Education Myths You Will Be Taught
Three famous education myths
- Cobun retention percentages (1968): Claim that we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 50% of what we see and hear, 90% of what we say and do. No empirical basis. Will Thalheimer and others have traced the figures back through textbooks and found no original study.
- Left-brain / right-brain learners: Claim that some people are “logical, analytical” (left-brain) and others are “creative, intuitive” (right-brain). Neuromyth. A 2013 fMRI study of 1,011 people (Nielsen et al., University of Utah) found no evidence for hemispheric dominance as a personality trait.
- Learning styles (visual / auditory / kinesthetic): Claim that each student has a fixed style and teaching to it improves learning. Weak evidence. A 2008 review by Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork found almost no experimental support. The idea persists because it is intuitive, not because it works.
- Why these survive: They sound scientific (numbers, brain imagery). They are easy to use in lesson plans. They have been repeated for decades.
- Information-literacy rule: A claim that “research shows X” should be checkable. If you cannot find the study, treat the claim as unverified.
Many teacher-training programmes repeat a few claims that turn out, on inspection, to have no real evidence behind them. The claims sound scientific. They appear in textbooks, lecture slides, and other materials used to train educators. Generations of teachers have been told them as fact. Some are still being told to current students.
A teacher who passes these on to their own students is repeating something they did not check. A teacher who learns to verify them is doing information literacy on the same material they are training to teach.
The Cobun retention percentages
A widely-cited figure in education materials claims that human memory holds different fractions of information depending on the channel and the action.
The standard form of the claim is:
- 10 percent of what we read
- 20 percent of what we hear
- 30 percent of what we see
- 50 percent of what we see and hear
- 70 percent of what we say
- 90 percent of what we say and do
The figures are usually attributed to “Cobun (1968),” sometimes to Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience (1946), and sometimes to no source at all.
When researchers have tried to find the original study that produced these percentages, they have failed. Will Thalheimer, an instructional designer who traced the claim across decades of educational literature, found that the numbers appear in many textbooks but no source ever cites a primary experiment. The figures have been copied from one secondary source to another, sometimes attached to Dale’s name, sometimes to Cobun, sometimes to no one, but never traced back to original data.
Dale’s Cone of Experience is a real diagram from 1946. It is a rough ordering of teaching activities from abstract (verbal symbols at the top) to concrete (direct experience at the bottom). Dale never attached percentages to any level of the cone. The percentages were added by later authors and attributed back to him without his work.
Modern memory research does not support fixed-percentage retention by channel. How much is remembered depends on many things: how the material is processed, what prior knowledge the learner has, how it is tested, how long after learning the test happens. There is no clean fraction that can be assigned to “what we read” or “what we hear.”
The figures persist because they are useful for lesson planning slides. They feel scientific and tell a tidy story. They are also wrong.
They sound scientific, they are easy to put on a slide, and they have been copied across textbooks for decades.
The numbers tell a tidy story: read 10%, see-and-hear 50%, say-and-do 90%. The story matches a real classroom intuition (active learning helps). But the specific percentages have no original study behind them. They became “research-backed” through repetition, not through evidence.
The left-brain / right-brain framing
A common claim in education and self-help books is that the two hemispheres of the brain handle different kinds of thinking. The left hemisphere is described as logical, analytical, mathematical, and language-focused. The right hemisphere is described as creative, intuitive, artistic, and emotional. Individual people are sometimes labelled “left-brained” or “right-brained” based on personality or career.
The popular framing is not supported by current neuroscience.
Real hemispheric specialisation exists. Language processing is strongly left-lateralised in most right-handed people. Spatial attention is often more right-lateralised. Faces are processed with a slight right-hemisphere bias. These differences are measurable and real.
But the popular leap from “some specialisation exists” to “people have a dominant hemisphere that defines their personality” is unsupported. A 2013 study by Jared Nielsen and colleagues at the University of Utah used functional MRI scans of 1,011 people to test for hemispheric dominance as a personality trait. They found no evidence that individuals are “left-brained” or “right-brained” in the sense the popular claim describes. Both hemispheres are active in almost all complex tasks. The differences between people’s brains are not concentrated in one hemisphere versus the other.
