7 Learning Myths Your Students Probably Believe

Misinformation is having a moment—again.

At Meta, the parent company of Facebook, fact-checkers are a thing of the past. Elsewhere, fast-moving new technologies enable so-called “deepfakes,” realistic but entirely fabricated audio clips, public service announcements, and celebrity product endorsements. Even well-intentioned “education” content runs afoul of the truth: A 2023 study found that only 27% of the most popular TikTok videos about autism are accurate, while a whopping 73% were either “overgeneralized” or outright “inaccurate.” 

As students progress from K through 12, it’s likely they’ll pick up some mistaken beliefs about their own cognition. Teachers must continue to prioritize their academic targets, so metacognitive discussions aimed at dispelling harmful misconceptions can often fall to the wayside.

In an article for ASCD, “Attack of the Zombie Learning Theories!,” the educator and ASCD CEO Richard Culatta lists some of the most pernicious learning myths in an attempt to help lay them to rest. Building on Culatta’s writing, here are seven of the top myths your students may believe, and some simple ways to steer them towards a more accurate understanding of how learning—and our brains—actually work.

1 Myth: Left- and right-brain thinking

Many students are stuck on the false notion that there are “left brain” and “right brain” thinkers, Culatta writes. Left-brain thinkers are more logical and analytical, the myth suggests, while right- brain thinkers are more creative and artistic.

There’s truth to the notion that specific regions of the brain are the primary contributors to specific mental functions, and that this division of labor sometimes falls along hemispheric lines—with language processing generally occurring in the left hemisphere and spatial and visual processing in the right. But left-brained/right-brained thinking is a radical oversimplification. As we reported in 2019, fMRI images increasingly reveal “that the brain is less like a collection of discrete, specialized modules—one for speech and one for vision—and more like an integrated network of functions that support each other.”

A 2013 study puts the debate to rest: Researchers examined the resting-state brain scans of over 1,000 people. “Our analyses suggest that an individual brain is not ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ as a global property,” the researchers concluded—and the scans “demonstrate that activity is similar on both sides of the brain regardless of one’s personality,” writes Robert H. Shmerling, MD for Harvard Health Publishing.

If your students have begun to divide themselves into “right-brained” and “left-brained” categories, it’s worth reminding them that “creativity” comes in many forms (software engineers can be creative!); that there are no biological or mechanical differences between creative and analytical brains; and that anyone can get more creative or more analytical with practice.

2 Myth: Intelligence is a fixed quality

By middle and high school, many students believe that their academic success is determined by an innate level of intelligence—a fixed intellectual capacity they were born with.

Standardized tests of intelligence like the SAT and the IQ propagate the myth. In reality, the tests have a checkered past, and fail as a consistent measure of a person’s intellectual ability. One of the earliest widely-adopted tests of general intelligence—the Binet–Simon scale, a precursor to the modern IQ test—was developed specifically to determine whether a student had an intellectual disability and should be removed from the general school population, as a 2013 article reveals. It wasn’t designed as a measurement of general intelligence.

Meanwhile, a person’s IQ test results can vary greatly over time. A 2011 study that tested and retested teenagers’ IQs found that their scores could fluctuate by as many as 20 points over the course of four years—the difference between a 50th percentile and a 90th percentile IQ score. “IQ tests are known to be sensitive to things like motivation and coaching,” cognitive scientist Steven Piantadosi told Discover Magazine. 

Be careful: Your own students may sometimes view a single test score as a verdict on their overall intelligence. English teacher Kimberly Hellerich suggests offering exam retakes—at least periodically—as a means to demonstrate growth and to “improve their self-perception and the quality of their work.” To reinforce students’ confidence in their own abilities, mix hard problems with a few easy ones, a 2024 study suggests: The simple tactic dramatically improved students’ attitude towards hard work.

3 Myth: You can multitask effectively

The myth of multitasking plagues almost everyone, even adults who know better—but it’s especially pervasive among students. In tech-friendly classrooms, one 2016 study found, students spent a full third of instructional time on non-academic work like playing browser games or shopping—earnestly believing that they could process the lesson at the same time.

But multitasking is a myth. “Human brains are not able to focus on multiple things at one time,” Culatta writes. “What is actually happening is that our brain is quickly switching from one task to another, but still only focusing on one of them at any given moment”—leading to substandard performance on each of the tasks we’re engaged with. 

This is particularly true when the competing tasks are relying on the same brain circuitry. A 2021 study offers a prime example: “Listening to lyrics of a familiar language may rely on the same cognitive resources as vocabulary learning,” and so playing lyrically intensive music while reading or writing about challenging topics can “lead to an overload of processing capacity and thus to an interference effect,” the researchers assert.

To help break their multitasking habit, “I recommend that teachers explain the ‘why’ around everything,” educational consultant Catlin Tucker told Edutopia. Kids “aren’t reading cognitive science articles about these things,” so many of them genuinely believe that they can multitask—and that things like cell phone bans are just unfair regulations. After explaining the research to her class, Tucker even made a deal with one student: He could wear AirPods during class one day, but not the next, and he’d be quizzed after both lessons. When the student saw the difference in his scores, “it was not a struggle anymore,” Tucker says.

