E. D. Hirsch celebrated his 90th birthday a few days ago.

What better time to remind ourselves of his contributions to American education? I hope Hirsch will forgive me if I do not dwell here on his practical and arguably greatest contribution—the establishment of the Core Knowledge Foundation, which has both produced outstanding curricular materials (many distributed without cost) and advocated for equitable, outstanding education for all. (I sat on the board of the foundation for some years.)

Instead, I'll focus on three profound ideas that Hirsch developed and explicated, and that have had a substantial influence on my thinking. 

1. The role of knowledge in reading. Background knowledge is the main driver of language comprehension, whether written or spoken.   Disadvantaged students are disproportionately dependent on schools to provide the background information that will make them effective readers because wealthy students have greater opportunity to gain this knowledge at home. These were the key ideas in Cultural Literacy. That 1987 volume became a best seller mainly because of the list at the back of the book, “What Literate Americans Know.” The list also gave Hirsch the undeserved reputation of an ultra-conservative because he was apparently advocating that school children spend most of their time memorizing the names of dead white males. You couldn’t hold that opinion if you actually read the book, but most people didn’t.
2. The importance of shared knowledge in citizenship. The American Founders recognized that this country, as a multi-ethnic society, faced a peculiar dilemma among nations; how to encourage a feeling of commonality and mutual responsibility among diverse citizenry? They saw a common body of knowledge as crucial to the cohesiveness of American citizenry where individuals held allegiance to other tribes—English, Scottish, German, etc. In The Making of Americans Hirsch argues for a “civic core,” and for the idea that each of us as individuals can and should have commonality in the public sphere, even as we have individuality and different group allegiances in the private sphere. The former does not diminish the latter.
3. The seeds of Americans' denigration of knowledge. Why would it be controversial to argue that children should share some common knowledge? The seeds of that idea lay in the Romantic response to the Enlightenment. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers esteemed knowledge of the world, the Romantics emphasized feeling, emotion, and especially esteemed the impulse of the individual. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers would emphasize social institutions as beneficial to human well-being and flourishing, Romantics depicted social institutions as problems, and portrayed humankind in its natural state as sanctified. In The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them and in Why Knowledge Matters, Hirsch has argued that early educational theorists were influenced by Romantics to a degree few appreciate, and that we today are inheritors of their mostly flawed assumptions about human nature. These assumptions lead to a reverence for individuality and for nature, and a corresponding denigration of knowledge deemed important enough for all to know.

 
Needless to say, a paragraph doesn't begin to do justice to each of these ideas. If they are not familiar, I encourage you to explore them further--I've already made it easy by including the links to buy the books!

Yesterday, the day of the student walkouts to protest gun violence, Robert Pondiscio published a blog  suggesting that participating students ought to face the usual consequences (whatever they might be at their school) for missing class.

I posted a link to this blog on social media with the provocative (but not inaccurate) title "Why students participating in the walkout today ought to be punished." A few people expressed puzzlement and a few expressed outrage, so I thought I'd explain.

Pondiscio's point is easily summarized with this quote: "By its very nature, an act of civil disobedience means the protester refuses to comply  with rule, norms, and expectations.”

Pondiscio goes farther than I would, saying that “compliance rob[s] the protest of any meaning,” and Andy Rotherham seems to agree in his own blog, saying that if students know in advance a walkout is consequence-free “it’s theater.” I think it's still meaningful to show support, but I don’t see how you can argue that it’s an act of civil disobedience or a walkout.

Rotherham touches on another theme that I agree with: adults coordinating the walkout, seeking ways to make it easy and "safe" for kids, fits a more general pattern of adults today exercising too much control over kids' lives, and keeping them safe in ways that ultimately backfire. (Watch for Greg Lukianoff and Jon Haidt's book on this subject, The Coddling of the American Mind.)

Both Pondiscio and Rotherham made another point that I found much more telling, and is the reason I thought the blog worth sharing: teachers and administrators allowing students to attend walkouts sets a terrible precedent.

