"Learning styles" sounds good. That's exactly the problem.
For years I taught as if some of my students were visual learners and some were auditory learners, and if I matched my delivery to the right label, they'd learn faster. I promoted it. I built lessons around it. When a colleague pushed back on it in a conversation, I went looking for the research so I could show her she was wrong.
She wasn't wrong.
Fact: the theory as taught in most teacher training says that matching instructional method to a student's preferred style (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, whatever taxonomy a given program uses) improves learning over a mismatched delivery.
Fact: that specific claim, the "meshing hypothesis," has been tested directly, more than once, with a study design that could have found the effect if it existed (assess the style, randomly assign matched and mismatched instruction, compare outcomes). It didn't find the effect. Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork ran the most cited review of this research in 2008 and came up empty, and nothing since has overturned it.
People still learn things. Some people do prefer pictures and some prefer text. None of that is in dispute. The part that doesn't hold up is sorting students by style and matching delivery to the label. That's the part that costs schools money and wastes teachers' prep time, and it's the part with no evidence behind it.
I don't think the people who taught me this were lying to me. I think it sounded good, and sounding good was enough for a long time, for me included.
That's the whole reason this page exists. Just because something sounds good doesn't mean that it is good, and I'd rather find that out about my own beliefs than get to keep them.
I hope that helps.
Growth mindset is the one on this list I still use, which is exactly why it's worth writing about.
The version that made it into every staff training I've sat through says that teaching students their intelligence is malleable, not fixed, raises achievement, and the early studies behind it reported large effects.
Fact: those early numbers didn't hold up at scale.
Fact: the largest test of the idea, a randomized study of roughly 12,000 students published in 2019, found a real effect, but a much smaller one, concentrated mostly in students who were already struggling, not across the board.
The honest version of that finding is narrower than the pitch: believing effort can change outcomes helps some students who'd otherwise give up keep going.
I still teach it that way, on purpose, because the supported version costs me nothing to run and might help the exact students who need it most. When a student bombs an assessment, I don't tell them they can still pass if the math says they can't. I ask what didn't work this time and how we change it for next time. That's growth mindset doing real work: effort and strategy change what a student is capable of learning next, not what already happened.
This is the first claim on this list that held up, just smaller than advertised.
What questions do you have for me?
"Loud pipes save lives" is close to gospel in motorcycle culture, and it's the first claim on this list I get asked about in person, not just online.
The claim has a mechanism behind it: a loud exhaust supposedly gets you noticed by drivers who'd otherwise pull out in front of you or turn left across your lane, the two crashes that kill the most riders.
Fact: exhaust noise on most motorcycles fires backward and downward, away from the driver ahead of you or beside you, toward the traffic you already passed.
Fact: by the time a loud pipe is audible over a modern car's insulation, closed windows, and stereo, the gap has usually closed to the point where noise wouldn't have bought a driver enough reaction time anyway.
Fact: neither the Motorcycle Safety Foundation nor NHTSA lists exhaust volume as a countermeasure with evidence behind it. What they do list is lane positioning, headlight use, and rider clothing that a driver's eyes can pick up before the moment they'd need to react.
None of that means I have a problem with loud pipes. I like the sound as much as the next rider, and picking your exhaust is a preference, the same way picking FOIL over the distributive property is a preference. Where it turns into an error is treating the sound as your safety plan. The riders who get hit at intersections mostly get hit by someone who looked and still didn't see them, and a driver who doesn't see you is a driver who isn't going to hear you either. Riding like you're invisible, because on a given day, at a given angle, to a given driver, you probably are, does more for you than the exhaust ever will.
What questions do you have for me?