancing. You might get some auditory or visual information of here’s what the pose looks like, but by and large, you’re going to want to dance. If you’re going to want to be able to recognize certain kind of prints from Monet versus Manet or somebody else in painting, then probably the best thing to do is look at a lot of paintings. Visual would make sense there. Semantic learning, if you want to remember something, you’re probably going to want to read it or hear about it, and so you want to practice it in the way you’re going to retrieve it. The reason people love this concept of learning styles is people love to take quizzes that put them into boxes. I don’t get this, but people take quizzes all the time. Here’s 10 ways to determine what kind of a spouse you are, or five things you can do to figure out what kind of parent you are. We love to do those. And the problem is that learning styles comes along and people think that’s how I learn. And based on what you said at the beginning, Rebecca, when a student says, “You don’t use many images and I’m a visual learner, therefore I can’t learn from you,” they won’t learn from you. But they won’t learn from you because they’re a visual learner, they won’t learn from you because in their head they’re thinking, I can’t learn from you. And when your brain is processing, “I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this.” there is so much cognitive load dealing with the fact you can’t learn it there’s no room for learning. So if you think of yourself as a visual learner, I would say, just think about it in terms of you like to use visual things to help you to learn, but there’s a lot of other ways that you can learn as well.

John: Going back to an earlier location in your book, one of the things you talk about as a suggestion for students is that they avoid dichotomous thinking, and you also add in a discussion in the essentials book of generative AI. So this is kind of a mashup of those two concepts. But will the use of generative AI be helpful or harmful for student learning?