My concern is that educators who suspended the usual consequences for students missing class did so because they agreed with the cause of the protesters. I do too, but it seems pretty clear that I can’t suspend a policy only for causes I agree with. So what happens when people want to cut class not to protest gun violence, but to support gun owners rights, or to lower the drinking age, or to show support for Nancy Pelosi or Donald Trump? “Slippery slope” arguments often make me roll my eyes, but in this case, I think it’s apt. Are students to be allowed to walk out of classes for any protest? (I imagine middle-school me, at the pizza place during math class, telling the vice principal between bites "This is the way I protest congressional inaction on term limits.")

Maybe there's a good argument for educators taking the role of sanctioning or punishing protests based on their content. I haven't heard it. 

In a 2014 commentary, Gail Lovette and I argued that many educators have a misconception about the teaching of reading comprehension. We suggested that they often think of comprehension as a transferable skill—as reading comprehension improves, it improves for all texts. We suggested, in contrast, the comprehension is highly text-specific and dependent on background knowledge.

Further, we suggested that all-purpose comprehension processes (e.g., monitoring whether you’re understanding, remembering to coordinate meaning across sentences and paragraphs) makes a contribution, but is not much susceptible to practice. As evidence, we cited eight meta-analyses that examined data from studies of comprehension strategy instruction. All of these analyses showed a sizable benefit for strategy instruction, but the amount of instruction or practice had no impact on the benefit. Our interpretation was the strategy instruction told students (who didn’t already know it) that things like coordinating meaning was a good thing to do, but such instruction can’t tell you how to do it, because the how depends on the particular meaning. The instruction can’t be all-purpose.

A new meta-analysis shows the same pattern of data.

Amy Elleman summarized data in a meta-analyis of 25 studies that used various methods to teach children to make inferences, and to apply them to texts. She examined three separate measures of comprehension: general comprehension, inferences in particular, and understanding of things literally stated in the text. She also separated the benefit of instruction to skilled and less-skilled readers.

The data showed “moderate to large” effects of instruction to general comprehension and to making inferences for both skilled and less skilled readers. The pattern differed for the “literal” measure, however, with skilled readers showing almost no gain but unskilled readers again showing a sizable gain. 

It’s somewhat surprising that these students showed such a large gain on an outcome for which they received no instruction…but it must be remembered that less skilled readers are often characterized as somewhat passive in their reading. Hence, instruction may have improved literal comprehension by prompting them tackle the task with more cognitive resources.
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Especially noteworthy to me was that Elleman observed no effect of what she called “Instruction intensity” i.e., number of hours devoted to inference instruction, as Lovette and I noted for the other eight meta-analyses.

This finding was not discussed in the article, but supports Willingham & Lovette’s interpretation of the effect of comprehension instruction: it alerts students to the importance of making inferences, and perhaps more broadly (for less skilled readers) that it is important to THINK while you read. But practicing inferences does not lead to a general inferencing skill for two reasons. One, as noted, inferencing depends on the particular text, and two, whatever cognitive processes contribute to inferencing are already well practiced from use in oral language---we continually draw inferences in conversation.
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As Willingham & Lovette suggested, comprehension instruction is a great idea, because research consistently shows a large benefit of such instruction. But just as consistently, it shows that brief instruction leads to the same outcome as longer instruction. 

Not long ago, a friend told me he was going across country to visit his friend who had lost his wife six months previously. He mentioned that he had not gone to the funeral. “I don’t get that much time off so I can only go once. Everyone’s at the funeral. Somebody needs to be there six months later.”

It’s important to keep this perspective in mind as we continue to process the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Just as my friend knew that losing your spouse is not resolved in six months, we might guess that the trauma associated with attending a high school where murder took place would have long term consequences.

In fact, Louis-Philippe Beland and Dongwoo Kim have examined the educational consequences for survivors. Using the Report on School Associated Violent Deaths from the National School Safety Center, they identified 104 shootings categorized as homicidal and 53 as suicidal. (Shootings took place on the property of a public or private US school, or while a person was attending or on their way to or from a school-sponsored event.)