The myth persists for several reasons. The hemispheres are a vivid metaphor. The labelling system is easy to apply (“you are right-brained, that is why you struggle with maths”). It also gives a reassuring explanation for difficulties that may have other causes.
A teacher who labels a student as “right-brained” and adjusts teaching to that label is acting on a folk-psychology theory, not a scientific one. The adjustments may or may not help, but the rationale is wrong.
A third example: fixed learning styles
A related claim is that each student has a fixed learning style (often visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) and that teaching to the student’s style improves learning outcomes.
The first half of the claim (students have preferences for how they receive information) is broadly true. The second half (matching teaching to those preferences improves learning) has been tested experimentally and the results are weak.
A 2008 review commissioned by Psychological Science in the Public Interest and authored by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork looked for experimental evidence that teaching to a student’s stated learning style produced better outcomes than teaching the same content in a different style. They found almost none. The studies that did exist were small and had methodological problems.
Their conclusion was that learning styles, in the strong form taught to many educators, is not well supported. The weak form (varying instructional channels helps all students) is supported, but that is a much more modest claim than “match the channel to the student.”
This is a distinct claim from Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, which is also contested but rests on a different argument. Multiple Intelligences proposes that human intelligence has several capacities; learning styles proposes that each individual has a fixed delivery preference. The two are sometimes conflated and should not be.
The pattern these claims share
Three properties make an education myth durable even after it has been refuted.
It sounds scientific. Numbers, brain imagery, or named theorists give the claim authority. A claim that comes with a percentage feels more solid than a claim without one, even if the percentage was made up.
It is easy to use in a lesson plan. A teacher can put “90 percent retention through doing” on a slide. A teacher can label a student “kinesthetic” and adjust homework. The claim gives the teacher a tool to use. A more accurate claim (“how much students remember depends on many interacting factors”) gives less to work with.
It has been repeated for decades. Textbooks cite other textbooks. Teacher trainers learned the claim from their own trainers. Removing a claim from the field is much slower than adding one.
A teacher who learns to spot this pattern can apply it across many other claims they will encounter: the Mozart effect (listening to Mozart raises IQ), the ten-thousand-hour rule (mastery requires exactly that many hours of practice), the myth that humans use only ten percent of their brains, the various claims about generational differences in attention spans. Each has the same three properties.
An information-literacy rule for teachers
The same rules this chapter applies to news articles and websites apply to education research as well.
A claim should be traceable to a source. If a textbook says “research shows X” without naming the study, treat the claim as unverified until you find the original.
The source should be a primary study, not another textbook. A claim that has been passed through three textbooks without ever citing an experiment is folklore, regardless of how often it appears.
The study should match the claim. Sometimes a real study exists but its findings are weaker than the claim suggests. The Dale Cone of Experience exists, but it does not contain percentages. The fMRI studies of hemispheric lateralisation exist, but they do not show “right-brained” personalities.
A teacher who passes on an unverified claim is producing the next generation’s misinformation. The same act of repetition that gave us the Cobun percentages will produce next decade’s myths. The break in the chain is a teacher who checks before passing on.
It sounds scientific, it is easy to use in a lesson plan, and it has been repeated for decades.
- Sounds scientific: Numbers, brain imagery, or named theorists give authority.
- Easy to use: The claim fits on a slide and gives the teacher a tool.
- Repeated: Textbooks cite textbooks. Removing a claim is slower than adding one.
A teacher who can recognise this pattern can spot education myths before passing them on.
Why this matters for information literacy
The chapter elsewhere covers how to spot fake news in newspapers and on social media. The same skills apply to claims in education. A teacher who teaches their students to verify a news story should verify the claims they themselves repeat in the classroom.
The three examples in this article (Cobun percentages, left/right brain, and fixed learning styles) are not the only ones. They are useful because they appear in most teacher-training programmes and because the evidence against them is solid and easy to check. An educator who looks them up will find detailed refutations within a few minutes.
The wider lesson is simpler. A claim that “research shows X” should always be checkable. If the chain breaks (no source, only secondary citations, no original experiment), the claim is folklore. Treat it accordingly.
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