Around the world, many teachers still believe longstanding—but long-debunked—myths about learning and cognition.
A study published this month in the journal Trends in Neuroscience and Education finds 9 in 10 primary school teachers across 11 countries, from Canada to Kazakhstan to Taiwan, believe that students need instruction tailored to their “learning styles” or that they have “multiple intelligences,” among other misconceptions.
Researchers asked more than 1,200 primary teachers about 21 “neuromyths.” They found 11 of these were held by a significant share of teachers worldwide, and most teachers reported learning about them as part of formal training or professional development, rather than through media or pop culture.
The findings mirror other recent studies of U.S. preservice and veteran K-12 teachers. Kristin Simmers, a learning sciences researcher at the University of Connecticut who did not participate in the latest study, has found similar patterns among preservice teachers—even though many entered training years or decades after some of these myths have been debunked.
Misunderstanding how students learn can lead teachers to misdiagnose learning problems and adopt less effective practices. The misconceptions often prove sticky because they stem from a misunderstanding of real research or seem to explain why some instructional practices work, but for the wrong reason.
For example, Simmers noted that a teacher who believes some students learn only “visually” while others learn only “kinesthetically” might create more nuanced lessons—or might assign different activities to individual students.
“When including ‘learning styles,’ you might find a positive effect if what you’re doing is adding modalities, whereas before you were using only one,” she said. “If I used to teach with worksheets and now I’m incorporating all these other modalities [such as hands-on activities or videos] via ‘learning styles,’ I might see a positive effect.”
Below are five of the most common cognitive misconceptions, each believed by three-quarters or more of primary teachers in the study.
1. “Multiple intelligences”
The myth: Brain function varies significantly from student to student; individual students have a “dominant intelligence” (mathematical, verbal, or spatial, etc.), and instruction should be tailored to their dominant intelligence.
Why it’s wrong: Brain development and activity is fairly consistent across individuals. Neuroscience has not found separate systems in the brain for different kinds of cognition.
Howard Gardner, the developmental psychologist who first coined the term “multiple intelligences,” has written that his work originally described how intelligence could be multifaceted, but has been consistently conflated with learning styles and taken to be prescriptive.
2. Learning styles
The myth: Individual students process information through their primary learning style—typically categorized as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.
Why it’s wrong: Matching instruction and activities by individual learning styles has not been found to improve student performance more than developing well-structured lessons overall.
Teachers also don’t consistently match students’ behaviors with the same learning styles, or particular instructional practices with a given learning style.
3. Brain hemispheres
The myth: The fact that some people are more “right-brained” and others are more “left-brained” helps explain the differences in whether students are more creative or logical, and how they learn.
Why it’s wrong: Early studies of epilepsy patients whose left and right brain hemispheres had been surgically divided found that when isolated, the right hemisphere tended to activate during nonverbal tasks and the left hemisphere during verbal tasks. Those results did not hold up in later studies—in people with whole, connected brains.
Individual tasks can activate specific or several different parts of the brain at the same time, in both hemispheres. Damage to the prefrontal cortex, for example, is associated with more difficulty with attention or motivation tasks—but even people with brain trauma or a stroke often relearn tasks and skills using different parts of their brains. And personality characteristics, such as creativity, intuitiveness, or rationality, are not associated with a particular brain hemisphere.
4. Environmental stimulation
The myth: Highly stimulating environments improve the brains of young children.
Why it’s wrong: This myth is often dubbed the “Mozart effect,” because its original study found that college students listening to a Mozart sonata performed better on a spatial task than those listening to other sounds or no sound at all. The study had nothing to do with infants or young children, and did not find (or even measure) changes in either longer-term performance or general intelligence. Later studies didn’t replicate that finding, or find that music or other “stimulating environments” improved infants’ or young children’s brain development.
It is true that infants and children who are severely neglected or deprived can have slower cognitive development, but more stimulation is not automatically better.
5. Coordination exercises
The myth: Short periods of coordination exercises can improve brain function (for example, touching your right ankle with your left hand and vice versa).
Why it’s wrong: Regular physical activity supports cognition by improving overall health, and reducing stress, but “coordination exercises” in particular are intended to improve learning by “improving integration of left and right hemispheric brain function"—part of the debunked “left brain/right brain” framework.