School performance data were obtained from each state’s Department of Education website. The researchers used other schools in the same district for comparisons, on the reasoning they would be roughly matched for demographics. (I wonder about the soundness of this assumption.) The researchers examined three main outcomes.

​First, they examined whether enrollment in a school would go down after a shooting. (Note: all of the effects described apply to homicidal shootings. There were no effects of suicidal shootings on any of the outcomes.) They found that it did decrease, presumably as parents who could selected other schools. This effect was only observed in 9th grade enrollments, however. Perhaps families with children already attending a school felt more committed to that school. 

Second, they tested whether deadly shootings lowered test scores in later years. They found that it did. (Click for larger image.)

Based on the first, result, it could be that lower scores are a consequence of the opt-out; maybe it’s the most capable 9th graders students who choose not to attend the school where the shooting took place. To test the possibility the researchers examined a subset of the data from California schools, where they could access student-level data. The effect replicated. In other words, it’s not due to changes in the population. When researchers examine test scores of individual students year to year, those scores dropped after the shooting.

Third, the researchers examined behavioral outcomes including graduation rates, attendances, and suspensions. They observed no effects.

On the one hand, it may seem unsurprising that school shootings affect academic outcomes three years later. On the other hand, there is a rich research literature showing that we often overestimate how long we’ll feel distressed in the face of a negative event. But in this case predictions of negative consequences are accurate. Attending a high school where a homicide takes place prompts trauma, and that impacts students school experience and achievement.

​The needs of the students who remain at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School may be deemed less urgent that those of the immediate families of the slain. That’s a fair assessment. But the needs of the survivors are real, and we must ask how we can address them. And we must not forget the students who attend these schools where murder took place within the last three years:

• Marshall County High School
• Aztec High School
• Rancho Tehama Elementary School
• Freeman High School
• North Park Elementary School
• Townville Elementary School
• Alpine High School
• Jeremiah Burke High School
• Antigo High School
• Independence High School
• Mojave High School.

It's one of the most familiar (and frustrating) problems teachers encounter. Students learn something new (say, a standard solution technique for a standard mathematical problem) but then fail to recognize the problem type when they encounter it again. For example, students may learn the idea of a "common factor" in equation form in an algebra class and fail to see that the same idea can be applied in a word problem. 

This is usually called the problem of transfer, and a classic laboratory problem was devised by Mary Gick & Keith Holyoak. 

It's a difficult problem, and most people are unable to solve it. If I tell you that this story may provide some inspiration, you'll probably get it. 

The interesting finding re: transfer is that if you simply ask people to read the military story and then to try to solve the radiation problem, most people don't see the analogy. They have no problem seeing it when told to look. But they don't spontaneously see it. And of course there's usually not someone around to give you a gentle elbow in the ribs, and drop a hint. You have to think of it on your own. 

This problem has proven very difficult to solve. One promising solution is to give subjects something to do that forces them to focus on the underlying structure of the problem. The underlying structure in the example above is "to avoid collateral damage, disperse your forces and converge at the point of attack." The underlying structure is expressed with tumors and rays in the problem and via a fortress and armies in the story. 

Dedre Gentner and her collaborators have tried (with some success) to improve transfer by asking people to compare problems. When you compare problems with the same deep structure, that obviously focuses attention on that deep structure and so you'll remember it better later.

A disadvantage of comparison is that the instructor must provide parallel versions for all problems. Ricardo Minervino and his colleagues sought a technique that would provide similar benefits, but might be more applicable to classroom situations.

In their experiment, subjects first read the fortress-army story (along with two other stories). At transfer, everyone was asked to solve the tumor-rays problem, but one group was also first asked to invent an analogous problem. Examples of the problems subjects invented appear below:

Subjects who invented an analogous problem were more likely to successfully solve the radiation problem compared to subjects not asked to invent a problem, 25% vs 10%. Independent raters judged the quality of the invented problems as analogous to the target problem, and further analysis showed that the better the analogy they created, the more likely they were to solve the target.

