New research by former teacher Trisha Jha, a senior research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies, has drilled down into what teachers actually believe about the brain and learning, finding four-in-five Australian teachers back the debunked ‘learning styles’ neuromyth, and half believe the widely discredited ‘left-brain versus right-brain learners’ theory.

And despite sweeping reform efforts in NSW, Victoria and some Catholic school systems across the country that are seeking to align teachers’ instruction with the evidence about what works best, Jha has drawn a question mark over how much the workforce as a whole knows about cognitive science and the science of learning.

A marked variance in teachers’ knowledge on this front persists, Jha says.

“Teaching doesn’t have a common shared body of professional knowledge, in the same way that if you spoke to a lawyer who had gone to one university in Australia and you spoke to a lawyer who’d trained at another university … both are going to know more or less the same thing about [tort law], for example”.

This is not the case within the teaching profession, Jha contends.

“You couldn’t say that teachers that have been trained in different parts of the country would necessarily have the same knowledge about some things that are really quite key to the role of teaching.”

While there have been efforts to lift the professional status of teaching, such as the now-outdated Teacher Standards introduced in 2012, Jha says research shows that core terms like ‘evidence-based practice’ still mean very different things from one classroom to the next.

“And that’s what I mean when I say that it’s probably more accurately a semi-profession than it is a true profession.”

In fields like nursing, law or medicine, the close oversight of regulatory and other professional bodies, as well as government, also differs markedly to teaching, Jha says.

“And so teachers, I think, sometimes can push back against this idea that government has anything to do with their profession – when the norm is actually that lots of professions have some role for government...”

Jha’s new paper Knowledge is power: What do teachers believe about learning? aims to capture what is notoriously hard to do: measure exactly what instructional practices teachers are using across the country.

“[School] systems are starting to wake up to the idea that the research is there about what practices are more effective.

“But the problem that we’ve got, is that these reform movements are very well-intentioned, but there’s not really any way built into them to see whether things are changing because it’s very hard to measure teacher practice at scale.

“It’s very hard to say definitively what practices are or aren’t being used. You can’t extract practices cleanly from even something like assessment data.”

Yet there is one thing researchers can do to fill this gap: look at what teachers believe about learning, Jha notes. 

“And one of the most common ways of trying to assess teacher belief is to look at their belief in neuromyths or generally, myths about learning.”

“The message of learning styles is really one of 'every student is different and needs to be taught differently'. And that's impractical and not in line with the evidence,” Trisha Jha says. 

A review of the literature shows that neuromyth belief can be observed in many countries around the world, Jha says.

Significantly, some 79 per cent of Australian teachers subscribed to the learning styles myth, research from 2020 found.

One definition at the heart of the theory is that students each have different modes of learning, and if teaching pedagogy is matched accordingly then their progress can be improved.  

A common model divides these modes into bodily senses – visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and sometimes with reading-writing added too, Jha’s paper flags. 

There are a number of dangers with this theory, the researcher says.

“One is that to the extent that it encourages teachers to spend a lot of time trying to a), understand and b), cater to student learning style, that’s time they’re not spending on effective practices, particularly practices that are in line with cognitive science, which really the key message of cognitive science is that students are more similar than they are different.

“The message of learning styles is really one of ‘every student is different and needs to be taught differently’. And that’s impractical and not in line with the evidence.”

The fact that such a significant number of teachers subscribe to the myth hints at a deeper issue, too, Jha says.

“It suggests that they don’t necessarily have a strong understanding of how learning actually happens in the mind and what cognitive science and educational psychology says about those topics.

“It really raises questions about their ability to effectively discriminate between and ineffective practices, given that teachers are making so many important instructional decisions, both outside the classroom during their planning time, but also inside the classroom as they’re teaching.”

Jha warns that instruction swayed by the myth can trigger several negative effects, including:

  • pigeonholing students by making assumptions about what, or how, they will or won’t learn;
  • wasted resources on ineffective methods and dilution of effective methods; and
  • the creation of unrealistic expectations for teachers among students and families for appropriately individualised/ differentiated instruction.

Initial teacher education is probabably not to blame for the proliferation of this myth either, Jha says.

“The more complex answer is probably that this is a belief that’s background radiation in our society.

“And instead, the role of ITE is to actually dispel that sort of folk wisdom and replace it with accurate, factual, professional knowledge for teachers.

“Because if you think about other professions, no doubt people go into, say, medicine with some misconceptions about how the body functions … but by the end of their medical degree, those misconceptions are well and truly stamped out.

“So that’s what we want ITE to be like. We want ITE to be having that role of inoculating people against myths because they now have the more accurate information to hand.”

When it comes to teachers’ grasp of the science of learning, there is little evidence to suggest they possess comprehensive knowledge of the established science, such as the importance of attention, the limits of working memory, the benefits of low-stakes testing, as well as the ‘cognitive mechanics’ of long-term retention, Jha contends. 

She concludes that teaching cannot achieve full professional status until these fundamental inconsistencies are addressed.

And it’s the job of policymakers to ensure our teachers are equipped with a clear and consistent scientific understanding of how students learn best, she reiterates. 

Jha puts forward three core recommendations in light of her findings:  

  • policymakers must ensure ITE core content requirements are rigorously enforced;
  • the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers must be rewritten, and include knowledge-based self-evaluation; and,
  • systems looking to scale science of learning-informed practices in schools should measure, monitor and develop teachers’ knowledge. 

“We actually do require a tool or a survey or a questionnaire or something to be developed to measure, monitor, and then further develop teacher’s knowledge, in the same way that we would want to assess or evaluate students in order to determine their progress and then make plans to address the gaps in their knowledge,” Jha says.

“And that’s not something that teachers should be afraid of, that’s just something that is in line with how professions function.”