Todd: Yes, [LAUGHTER] yeah, the dichotomous thinking, I will say, just to address that very quickly, is that whole concept is that it’s the weakest kind of thinking. It’s basically you put somebody in a box and you don’t have to deal with them anymore, because this is them. That person’s a very aggressive individual. Everything gets interpreted as aggressive because that’s who they are. We don’t stop and think about on a given day, maybe a lot of bad things have happened; on a different day, maybe good things happen. So maybe they tend to be more aggressive, but they’re not just yes/no, you are/you’re not. So AI… people have asked multiple times, is this terrible or is this good? I tell you, everything has nuances. So the bad side, I do think AI is going to be really tricky for us, because humans, in fact, all organisms, will take the easiest route we can. In many respects, we should. If we are going to work and it’s five miles away and there’s a car in the driveway, taking the car makes a lot of sense. So I should take the easy way. However, there’s going to be times when I’m going to want to be physiologically in good shape. I might need to run. I might want to walk up a flight of stairs. I might just want to live for a while, in which case I should work on helping my heart to be better. And the human body is fantastic, and the more you push something, the more it will develop. And so I love to ask students, for instance, I’ll say, “Anybody in here run or jog?” And a whole bunch of hands will go up, and I’ll say, “Why? You got cars. You should just take a car.” And somebody will say, “Well, yeah, but I want to be healthier.” I’ll say, “Perfect. Let’s talk AI for a minute.” For AI, if we let the AI do all the things for us, then we don’t develop those things. And so if I’m taking a poetry class and I just keep having AI write the poems, write the poems, write the poems. It can do it. I can edit them, but I’m not going to learn how to write and how to express myself. And so the issue we’re going to have is, if we don’t learn how to do those things, especially at the beginning level, kind of the cognitive load thing, we’re not going to be able to do them when it’s more complicated. So I think we have to be very careful of that. And for faculty, I think we have to be very careful about focusing on things like academic misconduct. Yes, there are students who will use AI to cheat, but students didn’t start cheating because AI came along. Based on the culture in your classroom, the rapport you have with your students will make a huge difference in the extent to which students will engage in academically honest behaviors. So anyway, those types of things, we’ll watch out for. The good side, there are so many things that this is going to be able to use for good. For instance, we know from study after study after study that the more you practice at something, the better you become. And we have said, I have said for years too, the best way to learn anything is to teach it to somebody else, if you don’t have a family member or a roommate, that you can teach it to, then teach it to a dog, teach it to a sofa, just teach it. And the concept there is, the more you explain something, the better you get at it. AI is beautiful for this, because it can work with you. Actually, I tried something recently I thought was so much fun. I told AI, and the scenario in my head was, I’m a student in a psychology class, and I just learned the routes of persuasion by Cialdini, and now I have to remember how this persuasion all works. Well, one of the best ways to do that is to practice with it. And so I fired up ChatGPT and the prompt I gave it was, “Hey, how about if we do a role play? I’m going to be a car salesman, and you’re going to be in the market to buy a car. You do have enough money, you could buy today, but you want to be a little cautious, because you want to get input from your family, and you want to make sure you get a good value and get the kind of car you want. So overall, if I really can sell you, you’ll buy, but otherwise you’re going to wait. What do you think?” And then ChatGPT typed out, “This sounds like fun. Can you show me some vans?” And so then I said, “This is a van,” and I started to sell it. Now, the reason I’m mentioning this is that I could use all my different persuasion techniques that I learned, and ChatGPT kept asking me questions back. So I’d say this van has something about scarcity. Here’s a good one for scarcity. It’s one of the principles to persuade people. I said, “Whis is the last van on the lot. And so ChatGPT said, “Oh, that’s unfortunate, because I’m really interested in the van. Is there a possibility of getting another one if this one sells before I actually sign the paper?” And now what ChatGPT has just done is to see if they could reduce that concept of basically a quantity issue of scarcity. If this is the only van, a human would basically say, “Oh no, it’s the only van. I better get it before somebody else does,” so with ChaGPT, it says, “Can you get another one from a different lot?” And if I said, “Yep”, then the scarcity goes down a little bit. So then I have to think, “Oh, how can I bring scarcity back in a different way? It’s on sale, but the sale is going to end at the end of this week, so we’re going to have to make a decision fast… that scarcity in a sense of we don’t have much time. And so the point is that I role played with ChatGPT for about 20 minutes on these principles of persuasion. We’ll be able to do that. We’ll be able to do simulations. We’ll be able to do repetition. I can say to ChatGPT, and I’ve done this one. “Give me 10 multiple choice questions about metacognition for a student in a second-year college course, and the course is on the basics of cognition.” The better prompts you lay out there, the better it will do. It asked me multiple choice questions. And the last one I’ll mention for this, because there’s so many different ways you could do it, I actually gave it a definition of metacognition. I wrote out kind of what it is, and then I just put it in ChatGPT, and I said, if I answered a question of “What is metacognition?” with this response, and I was a senior in a cognitive psych course, because it’s different from being a first-year student, but it’s going to give you feedback: “If I’m a senior in a cognitive psych course, what grade would I get?” And I purposely made it bad, and it said you would get an “F” on this. And then I said, “Why?” And it explained a couple reasons why. And then I rewrote it, one of the best responses I could possibly dream up. And then ChatGPT said, “this is a good solid A minus.” And I said, “Why is this an A minus?” And it pointed out that I hadn’t done very much on the reflective component. And I thought, “hmm, alright, I did miss that piece.” And so when I can practice quiz questions like that, I can have it ask me multiple choice questions. And much like Khan Academy, when Sal Khan came up with Khan Academy, he said, one of the things that students love about this is you can go and watch the same video four or five times, and it doesn’t get frustrated with you. ChatGPT, you can struggle with learning a concept, it’s never going to get frustrated with you because you’re struggling. Whereas a human might say, in their head, it’s like, “Oh my word. You should have gotten this by now.” So I know that was a very long answer. It’s a huge, huge issue in education right now, but we can’t be focused on the academic misconduct side of it. We really need to be focusing on how can we use it to instill deeper learning?

