L&T Blog T2 Week 5: Challenging misconceptions about learning

 

Dear WA,

I hope everyone is well! This week I was interested to read a summary from Edutopia about common misconceptions about learning. 

Objectives: To debunk some common misconceptions about learning and strategise for more robust strategies influenced by cognitive science.
 
Summary: 

The three misconceptions that the article aims to debunk are:

• 1) That every student has a ‘learning style’. Instead, the authors argue that educators are better to focus on processing information in multiple different ways (e.g. diverse examples, use of different senses, abstract and concrete representations). This helps to cement long term retention of the knowledge. 
• 2) That testing should be used only to assess student learning. Instead, the authors argue that as well as assessing student learning, testing actually changes student learning. This speaks to important cognitive science about retrieval practice.
• 3) That concepts that are easy to learn are easily remembered. In fact, techniques that speed up the acquisition of ideas often speeds up the forgetting of the ideas. The authors recommend considering the level of challenge and struggle to support with this and with the long term retention of concepts. 

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

Which of these myths are ones that I consciously or subconsciously subscribe to?
How can I tweak my practice to be more aligned with developments in cognitive science? 
What support do I need to be able to do this?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks, Jaya