The experimenters also showed that it wasn't just the deeper thought required by the problem creation that made those subjects more likely to get the problem right. Another control group was given the tumor-rays problem and were asked to create an analogous problem before solving it, but they did not read the fortress-army story beforehand. Just 10% of these subjects solved the radiation problem.

In terms of the psychological mechanism behind this effect, it's not a huge surprise. Again, it's a technique that prompts people to focus attention on the deep structure, just as comparison does. What's nice about this technique is that, as the authors note, it removes the burden from the instructor to devise parallel problems. But that also gives students the freedom to create an "analogous" problem that isn't really analogous. So the instructor needs to check up on the problems students create.

Still, it's useful to know about the consequences when students create a new problem, and teachers may find it useful in some contexts

Maybe it's just on social media, but I often read this proffered solution to improve children's reading: "just get 'em reading" or "just surround them with books."

Certainly, there's some logic to the idea. We might hope that children's desire to learn about their world is natural, innate. That might mean that most of the problem is one of access. If we provide easy access to books, children will happily read. That's the idea behind book floods: flood a classroom with books, and kids will read, and will end up with better attitudes toward reading and greater motivation to read in the future.

​In a recent study, researcher Susan Neuman found that a book flood, even with a great deal of support, is not a guaranteed success.

​Neuman focused on information books in childcare centers for 3-4 year olds. They ensured there was a comfortable room with at least 500 books, child-size furniture, and a few puzzles and games. Even better, they had preschool specialists who read information books to the children, they made the books available to take home, and they had an outreach program for parents.

There was also a 20-hour per week librarian who used carefully planned sessions to draw kids in to book topics. Here's a description from the paper: "The librarian would begin with songs and rhymes, then read
three information-related books to the children, pointing out new words (e.g., considered essential to story understanding), asking questions, getting children to predict events, and holding a brief discussion following the general mnemonic of the INQUIRE model, described below. Children were then encouraged to check out a book after the reading (e.g., open choice) for the week."

At the end of the year-long intervention, compared to children in a control group, the intervention kids showed no improvement in receptive or expressive vocabulary, word naming, or knowledge of information text. Nothing.

What are we to make of these null results? 

Neuman has done book flood studies before that have shown positive effects, as have others...but there is at least one other null effect published. What might have made the difference here? 

As Neuman notes, there are several possibilities. She speculates that, although they tried to engage the children with read-alouds and other activities, perhaps more needed to be done, especially from a psychological point of view. She notes that the specialists doing the read-alouds were not the children's classroom teachers, and so didn't know the kids well, and might have had a harder time connecting with them. Neuman aptly contrasts physical proximity of books (which they provided) to psychological proximity of literacy (which they might not have provided).

That observation makes sense, and brings to mind Jimmy Kim's work on providing children with books for summer reading. Kim reports these programs don't do much good unless you ensure that kids discuss the books with their parents, or in some way interact with them. 

Taking this "it's not quite so simple" still further, it calls to mind Freddy Hiebert's observation that, for children to learn vocabulary for text, the to-be-learned word must be repeated. That's unlikely to happen by chance, and so requires some planning in the reading program. 

The same applies for background knowledge. As Marilyn Jaeger Adams has pointed out, even if you succeed with the "just get 'em reading" plan students are unlikely to bump into all the knowledge you hope they will (given that background knowledge is a key contributor to reading comprehension). What they need to read to gain the knowledge needs to be planned in a curriculum. 

There message here, I think, is that we should not underestimate the challenge of what we're trying to do. If we aim to raise children who love to read and who read well, we are taking on a significant challenge. It may look easier than it really is, because when it happens in families, we don't see most of the interactions that matter. And of course parents have many advantages over teachers in getting their children to love reading and to excel as readers. That should make us redouble our determination and our effort.

​Personalized learning is, of course, not new, but there is much greater urgency in evaluating its potential advantages and drawbacks, largely because of the promise/threat of two gargantuan funders (Gates & Chan-Zuckerberg) to make personalized learning a priority.