Rebecca: That’s a nice transition to one of the other topics that you have in your book, which is maybe something that faculty might be interested in knowing is in your book, [LAUGHTER] which is that you advise students to spend two hours outside of class for every hour they spent in class, which is definitely an expectation, I think, that many faculty have, but it’s not always conveyed to students. I know I mention it to students, [LAUGHTER] but can you talk a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, so I put it in there, and it was funny because it was a section I put in the book, and one of the reviewers looked at it and said, “Why did you put this in here? And then it was funny because the editor was reading the book and said, “I love the fact that you put the breakdown in there about how much you should study and how much time you should commit, because people don’t normally know this stuff.” And so I put it in there because I think people struggle with this, and for students to understand, if it’s a course that requires extra work and things, if it’s a three-credit hour course, you’re expected to do two hours outside for every hour inside. This is the way the system was built up. So a three-credit hour class is going to take you about nine hours a week. The three hours in class, then the two-to-one ratio will give you six hours outside of class. This is why, if you take 12 to 13 credit hours, or 13 to 14 credit hours, it’s considered full time, because 13 credit hours would put you up around 39 hours total, when you put all the hours together, and that’s a full-time deal. And by the way, just so I don’t forget this, or I put it off to the side, if it’s an activity course, something you wouldn’t do anything outside, that’s why a one-credit hour class might meet for three hours, like a jogging class or something, racquetball class, because there’s not outside work. The two-to-one ratio kind of thing, all of that’s done in class. So that kind of gives you a sense of how much you should be studying. Here’s the tricky spot, nobody does it. I shouldn’t say nobody, very few people do it. The reason is that a lot of students can get by with studying less than two hours outside for every hour inside class. And when students will say they don’t need to, or faculty will say they don’t do it, and people focus on the fact that, “Well, you know, students don’t really have to spend that much time.” I love to respond with, oh, so they all are getting 100% on their quizzes and tests and perfect papers, right? And to that, we say, “Well, not really.” System’s set up that you expect a lot of B’s and C’s and D’s. Well, what if you spent two hours outside for every hour inside? It would be a very different thing. But the problem again, is, “Whew, if students are not spending the two hours outside for every hour inside, and then you are, then it seemed like you’re taking more time, and you feel like, why am I spending all this time when they’re not?” And so we look to other people, and unfortunately, we don’t do that. But I can tell you, for students, if you do actually sit down and study for two hours outside of class, for every hour inside class, and do it before the class period. When you walk in, you already know material there. You understand the foundation of it. And if the instructor is doing a good job, they’re pushing you and showing you connections and everything, you can process that because you have the material. If you walk into class after skimming a Chapter, you don’t have the foundational material to make the classroom more effective for a learning situation.

John: I was really happy to see that advice there, because I tell students the same thing, and they always seem really, really surprised. Or in an online class if you tell them they should expect to spend nine hours there, there’s often an even larger surprise, because they think it’ll take as much time as what they spend in high school, which is often zero outside of class and with an online class, zero doesn’t work very well, especially. So I’m glad you included that. But one of the other things you include in your book in terms of advice to students is you talk about various fallacies, and one of those is a sunk cost fallacy, which is something that we talk about quite a bit in economics, especially behavioral economists. So could you talk a little bit about this fallacy and how it might affect students?

