Two Things You Believe About Education That Research Has Proven Wrong

Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing. All of us navigate the world with a rich set of prior knowledge, background experiences, and beliefs rattling around our heads, and if you’re anything like me, the older you get, the more sure you are that these things rattling around are true and good.

Indeed, research shows that deeply held beliefs are remarkably resistant to change, even if they are wrong and attacked with direct instructional interventions. For example, a 2007 study found that 94% of subjects in a sample of college students had misconceptions about why the seasons change, such as a belief that the shape of the Earth’s orbit is responsible. Surprisingly, most students did not fundamentally revise their explanations even after watching a video that clearly explained that the tilt of the Earth’s axis was the cause of seasons. (Still don’t believe it? Watch this.)

In the last 6 months, I have myself experienced the discomfort of cognitive dissonance in having two fundamental beliefs about education challenged by actual research. These are things I’ve heard over and over since entering the field (and, in one case, since I was in elementary school), and all of us would do well to let science be our guide.

Fundamental Belief That Is Wrong #1: “American teachers work dramatically longer hours in front of students than teachers in other countries.”

Teaching is a hard job. Talk to anyone who has been a teacher, and they will almost uniformly say it was the hardest job they’ve ever had. Plus, we are Americans, and everyone knows that we work harder than our European counterparts — what with their government-mandated 35 hour work weeks and general penchant for lounging around in snooty cafes.

Thus, it makes total sense when we hear that American primary school teachers spend 1,131 hours per year in front of kids, 45% more than the OECD average of 782 hours. An educational powerhouse like Finland is even further from us, at just 673 hours of student contact per year (Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators, pg. 485). The fact that American teachers spend 68% more time in front of kids than Finnish teachers is compelling, and cogent thinkers on education and teacher development — like Pasi Sahlberg and Elizabeth Green — cite the excess of teacher doing and lack of teacher learning as a key failure of the US system.

That 68% statistic is also not a fact. Samuel Abrams of Columbia’s Teachers College released a report in January laying out more accurate estimates of American teachers’ student facing time. He found that elementary, middle, and high school teachers respectively spent 12%, 14%, and 11% more time in front of kids than their OECD counterparts, compared to previous estimates of 50%, 65%, and 73%.

This inaccuracy stems from the fact that the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is responsible for reporting teaching time data to the OECD, uses a survey of teachers to gather data, instead of drawing from statistical databases or administrative registers like almost every other OECD nation. Abrams explains in detail why the NCES survey is biased in an upwards direction, but this chart is particularly damning:

Given a 5-day week, it’s quite apparent that most US teachers use a methodology of estimating their hours per day as whole number, then multiplying by 5. It’s also clear that a large portion of the survey respondents are almost certainly counting their entire in-school workday as student contact time, even though that isn’t true. (10% of teachers spending 8 hours a day in front of students? Even the unsustainable, long-hours charter school I taught in didn’t have teachers in front of students for more than 5 hours a day typically.)

All of this is not to say that American teachers don’t work hard or deserve our admiration. But it does mean that when we search for ways to make the American education system better, drastically cutting the school day or reducing student contact time is not necessarily the right solution. Instead, we should be thinking about how to allocate the teacher time we do have better.

Fundamental Belief That Is Wrong #2: “Different students have different learning styles, and students learn best when taught in their preferred style.”

Now here’s an assertion I have been hearing for, literally, decades: “Lauren is struggling in social studies, because she’s a visual learner but the teacher just lectures,” or “Johnny is a kinesthetic learner and needs to physically manipulate materials in order to understand math.”

Many excellent teachers talk about the need to differentiate for various learning styles, and this makes intuitive sense. We’ve seen the kid that seems to be able to listen rapt to a teacher for hours, while the kid sitting next to them is asleep after five minutes. Or we personally would prefer to read material, while a friend of ours has to doodle for anything to make sense to them.

If this is true, then there is a clear, testable hypothesis: matching instruction to a student’s preferred learning style should produce superior academic outcomes, and this should be true for various learning styles. However, a 2008 survey of the literature found that while children and adults do express a strong preference for how information is presented to them, there is virtually no evidence to suggest that being taught in that preferred style makes any difference. Indeed, numerous studies that use sound experimental methodology have completely contradicted the so-called “meshing hypothesis” of matching content delivery to learning style.

So what? People like to learn a certain way, so why not give it to them? Well, as Michelle Miller in Minds Online argues:

“Students are prone to feeling locked into one mode of presentation once they’ve received a learning-style label. Rather than encouraging students to see themselves in charge of their own academic success, learning style encourages them to make excuses — or disengage when confronted with activities that contradict their learning-style label” (pg. 152–53).

So stop making excuses, Lauren and Johnny. Meanwhile, the rest of us need to stop believing in educational fairy tales.