The RAND report (handily summarized here in Education Week) had a little something for the lovers and the haters of the idea. On the negative side, researchers concluded that enthusiasm for personalized learning was getting ahead of any research basis (i.e., we don’t know if this works), and the problem a lot of people pointed to when we used to call it “differentiated instruction” is 

​still with us—it seems like personalized learning will be very time-consuming for teachers. On the positive side, RAND researchers concluded the two most-feared bogey-men—school as an all-day screen-fest, and corporations gobbling up personal data—are not a problem, at least in the schools RAND evaluated.

The RAND report also mentioned a point that most of us already knew—there’s not an agreed-upon definition of personalized learning. I see the term used to highlight three possible features of a learning environment. These three are not mutually exclusive.

• ​First, it might represent a tailoring of pedagogical methods to individual children—one child might learn best like this, whereas another child learns best like that. “Personalized” means “personalized pedagogy.”
• Second, it might mean allowing children to learn at their own speed. There’s no differentiation of pedagogical strategy, but kids who understand move on, and kids who need more instruction get it. “Personalized” means “personalized pace.”
• Third, it might mean different content for different students, depending on their interests. “Personalized” means “personalized curriculum.”

Any or all of these seem worthy to me, but each carries a challenge that I’ve not seen discussed.

Personalized pedagogy. I can see two ways of doing this: theoretically driven, and theoretically agnostic. In the theoretically driven scheme, we have a theory in mind about different types of learners. For example, when learning an abstract idea, maybe some people learn best by exposure to many concrete examples before you hit them with the abstraction, whereas others learn best if they see the abstraction before the concrete examples. So education improves if we (1) have in hand distinctions like this that make a difference to learning and (2) have a reliable way to putting kids in the right category.

The problem is that we don’t have reliable theoretical distinctions in hand. (And yes, learning styles would be a subset of this idea.)

The theoretically agnostic version might work this way: you don’t pretend to know the differences among students. Instead, you let a learning algorithm figure it out for you. You note which lessons a child learns more quickly or more slowly, and keep a running tally. Over time, you should see which type of lesson each child learns more quickly. Then you can give the child that type of lesson more often (presumably still varying them some, so that you can continue to fine-tune your understanding of the child’s preference.)

This method is actually not theoretically agnostic. You still need to pick features that you’ll code for each lesson. The number of features we might attribute to each lesson is pretty big. That is not a problem for the learning algorithm, but may be a problem for creating lesson plans. The larger the number of features I code, the more likely I am to capture a set of features that’s a good fit to an individual student. But the larger the set of features, the longer it takes me to sample the feature space (i.e., the more lessons I need to administer to get an idea of what’s a good fit for the child).

But the biggest problem is that I’m greatly increasing the number of lessons I need to have at the ready. If you learn math best in a series of 5 brief lessons, with lots of ducks used as examples, with frequent review of previous concepts, and with the use of spatial metaphors, whereas I learn math best in a series of 3 slightly longer lessons, with examples from the solar system, and a moderate amount of review of previous concepts, and the use of number line metaphors. Now suppose everyone in the class has their own set of preferences. How are these specialized lessons going to be generated?

Personalized Pace: The challenge here is similar to the last point made about personalized pedagogy. In this plan we’re not thinking that different children will receive pedagogically different lesson plans. But, if you understand a lesson and I don’t, I will get another explanation, another set of problems to work, something. This decision to offer more instruction and support to me must be based on some decision about my performance to that point. So we have a bunch of decision points where kids either move to new content or review old content in a different way. As we add more of these decision points we have greater and greater opportunity to adjust the lesson based on the students current understanding.

What people often fail to realize is that each decision point also demands new material. A new explanation. A new metaphor. A new set of problems to work. With more decision points, the pathway through the lesson gets “bushier” and “bushier” and we greatly multiply the amount of high-quality instructional content we need. That’s a formidable challenge.

Personalized content: What if we allow students a greater voice in selecting the content that makes up their education? I’m ready to believe that there could be a benefit to student motivation, and that for some, that benefit could be significant.