Todd: Yeah, sunk cost is something that I always covered in psychology, because I love the concept, psychological concept. It’s really important a sunk cost basically just simply means, how much energy or resources have you put into a course of action. That’s basically it. How much have you sunk into this thing? The problem is for humans, is we overestimate the value of that. If you’ve worked on a paper for six hours and it turns out you’re heading in the wrong direction, best thing you can do is pitch the paper and just start over. But people say, “Well, wait a minute, I’ve put six hours in on this. I must be able to salvage something of it.” And I watched a woman on television years ago, and I think it was Ukrainian eggs. It was when they hollow out the eggs, you get the insides out, and you cut half of it away, so you’re dealing with, like a little half of a shell. And they do these beautiful, intricate things inside the shell. And she pointed out, she said, “If you ever drop one of those, the best thing you can do is stomp on it,” because if you drop it and it cracks, you try to fix it, and you spend so much time trying to fix it, because the sunk cost is, “I’ve already put hours into this,” then you waste a lot of time trying to fix it, your better bet is just to throw it away and start over.” And that’s why she said stomp on it, so you’re not tempted to do that. So in your work, we’ll do this all the time. We try things, and we get all this investment… we might be in a class that’s just we’re flunking the class, and this is always hard, and you always want to always talk to an advisor if any students are listening, or tell your students always talk to an advisor before you ever drop a class, because it can have ramifications, especially if it drops you down to part-time status. But if you are going to flunk class, the best thing you can do is just stop working in that class. Take the F if you’re past the drop period, and just focus your energy somewhere else. And students will often say, “but yeah, but I’ve already put so much time in this.” And when I was teaching intro psychology, this is a particular one is students would come in with like, 50% average and come into the final, and I’d say, it doesn’t matter, you’d need a 98% to get a passing grade. You’re going to get an F. And the students say, “Well, yeah, but I put so much energy this I’m going to try” and I’ll say “If you’ve averaged 50, you’re not going to score above an A plus. It’s just not going to work. Take your time and study for your other classes and then come back and take this class next semester.” So we do this a lot. We have people who will stay in relationships because they’ve been in relationships for a while. So it’s like, I’m gonna hang in there when, you know, maybe it’s the end of the relationship. We’ll have people that put so much money into a car they’re gonna keep driving it. It might come to a point you just need to get rid of the car. So sometimes we’ll chase a course of action because we put so much money into it. The one thing I do want to point out, though, that’s important, is that sometimes sunk cost is very helpful. So if we’re in a job, for instance, that we’ve been in for five years, and we run into a really rough spot, we might say, “Well, I’ve been working pretty hard. I’m working my way up in this. I’ve got a lot invested. I’m going to stick this out.” A relationship’s another good example. Relationships do have rough times. And if you have been dating someone or married to somebody for a period of time, then it’s like, “I’m going to get through this because I have so much invested.” So a sunk cost can help you if down the road, it’s a good thing to stay in, but you’d be tempted to leave. College is a good example. I mean, junior year, a lot of people would quit, but it’s like, “I’ve already got three years in, I’m going to finish.” But at other times, we’ve got so much in, and it’s time to cut it loose. And this is the part where I love to tell people, when I was an undergraduate, I was a criminal justice major at first, and then I switched over and double majored with psychology, and then I ended up with a psych major and a criminal justice minor and a sociology minor, and I am one class short of having a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. And every time I tell that, there are people in the group that says “You should just take that class,” and I’d say, “Why?” And they say, “Well, because you’re one class short, you’ve got all that invested.” And to that, I get to say, “At my age, I’m getting close to retirement age. I’m never going to work as a police officer. I don’t even think those credits would count. But even so, what I did is I got to a point where I thought, is it worth it for me to spend a semester to finish this when I don’t believe it’s anything I will ever do. I worked with a police department for a short period of time. At the end, decided I just didn’t want to go that route. There’s no reason to finish that.” But even listening today, if I tell you, in an entire bachelor’s degree, I just need one more three-credit hour class, the inclinations to say, “Well, you should take it.” That’s a sunk cost.

Rebecca: As I’ve been listening to you talk today and thinking about the things in your book, and I was also thinking about a lot of the things that some of our faculty panelists said at our graduate orientation, I was very happy that a lot of those things aligned. That’s always good. And one of the things that came up actually at orientation was the recommendation from one of our panelists to really think about some wellness things like sleep and exercise. And that’s something that came up and eating well, which is something that is in your book. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits of having adequate sleep and engaging in exercise that you talk about in your book?

