Yearly Archives: 2025

Over on eX/Twitter, a debate has been raging — with all the subtlety and nuance of your typical Twitter debate. The opening salvo was something like:

“Despite what you’ve heard, all people learn the same way.”

You can imagine what happened next. (Free advice: look away.)

Despite all the Twitter mishegas, the underlying question is useful and important — so I’ll do my best to find the greys among the black-vs-white thinking.

Here goes.

Useful…

I suspect that this claim — “all people learn the same way” — got started as a rebuttal to various myths about “meaningful sub-categories of learners.” Alas, most of those proposed sub-categories turn out not to be true or useful.

• No, learning styles theory has not held up well.
• No, the theory of “multiple intelligences” has no useful teaching implications. (And Howard Gardner didn’t claim that it did.)
• No, “left-brain, right-brain” dichotomies don’t give us insights into teaching and learning.
• No, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator doesn’t tell us how to manage classrooms or lesson plans. *
• My British friends tell me about some system to sort students according to different colored hats. (I do not think I’m making this up.)
• (I’ve written about these claims so many times that I’m not going to rehash the evidence here.)

Whenever anyone says “we can usefully divide students into THIS kind of learner and THAT kind of learner,” we should be highly suspicious and ask to see lots of research. (If you want to evaluate that research critically, I can recommend a good book.)

Well, the shortest rebuttal to this sort of claim is: “Those sub-categories don’t exist. ALL PEOPLE LEARN THE SAME WAY.”

Now, any time someone makes an absolute claim about teaching and learning in six words and seven syllables, you know that claim is oversimplified.

But you can understand the temptation to cut off all those untrue claims with a brusque rejoinder. That temptation pulses all the stronger because those untrue claims persist so stubbornly. (In 2025, schools of education are STILL teaching learning styles.)

…and (substantially) True

This claim (“all people…”) isn’t simply useful; it’s also largely accurate.

For example:

At the neuro-biological level — neurons, neurotransmitters, synapses, myelin, etc. — long-term memories form the same way for everyone.

As far as we know…

• men and women
• tall people and short people
• introverts and extroverts
• people who think cilantro tastes like soap, and the rest of us

… everyone forms new neural networks (that is: “learns”) the same way. (I should emphasize that our understanding of this neural process is still VERY basic. We’ve still got SO MUCH to learn.)

When we switch our analysis from neuroscience to psychology, the claim still holds up well.

For instance:

• Everyone uses working memory to combine new information from the environment with concepts and facts stored in long-term memory.
• Everyone depends on a complex of systems that we call “attention” to control the flow of all that information.
• Everyone responds simultaneously with emotion and cognition to any given set of circumstances. (These two systems overlap so much that distinguishing between them creates lots o’ challenges.)

And so forth.

Given all these similarities, cognitive science research really can offer up advice that applies to almost everyone in almost all circumstances.

Yes: we really must manage working memory load so that students can build concepts effectively.

Yes: retrieval practice helps almost all learners consolidate and transfer almost all school learning. (Yes, “retrieval-induced forgetting” is a concern, but can be managed if we strategize effecively.)

Yes: spacing and interleaving enhance learning in most circumstances.

And so on…

Given the broad usefulness and truth of the “we-all-learn-the-same” claim, I certainly understand why it’s tempting to make it — and to defend it.

Exceptions Matter

I’ve written that the claim is “broadly” useful and true; but I don’t think it’s ALWAYS true.

For example:

Students with diagnoseable learning differences really might learn differently.

For instance: dyslexic readers combine distinctive neural networks to get their reading done. Those readers almost certainly benefit from distinct teaching strategies. In other words: by any reasonable definition, they “learn differently.”

Another example:

All learning depends on prior knowledge.

That claim — which sounds like “all people learn the same way” — also suggests that people learn differently.

Let’s imagine that you know A LOT more about opera than I do. (This assumption is almost certainly true.) If you and I both attend an advanced lecture about an obscure opera — “Der Häusliche Krieg” —  your learning will function quite differently from mine. Because you’re an expert and I’m a novice, we will learn differently.

Lots of individual differences will bring teachers to this same point.

Because I teach English, I teach grammar — and MANY of my students simply hate grammar. Their prior experience tells them it’s boring, useless, and impossible to understand.

On the one hand, those enduring cognitive principles listed above (working memory, retrieval practice, etc.) do apply to them. But their emotional response to the content will in fact shape the way they go about learning it.

Core principles of learning apply, and my students’ prior experience means that their learning process might well be different.

Beyond Twitter Rage

Twitter generates lots of extreme debates because complex ideas can’t be boiled down into its trivializing format.

So it’s not surprising that a nuanced understanding of “individual differences within important, broad, and meaningful similarities” doesn’t work in Twitter-ville.

At the same time, I do think our discussions of learning should be able to manage — and to focus on — that nuance.

