Author Archives: Andrew Watson

Teachers often hear that we should divide students into different groups and teach them differently.

Most famously, learning styles theory (now thoroughly debunked) says that we can think of students as auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learners. It further suggests we should align our instruction with their natural learning style: visual learners get visual instruction, and so forth.

(To be very clear: visual learners should NOT get visual instruction, because visual learners do not exist. We all learn through our senses, and the best one to prioritize depends on the content being learned.)

Honestly, most advice that sounds like “sort-students-and-teach-them-differently” lacks good research support.

At least one obvious exception to this rule demands attention: prior knowledge.

Imagine this hypothetical:

• You and I are taking a class on the Spanish Civil War.
• You know considerably more about Spain, fascism, military history, and Picasso than I do.
• That is: you are, relatively speaking, an “expert.” I am, relative to you, “a novice.”

In this hypothetical, it just makes sense to suspect that we will benefit from different instructional strategies.

This argument goes by the name the “Expertise Reversal Effect.” That is: instructional supports that benefit novices instead interfere with learning for experts.

• I will need A LOT of instructional support, and my learning will suffer if I don’t get it.
• You will probably learn best if you get a fair amount of freedom and intellectual room to knock about on your own.

If you have to sit through all the basics that I find essential (“here is a map of Spain; notice Madrid here, Barcelona here, and Guernica here”), you’ll feel bored and constrained. And you’ll learn less than you would with greater freedom.

So far in this blog post, the expertise reversal effect is a hypothesis. Is it supported by evidence?

Does It Work in Theory?

In a minute, I’ll explore the data. (Preview: yes, this hypothesis has good research support.)

Before we get there, let’s pause to consider WHY the expertise reversal effect might be true.

A recent meta-analysis offers a few explanations; I’ll focus on two of them.

First: cognitive load theory tells us we want to get rid of needless extra mental work (“extraneous cognitive load”) so that students can focus on the essential mental work (“intrinsic cognitive load”).

• In my Spanish Civil War hypothetical, my working memory will be threatened by all the new information. I will learn more if the teacher organizes it and focuses on the essentials.
• You, however, have lots of working-memory headroom — because you store more relevant information in long-term memory than I do — so extra information isn’t always extraneous. It might, in fact, help you figure out new and unforeseen ideas.

Second: self-determination theory tells us that student motivation benefits from their feeling autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

• For me — the Spanish Civil War novice — I will feel more competent if a supportive teacher helps me out, and more related to my teacher as well.
• All that extra support, however, might reduce feelings of autonomy for an expert like you.

Now that we have some reason to think that the expertise reversal effect has a plausible theoretical background, let’s see if we’ve got FACTS to support it.

Crunching the Numbers

You want data; we’ve got data.

More precisely, Tetzlaff, Simonsmeier, Peters, and Brod have data from that recent meta-analysis mentioned above. This team found 60 relevant studies; those studies included 176 relevant effect sizes, and included almost 6000 participants. (“Effect size” means, roughly, what the name suggests: the size of the effect of teaching one way or another.)

In brief:

• Yes: students with a LOW level of prior knowledge learn more from high-support pedagogy than low-support pedagogy. (Stats folks: the d-value here is 0.505.)
• Yes: students with a HIGH level of prior knowledge learn more from low-support pedagogy than high-support pedagogy. (D-value: -0.428.)

Those d-values are traditionally in the “medium size” range. I speak d-value, and I pay attention to numbers that size.

The expertise reversal effect gets bigger as students get older. The effect was strongest in higher ed; we don’t honestly have lots of studies in primary school.

It also varies somewhat depending on academic discipline. (There’s less of an effect in language and humanities.) But — roughly speaking — we can say that “beginners benefit from higher-structure pedagogy; experts benefit from lower-structure pedagogy.”

Not So Fast

But wait just a minute. Why did I slip the phrase “roughly speaking” into that previous sentence? We’ve got all those data — shouldn’t we just do what they say?

Let me focus on one of several reasons.

Sometimes research considers variables that are either one thing or the other:

• The switch is either on or off.
• The school is either in Hawai’i or in Delaware.
• The subject being studied is either chemistry or Latin.

At other times, research considers variables that fall along a continuum.

• The research might sort teachers into a “cheerful” group and a “glum” group. But not all “cheerful” teachers are equally cheerful. Heck, on some days, they might be glum.
• Research might describe playground behavior as “cooperative” or “competitive,” but not all cooperation is equally cooperative. Heck, some cooperation is a kind of competition. (From the little I’ve seen of it, the entire Survivor franchise depends on competitive cooperation.)

And so forth.

Notice that — in my “roughly speaking” summary — ALL OF THE KEY TERMS are continuous.

• There is no exact line separating LOW prior knowledge from HIGH prior knowledge. Prior knowledge exists on a continuum.
• There is no exact line separating LOW-structure pedagogy from HIGH-structure pedagogy. Pedagogy exists on a continuum of support.

For that reason, classroom teachers can’t simply “do what the research says.”

I might say to myself:

“My 1st period class has slightly more prior knowledge than my 3rd period class. For that reason, my instruction 3rd period should be somewhat higher structure than during 1st period. But they’re both novice groups compared to my advanced class 5th period, which should have lower-structure than both…”

These delicate — even hunchy — internal monologues can be guided by the expertise reversal effect. But that effect and this meta-analysis don’t translate into step-by-step rules that teachers can follow.