Todd: Yeah, it’s funny, because when I’m talking to students, especially, if there’s quite a bit of material, there’s invariably somebody will say: “So if there’s just one thing I should really work on, we’ve talked about the testing effect, practicing over and over and quizzing yourself. We’ve talked about things like interleaving, where you mix materials together, or spaced learning, where you space it out. And for memories, is to practice over and over types of things, and to say, “Which one should I really focus on?” I said “sleep.” The best thing you can do to be better at learning is to make sure you have a good chunk of sleep. Not only as a restful person, do you process information faster, but while you’re sleeping, you actually consolidate memories. You could study all day long, all through the night. Take a quiz, and you’ve all done this at some point, do okay on the quiz, because that’s right during the learning period, come back a week later, or final exam, for sure, and it’s like none of it’s there. Well, it’s because after you learned it, you never slept, which allows your brain to consolidate it. We actually now know that different stages of sleep will consolidate certain semantic like meaningful things. A different stage of sleep will solidify and consolidate repetition, like movement, so the kinesthetic things. So the physiology of what your brain does is really important. By the way. I was just reading something the other day too. I can’t cite it here, because I didn’t know I’d be talking about it, but it talked about the correlation between low levels of sleep and later cognitive decline, because while you sleep, the brain kind of flushes out all of the toxins, so to speak, and all the stuff it doesn’t need. It consolidates the stuff that’s important. It gets rid of the rest. And if you don’t sleep, a lot of that becomes muddled across time. And so sleep, physiologically, is just an amazing thing for you. And so that’s a really, really important thing. Exercise is another one. Regular aerobic exercise is just good for the learning process. I had a student that told me one time… it was funny, we were chatting about this… and said he does the best learning during basketball season when they’re exercising all the time. Coach makes them sleep an adequate amount, because it impacts your play, of course, and if it impacts your play. It probably impacts your learning too, right? So the concept there is that he said he always did better during basketball season because he was sleeping better and exercising better. Eating is the same thing. We know that simple sugars are not as good as complex carbohydrates. There’s actually ways that we can process this in terms of memory, and it doesn’t take very much liquid at all. If you get dehydrated, a little bit of dehydration, you have cognitive decline. In fact, it’s funny, because if you talk to somebody who is a health professional and you say, late in the day, “Man, I’m just confused and really having trouble processing things,” one of the first things that will ask you is, “How much did you drink today?” So it does have an impact on that. So, adequate hydration, not too much, but the right amount there, good nutrition, sleeping and exercise, those are four ways right there that you can actually impact your learning of material in classes… oh, and your health. I’d like to point out too that it’s one of those things that’s got the best side effect there is: it’s really good for learning and it’s also good for living.

Rebecca: One of the key tips that came up from our students and our faculty was to actually schedule some of those to make sure you’re doing those things.

Todd: Oh, totally. Yeah, eating too, I have to admit for myself, especially when it’s hot out. I didn’t understand this when I was younger, but I can eat breakfast and work outside in the yard, come in, drink a little bit, go back out, sit down and read a book and do some stuff, and realize at eight o’clock at night’s like, “Oh my word. I didn’t eat today,” and so I’m suddenly hungry, but then it’s late, so you’re eating at eight, nine o’clock, which is not ideal. But if you schedule it while you’re busy, and stick to it. If you’ve got it scheduled, you’re gonna eat at one o’clock or noon, and the bell rings summarize where you’re at, go eat, and then come back and then pick it up from there. Because if you think “I’ll just finish this section and then I’ll eat,” there’s been lots of study through the years that says that’s not as good as stopping, noting where you are and then coming back for most people.