But I also see a trade-off. Students will go deeper on X, and will slight Y. When student choice is to affect curriculum, advocates tell skeptics that breadth will still be assured. Choice represents a bonus, an “and.” I’m doubtful. I think it will be an “instead.” Even curricula with the explicit goal of breadth, of minimum competence in all domains, struggle to achieve it. If significant time is siphoned off for a particular domain, proficiency in others will suffer.

Practice matters. Students need time to work with ideas to really absorb them, make them part of their thinking. Even minimum competence requires exposure and thinking over the course of a few years.

If students become more narrow—that is, really good at what they are interested in, and less good at what they are not interested in--that’s not intrinsically bad. It’s a choice. It’s a way to reify an educational value. Your goal can be breadth or your goal can be depth. The personalized content approach is a depth approach. We should not kid ourselves that personalized curricula will give us both.

So, all in all, is personalized learning worth pursuing?
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I’d rather start with changes that research gives us more confidence will help kids. But hey, that’s just my personalized point of view.

I've been very skeptical of 21st century skills (e.g., see here nearly ten years ago, and again here). My skepticism grew out what I perceived as a neglect of domain knowledge among the proponents of 21st century skills and (to a lesser extent) a sense that the truly new part of "21st century" is a relatively small part of what students need to learn: most of student time should be devoted to math, science, reading, civics, history, etc., much the way it the looked in the 20th century.

Sam Wineburg's recent research shows that I was wrong.

Wineburg has confirmed the suspicion that many have had regarding student's use of Internet sources. Students are too trusting of what they read on the Internet. Most striking, they implicitly trust Google to verify sources for them--whatever Google lists first, they figure must be a good source.

Even when asked to verify the accuracy of pages they read, they do poorly. They are suckers for a slick looking page, and for the self-description of the authors--i.e., if the authors say "we are a non-profit, devoted to the welfare of children," students are all too likely to believe them. 

I think my assessment of 21st century skills as a small part of what student need to know was inaccurate, because evaluating sources on the Internet is such a substantial part of student work today. 

In addition, I've always thought that the solution is for students to understand what the heck you're reading about. You won't fall for the Northwest Pacific Tree Octopus hoax page if you know even a little bit about cephalopods. I thought that because of work showing what I took to be the limited utility of reading comprehension strategies, and the decisive importance of content knowledge to comprehension. 

But Wineburg and his associates have shown that there's a useful, content-free strategy that could a big difference in student assessment of website accuracy. Through study of professional fact-checkers, Wineburg suggests that students be taught to 
1) read laterally. Instead of going through a checklist of features of the website in question (the usual advice) encourage students to get OFF the website to see what others say about it.  That's the way to discover that it's actually a front for a hidden organization, for example, or has some other agenda.
2) show click restraint. That's Wineburg's term for refraining from clicking on the first result from a Google search. Instead, students should peruse the short sentences accompanying each result to get a sense of what they'll find on each site
3) use Wikipedia wisely. There's more information on Wikipedia than the main article, and Wineburg specifically recommends the "Talk" page, which include ongoing conversation about more controversial aspects of the article topic and can be especially revealing. 

I'm not buying the whole 21st Century Skill bill of goods....but Wineburg's work on Internet search is hugely valuable, and I think all educators should know about it. 

Here's a free, recent article summarizing it from Wineburg, written with his colleagues Sarah McGrew, Teresa Ortega and Joel Breakstone.

I concluded that many teachers believe learning styles theory is accurate in about 2003. It was perhaps the second or third time I had given a public talk to teachers. I mentioned it in passing as an example of a theory that sounds plausible but is wrong, and I felt an immediate change in the air. Several people said “wait, what? Can you please back up a slide?”

Since then I’ve written a couple of articles about learning styles (here and here), created a video on the subject, and put an FAQ on my website. Last week I was on the Science Friday radio program (With Kelly Macdonald and Lauren McGrath) to talk about learning styles and other neuromyths.

I put energy into dispelling the learning styles myth because I thought that audience of educators was representative—that is, that most teachers think the theory is right. But with the exception of one recent study showing that academics often invoke learning styles theories in in professional journal articles (Newton, 2015) there haven’t been empirical data on how widespread this belief is in the US.

