The research, led by Associate Professor Joshua Cuevas from University of North Georgia, unearthed some concerning findings that have prompted broader questions over the level of pedagogical knowledge and metacognitive awareness of those in education faculties.
The researchers presented more than 100 participants with ten learning concepts, five of which are well-established by research as beneficial to learning, and five which have been discredited and are now classified as myths or misconceptions.
These included multi-tasking, learning styles, the idea of ‘digital natives’, using pure discovery learning, and extrinsic motivation.
The approaches and concepts backed by the evidence included dual coding, retrieval practice and the testing effect, summarisation, direct/explict instruction and spacing.
The findings came as a shock, researchers suggest.
“Surprisingly, College of Education faculty, whose academic discipline is entirely rooted in pedagogy, did not demonstrate better understanding of these research-based, well-established instructional concepts than faculty from other disciplines,” they assert.
Commenting on the results, Paul A Kirschner, Emeritus Professor at Open University of the Netherlands, said while ‘eye opening’ for the research team, he “didn’t expect anything else!”.
“While many faculty could identify effective strategies, a surprising number also believed in debunked myths.
“Perhaps more troubling, faculty were generally unaware of their own ignorance. They felt confident about their teaching expertise even when their beliefs contradicted evidence from cognitive science,” he writes in a post.
According to the expert, the study “adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that higher education urgently needs professional development in this area across all levels of seniority and academic discipline, including schools of education (!!)”.
The data paints a picture of faculty who tend to characterise all pedagogical approaches as being effective, regardless of whether they are myths, misconceptions or are actually effective strategies, the study found.
“This resulted in a dynamic in which faculty correctly classified effective practices as being beneficial to learning but also incorrectly endorsed debunked myths and misconceptions.”
This finding is consistent with recent research showing that educators continue to report holding beliefs in neuromyths despite “a wealth of evidence to the contrary”, researchers note.
Some two-thirds of the faculty believed unguided discovery learning and learning styles were beneficial to student learning, while more than half were incorrect about multitasking and digital natives.
Tellingly, the only misconception that the majority of faculty correctly characterised was the use of extrinsic motivators, with most reporting that rewards systems were ineffective long-term instructional strategies.
Even the most senior faculty showed limited metacognitive awareness of their pedagogical knowledge.
But Kirschner says one of the most striking findings was that education faculty – who specialise in teaching and learning – did not score better than academics in other departments.
“This raises difficult questions about how pedagogical knowledge is taught (or not taught) within schools of education themselves and answers the question as to why many pre-service and in-service teachers know very little about how we process information, learn, and should teach.”
The research also gauged professors’ metacognitive awareness by capturing their confidence in their pedagogical knowledge and then seeing if this aligned with their actual level of knowledge.
The mismatch that was revealed here was “perhaps the most concerning finding”, Kirschner argues.
“…There was no positive correlation between the two. In fact, the relationship was weakly negative.
“In other words, faculty who rated their knowledge of teaching and learning most highly were no more likely (and sometimes less likely) to perform well on the objective test.”
Even the most senior faculty showed limited metacognitive awareness of their pedagogical knowledge.
Kirschner says this is a classic example of what’s deemed the Dunning-Kruger effect: “people with low expertise often overestimate their competence precisely because they lack the knowledge to recognise their own gaps”.
Indeed, almost 88 per cent of faculty believed that their colleagues did not know more about teacher pedagogy than they did.
“While this high self-efficacy may protect their self-esteem (and take it from me, most professors hold themselves in very high esteem), but it also reduces the likelihood they’ll seek out better methods or take part in professional development,” Kirschner warns.
As the researchers flag, those with little knowledge but high levels of confidence are unlikely to change their views and seek ways to better their understanding or performance.
“In this case, such faculty would be unlikely to improve upon or learn about new instructional techniques over time,” they note.
Researchers say this situation may mirror that of K-12 education when public school teachers might receive limited instruction in learning science and ultimately default to relying on anecdotal experiences to guide their practice.
Kirschner says the issues highlighted are likely widespread across higher education, given most of the faculty surveyed had earned their PhDs at 'top-tier' research universities.
“This raises a systemic problem,” he adds.
“If PhD programs don’t prepare future faculty with respect to knowing and understanding how we learn, and if schools of education are also failing to convey accurate pedagogical knowledge, then instructors at all levels may be relying on intuition, tradition, gut-feelings, or hearsay to guide their teaching.”
The solution, at least according to the expert, could be especially tricky to action within education colleges.
“How people learn and how to teach is their core business. If education professors themselves can’t distinguish between myths and truths, they risk passing on this misinformation to generations of K-12 teachers, administrators, and policy makers.
“This not only perpetuates ineffective practices in schools but also damages the credibility of the education profession itself,” he writes.
Based on the findings, researchers say that universities preparing doctoral students for faculty positions should ensure candidates are exposed to accurate learning science information – and that accrediting bodies might need to do more to better ensure that ITE programs are grounded in scientific evidence.
Earlier this year, research led by Professor John Hattie revealed the widely discredited learning styles myth had made a grand comeback in education research and teacher training circles across the world.
Drawing on 17 meta-analyses, Hattie and his University of Melbourne colleague Dr Timothy O’Leary found there has been a clear resurgence in the deep-rooted, yet entirely invalid, theory.
“We were surprised when we started looking at the research and the textbooks, and when we started to go onto various sites of teacher education programs around Australia and the US, to continually still find learning preferences there upfront, without even a question that they may be discredited,” Hattie told EducationHQ.
“That is sad. But to be fair, it’s the reflection on those of us who have more of a passion about learning strategies that we haven’t done our job well enough.”