John: And one of the things you talk about in your book is scheduling. And you also suggest there that you include a little bit of slack, because things don’t always take the amount of time that you anticipate. Could you talk just a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, I kind of laugh about this one, because, yeah, people are hideous at estimates. Almost everybody is. But I will tell you, folks with ADHD are particularly bad at it. And part of the issue you run into with ADHD is it’s not just that you’re distracted, is that you’re thinking to yourself, I will do this task, it will take like, 40 minutes, and then I’ll go do this other task. When I got tested for ADHD, after three questions, like, we’re good, we know exactly where we’re at. Anybody who knows me says you don’t need any kind of test. We’ve known that for years. I wish somebody had told me 10 years ago. But the reason I mentioned this is that I’m working really hard at some metacognitive kind of process of estimating how long it’s going to take me to do something. I set off the block of time. When the timer goes off, then I think about: “What did I do? What worked well? What didn’t work well?” That process takes seconds to do, by the way, it’s like, okay, “did it work or didn’t work?” And then if it does work, I think about what I did to kind of set that up. And if it doesn’t, I think about that. But I will tell you that I will often start out with a to do list of 10 items, and I’m sure that I’ll be done by noon, and so by 6pm I’ve gotten through three of them, and I still have seven to go. So I put those seven on my to do list for the next day, and then, because I am a super genius… I always use that phrase whenever I follow it with something that’s not super geniusy… but I’ll take those seven items and I’ll just put them on the to do list with another 10 items, and then I got 17 items that I’m going to do tomorrow, because that’s going to be easy to get through them. I’ll just do them really fast, and then I get through like five things. As you practice at that, you can actually practice at estimating how long things will take you, put it into a schedule. I did this was an intro psych class. It was one of the most impactful things I’ve done. Is the teacher had us keep track of one week in one-hour blocks. Like, if you sleep for eight hours, you block off and say, I slept. But then if you read, you put a block in for reading, and while you’re awake during the day, he had us doing metacognitive exercises too. You estimate how much do you think you’ll get done? How well did you do? And then you just put a grade in the block. So if it’s going to be I’m going to read the to read this chapter in this two hours, and I get through half of the chapter in the two hours. And I’ve done this other stuff, I get like, a D. And what I found was that I’m very effective in the morning, from about 6 am until about 10 am I can cram through… oh, it’s just so good. And then I find out that from about 2 to 4 pm I’m just awful. I have enough extrovertness in me that if I’m talking to somebody, it’s fine, but if I sit down to read something or work at something, it doesn’t work. So I schedule these things in. So I’m kind of coming back to the schedule, but I schedule these things in, but also try to make estimates of how long things will take. I will finish with this, tell your students, or ask your students, I guess, at the beginning of the semester to keep track of, as they read the first couple pages in every book, jot down, after five pages, how long did it take you, and figure out the average amount of time it takes you per page. Because students don’t understand this, and they’re not good at estimating their time. And I’ve had students before who are going to tell me, for the final exam, they’re going to reread all the chapters. And I say, how long is that going to take you? And they’ll say, “I don’t know.” And I’ll say, “The exam’s tomorrow. What do you think it’s going to be?” And students will tell me that they thought they could read a chapter in an hour, or the whole book in like six hours. And then they find out that their average is eight minutes a page, and say, “Alright, well, at eight minutes a page, you’re not going to read a chapter of 35 to 40 pages in an hour.” But the point is, it may be that you have a novel in English class that you average one minute a page. You might have a physics book where you average 20 minutes per page, and you might have a philosophy book where you average five minutes a page. If you know that, you can make some estimates. And so talk to your students about making those estimates. But rolling that all together, kind of figuring out estimates on how long things are going to take, and keep working at it, and then using metacognitive strategies to think about when it’s going well and not going well. And I’m still working at how to do this.

John: And that issue of cascading to do lists, one of the things I found is that there’s a lot of to do apps that you can put on your smartphone, and when the list gets too long, just start another one.

Rebecca: That’s what I do. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, there’s a great strategy that I really do like. You list the really important things as A’s and then B’s and then C’s. And the one strategy I read one time was great. It says, Put all your things on the list, put down your A’s, your B’s, and your C’s, and then delete all your C’s. [LAUGHTER] And so it’s that same kind of a thing as at the end of the day, they’re not going to get done, just pitch them. But yeah, we put too many things on the list. I’m trying right now. Actually, I’ve reframed it in my head, and I’m desperately trying to put down the amount of stuff that I think that I can get done by noon, and I still block off eight until 6pm but I put my to do list thinking this can get done at noon. If I get done at noon, you know what? I’m only gonna work a half a day. And when I’m better at it, I’ll probably put more items on the list. But for right now, yesterday, I still was working till 8 pm on my stuff that should have been done by noon. An another little tip I’ll give you… I’m getting better at some of these… I always make up my to do list now just before I go to bed, when I’m as tired as I can be during the day, because if you make a to do list in the morning when you’re feeling really full of energy, then you’re very optimistic. If you do it when you’re exhausted, it’s a little closer. [LAUGHTER]

John: I believe that behavioral economists refer to this phenomenon of underestimating the amount of time required for a task as the planning fallacy, and I believe that I’ve heard that the people who are most productive underestimate the amount of time required by more than other people tend to, otherwise they’d never undertake many of the tasks that they engage in. There was a Freakonomics episode on it that I just listened to recently.

Rebecca: In my design class, I have students keep time sheets for their projects and things, and that helps them become more aware of how long it takes them to do different parts of projects, so that if they were to take on freelance work or whatever, they have more of an idea of how long it actually takes them to do things, so that they could more adequately charge for work if they were to do that.