4 Myth: You have a “learning style”

This is one of the most enduring education myths, capturing the hearts and minds of teachers and students alike. The learning styles framework suggests that every student has a biological predisposition for a particular form of learning—an innate preference for learning visually, kinesthetically, or verbally, for example. It’s an enticingly simple idea. In fact, many students who have never heard the term “learning styles” might develop it independently—or hear about it secondhand—and start to believe it themselves.

This myth also shapes how adults perceive a student’s potential, 2023 research concluded. In the study, teachers and parents rated “visual learners” as more intelligent and “hands-on learners” as more athletic, by wide margins. Even teaching colleges can perpetuate these misconceptions, the study found, falling back on casual misstatements like “chemists and engineers are often kinesthetic learners.” Such faulty notions can lead teachers to pigeonhole kids based on their apparent abilities—and thus limit their potential.

While “it’s true that we have individual preferences for learning activities, [...] our brains are not wired differently to learn better from one style or another,” writes Culatta. A comprehensive 2009 review of decades of research found no evidence that students learn more effectively when instruction is tailored to their preferred “style.” 

On the contrary, “research suggests that students will learn, remember, and apply novel information better if they process that information in multiple different ways,” wrote professor of educational psychology Jonathan G. Tullis for Edutopia— as this “creates elaborated and detailed memories, which enhances the long-term retention and generalization of that knowledge.” For example, when learning about cells, all students should see diagrams, read about them, draw them, and even build models by hand—rather than only doing one thing or another in accordance with their preferred “style.”

5 Myth: Talent beats persistence

Whether it’s math, English, or art, if a student is struggling in a particular subject, the talent beats persistence myth may lead them to throw up their hands and say “I just don’t have the knack for it.”

Unfortunately, this myth is often perpetuated by the adults in students’ lives—sometimes unintentionally. In a phenomenon called the “naturalness bias,” evaluators tend to rate a person who appears naturally gifted at something more highly than someone who had to work hard at it, even when their overall performance is comparable.

But persistence is a more important factor than innate ability in the majority of academic endeavors, research suggests. A landmark 2019 study led by psychologists Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth found that high school GPA is a better predictor of on-time college completion than SAT scores. Unlike standardized test scores, “grades are a very good index of your self-regulation—your ability to stick with things, your ability to regulate your impulses, your ability to delay gratification and work hard instead of goofing off,” Duckworth told Edutopia in 2020. Their predictive power suggests that perseverance is what truly determines long-term academic and professional success.

Remind struggling students that hard work, not inborn skill, is what matters in the end. “World-class experts start off like everyone else—they are awkward, clumsy amateurs,” Duckworth said; “It’s through thousands of hours of deliberate practice that they attain greatness.” To drive the point home, as we wrote last year, “Consider praising students for their improvement instead of their raw scores” and think about periodically assigning “reports on the mistakes and growing pains of accomplished writers, scientists, and artists.”

6 Myth: Learning is “filling your brain”

In his ASCD article, Culatta points out that many educational metaphors involve “filling” your brain with information, as if it starts as an empty bucket that could one day be filled to the brim—or “a hard drive or filing cabinet where you store things.” 

That language obfuscates how the brain really works. Rather than simply dropping bits of information into an empty container, “our knowledge grows by making connections to things we already know,” Culatta writes.

“As we amass knowledge over the course of our life and connect events in our memory, we learn to model complex contingencies and make inferences about novel relations,” writes neuroscientist Anthony Greene for Scientific American. “It is the connections that let us understand cause and effect, learn from our mistakes, and anticipate the future.” 

To help dispel this myth, reconsider the language you’re using to describe learning in the classroom. Instead of a storage system, “a better analogy might be to compare the brain to a strip of velcro where new things stick if they have enough hooks to build a connection,” Culatta suggests. To align your pedagogy with the science, kick off lessons with activities that connect new material to learned material, like concept mapping, Venn diagrams, or structured think-pair-share activities.

7 Myth: Study as close to the test date as possible

Students’ fondness for cramming is understandable; the strategy requires much less effort than studying a bit each day, and it can even feel effective, since a single night of intense study may be sufficient to pass a test. But the approach ultimately sets students up for failure: Kids who cram will often perform poorly on the exam—and subsequently forget the material more quickly, robbing themselves of the foundation needed to succeed in the future.

Committing information to longer-term memory requires students to engage in “distributed practice,” Willingham says—reviewing the material a little bit at a time over an extended period of time. In particular, research supports the practice of “spaced retrieval,” wherein students  recall information from memory (without notes or aides) on a number of spread out occasions. Flashcards and self-quizzes are a few ways students can do this on their own.

To help students break their cramming habit, consider coaching them to schedule out their studying in advance, Duckworth recommended to Edutopia in a 2021 interview. For example, in a group activity at King Middle School in Portland, ME, eighth grade teacher Catherine Paul calls on students to name each of the assignments that are in progress across all of their classes; one student stands at the board to write them down. Through a whole-class discussion, the class decides how to rank order the assignments in terms of their priority—factoring in their deadlines and the level of effort each one is likely to require.

In fact, a 2017 study revealed that students who received explicit encouragement to prepare for an upcoming test—and were prompted to consider which resources would be most useful to their studying, such as the class textbook or practice problem worksheets—scored a third of a letter grade higher than their peers who did not receive this advice.