Now there are.

Macdonald, McGrath, and their colleagues conducted a survey to test the pervasiveness of various beliefs about learning among American adults (N = 3,048), and among educators in particular (N =598). Similar surveys have been conducted in parts of Europe, East Asia, and Latin American, where researchers have observed high levels of inaccurate beliefs on these issues.
Learning styles theory was endorsed by 93% of the public, and 76% of educators. Data regarding other neuromyths (common misperceptions about learning or the brain) are shown in the table below (from the paper).

As the authors acknowledge, there are limitations to the interpretation, in particular regarding the sample. The subjects were visitors to the site TestMyBrain.org, and so it’s difficult to know how they differed from a random sample. Still, neuromyths were endorsed at rates similar to those observed in other countries.

Why is acceptance of the idea so high? No one really knows, but here’s my tripartite guess.

First, I think by this point it’s achieved the status of one of those ideas that “They” have figured out. People believe it for the same reason I believe atomic theory. I’ve never seen the scientific papers supporting it (and wouldn’t understand them if I had) but everyone believes the theory and my teachers taught it to me, so why would I doubt that it’s right?

Second, I think learning styles theory is widely accepted because the idea is so appealing. It would be so nice if it were true. It predicts that a struggling student would find much of school work easier if we made a relatively minor change to lesson plans—make sure the auditory learners are listening, the visual learners are watching, and so on.

Third, something quite close to the theory is not only right, it’s obvious. The style distinctions (visual vs. auditory; verbal vs. visual) often correspond to real differences in ability. Some people are better with words, some with space, and so on. The (incorrect) twist that learning styles theories add is to suggest that everyone can reach the same cognitive goal via these different abilities; that if I’m good with space but bad with words (or better, if I prefer space to words), you can rearrange a verbal task so that it plays to my spatial strength.

That’s where the idea goes wrong wrong. First, the reason we make the distinction between types of tasks is that they are separable in the brain and mind; we think verbal and visual are fundamentally different, not fungible. Second, while there are tasks that can be tackled in more than one way, these tasks are usually much easier when done in one way or another. For example, if I give you a list of concrete nouns, one at a time, and ask you to remember them you could do this task verbally (by repeating the word to yourself, thinking of meaning, etc.) or visually (by creating a visual mental image). Even for people who are not very good at imagery, the latter method is a better method of doing the task. Josh Cuevas has an article showing this point coming out early next year: people’s alleged learning styles don’t count for anything in accounting for task performance, but the effect of a strategy on a task are huge. 

​A final note. I frequently hear from teachers that they learned about the theory in teacher education classes. I've looked at all of the well-known educational psychology textbooks, and none of them present the idea as correct. But neither do they debunk it. Teachers are, according to the survey, more accurate than the general public in their beliefs about learning, but they should be way ahead. Debunking these ideas in ed psych textbooks ought to help. 

Like so many other Americans, I am starting this week despondent about the weekend events in Charlottesville, Virginia. Yes, I work there and live nearby, so there was some poignancy in seeing events unfold in streets and near buildings I know so well. But more, it’s the bitter recognition of how far we have to go. Like others, I am certain that we’re not seeing a resurgence of racism, antisemitism, and chauvinism, but a more realistic look at what has always been there.

Educators might be particularly dejected. Have we not in some way failed? How can people believe ideas that are so self-evidently wrong? Are they that ignorant of basic facts? Are they that incapable of probing the soundness of the ideas they espouse?

Key tenets—at least those made public—of the organizer of Saturday’s rally are (1) white people are oppressed in America; (2) European culture is dying (3) the white race is “dispossessed.” (4) the solution to these so-called problems is what he calls “peaceful ethnic cleansing” which he apparently thinks can be squared with the Constitution. Readers of this blog will not need to be convinced that these ideas are factually laughable, so I won’t marshal evidence against them.