Todd: Rebecca, that’s a really, really important skill to teach them, because you could make up your mind you want to have a design company or a landscaping company, whatever it is, and if you’re hideous at estimating time, you’ll be out of business very quickly. When you explain to somebody, “Yeah, I’ll cut your loan on every week, and I’ll only charge you $20 because I think it’s going to take 10 minutes,” and then it turns out it takes two hours. You can’t stay in business like that. So I think that’s a great skill. See, we started out with the why don’t we teach these cognitive things early? This is one of those that you are doing, which is great. Teach them how to think about time.

Rebecca: Well, we could talk about really important things we could teach students all day long, but we do need to pay attention to our time, which we are not always good at doing. [LAUGHTER] So we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

Todd: Probably just the last items on my to do list is next, [LAUGHTER] but right after that, I’m working on a couple things. So one of them is a book on lecturing and active learning. The research does not say that the active learning is more effective than lecturing. The research is very clear that says, when you combine the two, lecturing with active learning, it’s more effective than lecturing alone. So I’m working on a book that’s balancing the two. And then the other one is, I’ve really become pretty passionate lately about people that are not built for the way the educational system’s built. I love to use the phrase that education is kind of built for fast-talking, risk-taking extroverts. I’ve got that in the book, and actually in a couple of the book. And the idea is in class when the teacher says, “Could somebody tell me…” there’s hands going up before you actually get to the end of this question even from some people, individuals who think really fast, who are okay if they’re wrong, they’re taking a shot at it, and they’re extroverted in that they like to really have the energy to be around people. If you’re not one of those individuals, you’re actually at a disadvantage all the way through the educational system whenever something’s run like that. And so the other thing I’m working on right now is, how do we help the individuals who are shy, who are on the autism spectrum, who maybe have depressive episodes, individuals with food insecurity, housing insecurity, all these types of individuals who walk into a classroom and when they do really well, it’s because they’re doing so much more work. I should be careful. I don’t want to discount the people who are working hard in the classroom, but there’s individuals who are working way harder than other individuals, and there’s got to be a way to balance that a little bit. That’s what I’m working on now too.

Rebecca: Sound like really important, interesting projects.

John: And will those both be ready this year, or [LAUGHTER] will it take a little bit longer for those?

Todd: Probably Tuesday, I think… maybe Thursday. It’s interesting. I will say that I really love writing. It’s obvious, I’ve got several books out now. But I work with an editor. I have my own editor that I’ve hired now, and the reason I did that is because I’m not an editor. And what I used to do on books is I would write something and I would spend more time trying to edit it and get it to sound right than I was actually writing. And so the reason that I’m kind of cranking books out right now is I write it, I send it off to my editor, my editor reads it, comes back to me and says,” I like what you did here, but you might want to change that.” And then I just zip into the next thing. So it takes me about four months to write a book now. And so I would suspect that we will see one of those heading off… well, it won’t be too long.

Rebecca: Must be there on the early part of that list, that stuff before noon.

Todd: When I mentioned that keeping track of the day, it’s a really, really important thing. It’s because, yup, that’s exactly what it is. My writing time tends to be between 7am and 10am and then all my committee meetings are in the afternoons.

Rebecca: Prioritize.

Todd: Yeah, it’s like recording this show. Huh, look at this, 3:46 pm… Ha! Right, between two and four.

Rebecca: I did notice that. I was making that note,

Todd: Uh huh, I knew you were. Boy, we should do this sometime at 10 am You wouldn’t believe how fired up I am the.

Rebecca: Alright, but that’s when I prioritize my writing and doing stuff too.

John: We always enjoy talking to you, and we’re very much looking forward to talking to you about those next books as those approach,

Todd: I always love coming to this program. I get to sip my tea, which is always good, and chat with two of my favorite pod people.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us, Todd.

Todd: Thanks for inviting me.

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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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317. Beware the Myth

Posted in higher education, instructional communication, learning, neuromyths, social justice, teaching
November 29, 2023

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

Posted in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, evidence-based practices, first-generation, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, learning science, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, self-regulated learning, sleep, teaching
June 14, 2023

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

Posted in evidence-based practices, higher education, K-12, learning, learning science, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, professional development, retrieval practice, scholarship of teaching and learning, teaching, teaching centers
November 20, 2019

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.