Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 14 June 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Educational Psychologist
- Vol. 48 (3), 169-183
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2013.804395
Abstract
This article takes a critical look at three pervasive urban legends in education about the nature of learners, learning, and teaching and looks at what educational and psychological research has to say about them. The three legends can be seen as variations on one central theme, namely, that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning. The first legend is one of learners as digital natives who form a generation of students knowing by nature how to learn from new media, and for whom “old” media and methods used in teaching/learning no longer work. The second legend is the widespread belief that learners have specific learning styles and that education should be individualized to the extent that the pedagogy of teaching/learning is matched to the preferred style of the learner. The final legend is that learners ought to be seen as self-educators who should be given maximum control over what they are learning and their learning trajectory. It concludes with a possible reason why these legends have taken hold, are so pervasive, and are so difficult to eradicate.Keywords
This publication has 80 references indexed in Scilit:
- A Unified attentional bottleneck in the human brainProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011
- Executive Control Deficits as a Prodrome to Falls in Healthy Older Adults: A Prospective Study Linking Thinking, Walking, and FallingThe Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 2010
- Cognitive control in media multitaskersProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Expertise-related differences in conceptual and ontological knowledge in the legal domainThe European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2008
- Information-problem solving: A review of problems students encounter and instructional solutionsComputers in Human Behavior, 2008
- Lack of interaction between sensing–intuitive learning styles and problem-first versus information-first instruction: a randomized crossover trialAdvances in Health Sciences Education, 2007
- Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-Resolved fMRINeuron, 2006
- Cognitive Load Theory and Complex Learning: Recent Developments and Future DirectionsEducational Psychology Review, 2005
- Exploring novice users' training needs in searching information on the WWWJournal of Computer Assisted Learning, 2000
- Self-regulation failure: An overviewPsychological Inquiry, 1995