You can’t blame people for thinking that anyone who believes this nonsense simply closes their mind to facts and is motivated by ideology—an ideology that is plain evil. What good is education in the face of someone who closes their mind to facts?

I’ve put it crudely, but I think something close to this is right. Yet it’s worth trying to refine our understanding of the motivation of the Nazis* who gathered in Charlottesville.

People hold beliefs for multiple reasons. One—but only one—reason people believe things is in an effort to make their beliefs coordinate with reality, to be in line with the objective truth about the world.

People also hold beliefs to belong to a group, to maintain social ties. They believe things to regulate emotions. They believe things to promote and maintain their self-image. The believe things to protect values they consider important.

So for example, I might believe that a secret cabal of Jews runs the world economy because my close friends and family believe it; I hold this belief, in part, to maintain social ties. Now suppose I hear that some friends have threatened an elderly Jewish store owner in my neighborhood, which upsets a little, because he’s a nice old guy who has always been pleasant to me. I may adopt a new belief—the old man must be part of the cabal, or at least knows about it—as a way of regulating my emotions. I don’t want to feel bad for the store owner, and I don’t want to believe my friends are doing something wrong. So I start to have doubts about the old man.  

This is why persuaders work so hard to create doubt; doubt as to whether we know cigarettes cause cancer, doubt as to whether whether we know human activity changes the climate, doubt about whether we know GMOs are safe. If we doubt, that means there is not a settled reality out there in the world with which we must be sure our beliefs align. That allows the other influencers—emotion, social ties, sacred values—room to operate. We tell ourselves “no one really knows” and so we go with beliefs that feel right.

An important aspect of this situation is that is that we never admit to ourselves that we are influenced by anything other than facts. I may believe the science linking cigarettes to cancer is “unclear” because thinking that it’s clear, coupled with the fact that I smoke, makes me very anxious. But I’ll never say “I choose not to believe the science because doing so frightens me.”

This fact is our secret weapon. People actually want to believe what’s true. So if I could sit the Nazis down and present evidence that they are wrong about racial differences, they would change their minds? How much factual evidence is required to change an inaccurate belief obviously varies, depending the strength of the other motivators—to what extent to you believe something because it maintains social ties, is important to your identity, and so on.

It would be very very difficult indeed to persuade the people who marched in Charlottesville that their ideas about race, religion, immigration, history, the United States government, and many other things are wrong. But for each person who marched, there are likely hundreds or thousands who did not march but who read about these events and thought “Huh. Well, I see their point.”

These people might be reached. The children of these people might be reached.

The way to reach them is with facts, by building in them a habit of seeking evidence for their own beliefs, and with the skills to seek and evaluate that evidence. That’s the long-term goal of educators. So if you’re an educator, don’t lose heart. If you think your curriculum needs to do a better job on the history of the KKK, or Nazism, or the Constitution, or whatever, then work for that change. But in the main, keep doing what you’re doing. Every educator has learned, years after the fact, that he or she had a profound influence on a student, although at the time that was not at all obvious. The same principle applies here. You likely do not know the good you are doing.

In the shorter term, educators and non-educators can help by fighting fake news in all its aspects. Fake news stories are designed to provide what looks like objective evidence for a wished-for belief. Everyone has a friend or two on Facebook who reposts these stories. Don’t just roll your eyes. Let your friend know it’s not accurate.

Equally important, stand up for mainstream media sites that get it right. If you don’t already do it, support a newspaper you admire by paying for a subscription. Over the last decade I have been interviewed for hundreds of stories about education. With apologies to my friends in these media, my impression is that writers for television, radio, and magazines all, to a greater or lesser extent, worry about entertaining their audience. In my experience, newspapers are the only medium where truth is the primary concern. You know newspapers are struggling. Do your small part.

Truth is our greatest weapon against senseless evil. Fight with it. Fight for it. And don’t be discouraged.
 
*I’m aware that not all of the marchers would call themselves Nazis and I’m aware they varied in the degree to which they were coy about their veneration for Nazism. I tend to paint racist, antisemitic xenophobes with a broad brush. It’s a personal failing I’m not really working to correct.