Our students will learn more when we recognize BOTH the broad cognitive principles that shape instruction, AND the individual variation that will be essential within those principles.

Back in 2019, Paul Kirschner wrote a blog post on this same point. His “digestive system” analogy is VERY helpful.

* A few years back, I emailed the MBTI people to ask for research supporting their claims. They did not send me any. They did, however, sign me up for their newsletter.

You come to Learning and the Brain conferences — and to this blog — because you want research-based insight into teaching and learning.

We sincerely hope that you get lots of those insights, and feel inspired by them.

At the same time, all sorts of work has to go on behind the scenes to make sure such advice has merit. Much of that work seems tedious, but all of it is important.

For instance: definitions.

When researchers explore a particular topic — say, “learning” — they have to measure something — say, “how much someone learned.”

To undertake that measurement, they rely on a definition of the thing to be measured — for example: “getting correct answers on a subsequent test = learning.”

Of course, skeptics might reject that definition: “tests don’t reveal learning. Only real world application reveals learning.”

Because these skeptics have a different definition, they need to measure in a different way. And, of course, they might come to a different conclusion about the value of the teaching practice being measured.

In other words:

If I define learning as “getting answers right on a test,” I might conclude that the Great Watson Teaching Method works.

If you define learning as “using new concepts spontaneously in the real world,” you might conclude that the Great Watson Teaching method is a bust.

The DEFINITION tells researchers what to MEASURE; it thereby guides our ultimate CONCLUSIONS.

A Case in Point

I recently read an article, by Hambrick, Macnamara, and Oswald, about deliberate practice.

Now, if you’ve spent time at a Learning and the Brain conference in the last decade, you’ve heard researcher K. Anders Ericsson and others present on this topic. It means, basically, “practicing with the specific intention of getting better.”

According to Ericsson and others, deliberate practice is THE key to developing expertise in almost any field: sports, music, chess, academics, professional life.

Notice, however, that I included the slippery word ‘basically’ in my definition two sentences ago. I wrote: “it means, basically, ‘practicing with the specific intention of getting better.’ ”

That “basically” means I’m giving a rough definition, not precise one.

But, for the reasons explained above, we shouldn’t use research to give advice without precise definitions.

As Hambrick, Macnamara, and Oswald detail, deliberate practice has a frustratingly flexible definition. For instance:

• Can students create their own deliberate practice regimens? Or do they need professionals/teachers to create them and give feedback?
• Does group/team practice count, or must deliberate practice be individual?

As the authors detail, the answers to those questions change over time.

Even more alarmingly, they seem to change depending on the context. In some cases, Ericsson and his research partners hold up studies as examples of deliberate practice, but say that Hambrick’s team should not include them in meta-analyses evaluating the effectiveness of deliberate practice.

(The back-n-forth here gets very technical.)

Although the specifics of this debate quickly turn mind-numbing, the debate itself points to a troubling conclusion: because we can’t define deliberate practice with much confidence, we should hesitate to make strong research claims about the benefits of deliberate practice.

Because — again — research depends on precise definitions.

Curiouser and Curiouser

The argument above reminded me of another study that I read several years ago. Because that study uses lots of niche-y technical language, I’m going to simplify it a fair bit. But its headlines were clear:

Project-based learning helps students learn; direct instruction does not.

Because the “constructivist” vs. “direct instruction” debate rages so passionately, I was intrigued to find a study making such a strong claim.

One of my first questions will sound familiar: “how, precisely, did the researchers define ‘project-based learning’ and ‘direct instruction.’ ”

This study started with these definitions:

Direct instruction: “lecturing with passive listening.”

Constructivism: “problem-solving opportunities … that provide meaning. Students learn by collaboratively solving authentic, real-life problems, developing explanations and communicating ideas.”

To confirm their hypothesis, the reseachers had one group of biology students (the “constructivism” group) do an experiment where they soaked chicken bones in vinegar to see how flexible the bones became.

The “direct instruction” students copied the names of 206 bones from the chalkboard into their notebooks.

After even this brief description, you might have some strong reactions to this study.

First: OF COURSE students don’t learn much from copying the names of 206 bones. Who seriously thinks that they do? No cognitive scientist I’ve ever met.

Second: no one — and I mean NO ONE — who champions direct instruction would accept the definition as “lecturing with passive listening.”

In other words: we might be excited (or alarmed) to discover research championing PBL over direct instruction. But we shouldn’t use this reseach to make decisions about that choice because it relies on obviously inaccurate definitions.

(If you’re interested in this example — or this study — I’ve written about it extensively in my book, The Goldilocks Map.)

In Brief:

It might seem nerdy to focus so stubbornly on research definitions. If we’re serious about following research-informed guidance for our teaching, we really must.

Hambrick, D. Z., Macnamara, B. N., & Oswald, F. L. (2020). Is the deliberate practice view defensible? A review of evidence and discussion of issues. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1134.