Now, some signs will be obvious.

• If my students can’t define basic terms — “what’s a noun again?” — they’re clearly novices.
• If they spontaneously combine ideas in ways we haven’t discussed — “I want to strengthen this sentence by using the participle as a gerund” — they’re well into expert territory.

For this reason, I should begin classes and units with questions designed to identify my students’ place along the low-to-high prior knowledge contiuum. And, I should be reasonable about the fuzzy limitations of that placement.

In Sum

This meta-analysis suggests that the expertise reversal effect is a thing.

When possible, teachers should provide beginners with relatively more pedagogical structure, and experts relatively less.

Part of our own developing expertise will be adapting — lesson-plan by lesson-plan, class by class, unit by unit — to those subtle gradations.

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119.

Tetzlaff, L., Simonsmeier, B., Peters, T., & Brod, G. (2025). A cornerstone of adaptivity–A meta-analysis of the expertise reversal effect. Learning and Instruction, 98, 102142.

If you’ve watched educational videos lately, you’ve probably noticed that captions are EVERYWHERE. In fact, caption technology has evolved in recent months so that captions now highlight individual words as spoken, rather than present entire phrases or sentences one after another. But what if this well-intentioned practice is actually interfering with learning?

Given their prevalence, I’ve just assumed that we have good reasons to include captions. At the same time, people do LOTS of things that contradict evidence — so perhaps the time has come to investigate my assumption.

I started by casting a wide net. I went to Google Scholar and put in “captions and subtitles.” The first hit sounded a confident tone: “Video Captions Benefit Everyone.”

To be sure we understand the confidence of this study, let’s read the first two sentences:

Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos (children, adolescents, college students, and adults).

More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video.

If in fact captions promote understanding, focus, and recall for practically everyone who watches, we’ve got as close to a slam dunk as I can imagine.

Let’s check to be sure…

Focus on Definitions

As is so often the case, we should start by defining our terms, questions, and expectations clearly.

Because this blog focuses on education, I’m interested captioned videos used to help K-12 students learn stuff. That is: research into captions when people watch movies for fun don’t fit my question.

For the time being, I’m also going to focus on same-language captions: a video where the narrator speaks in English and the captions show the narrated words in English. Of course, a student who speaks Spanish at home might benefit from seeing Spanish subtitles for a video in English, but that’s a very different research questions.

For similar reasons, I’ll start by focusing on research into neurotypical students. I can imagine that students with particular diagnoses might — as part of their learning profile — have different requirements than their peers. It’s probably helpful to start by understanding how most people learn, and then adapt that practice as needed for individuals.

(To be clear: we will ultimately be interested in different-language captions, and in the potential benefits for different categories of learners. To start with, I simply want the most basic question answered.)

I’d like to find several rigorously designed studies all pointing in the same direction. I want sample sizes that rise above the trivial; I’d like plausible control groups; I’d like objective measures — not mere self-report. And so forth. After all, I shouldn’t tell you that captions are (or aren’t) a reseach-informed instructional practice if all the research I’m citing doesn’t meet basic standards.

Finally, if I’m really lucky, I’d like to have both research and theoretical frameworks pointing in the same direction.

Now that we’ve got some parameters in place, let’s return to that study and see what we find.

Working the Steps

I spend lots of my time double-checking (or triple-checking) “research-based” claims, so I’ve got a process to follow.

I won’t walk you through each step of the journey — it took a few hours — but the results are impressively clear.

First:

We have essentially no research that fits the criteria above.

No, really: we don’t have a pool of persuasive research giving us an answer one way or another.

That “Captions Benefit Everyone” study focuses on foreign-language captions, or on non-neurotypical learners, or on college students, or on self-report. LOTS of self-report.

I should explain, by the way, why self-report data don’t persuade most researchers: people are REALLY bad at knowing what helps us learn. College students might THINK they pay more attention, or remember better, when they see vids with captions. But unless we actually measure their attention, understanding, or learning, we shouldn’t actually make claims about attention, understanding, or learning.

When I asked Elicit.com to research this question, I found the same problem. The studies it summarized focused almost entirely on Chinese students watching videos with English captions. That research helps answer an important question — but it’s not the question I asked.

Second:

The study that comes the closest to answering my question suggests that captions might interfere with reading for not-at-risk students.

This study suggests that captions DO help at-risk 2nd and 3rd graders recognize words. But the not-at-risk students recognized fewer words with the captions on. Obviously we’re glad to have strategies to help at-risk students. But that’s not the big-picture question we started with.

(I’m honestly puzzled that captions benefit struggling readers…but because I don’t teach reading I’m not going to have a strong opinion here.)

Let’s Talk Theory

I noted above that I’d like to have both well-done empirical research AND a theoretical framework to answer my question.

Richard Meyer’s “redundancy principle” tells us that presenting the same information both verbally and visually at the same time increases cognitive load.

In his excellent book Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory in Action, Oliver Lovell gives a common example: conference presentations.

It’s a common practice for presenters to provide written information on their slides and then to read out that information during the presentation. To conventional audiences, this represents the presentation of redundant information. Only one presentation format is needed, either the written words, or the spoken words. (62)

That example sounds A LOT like captions, no?

A full explanation of the redundancy principle requires a blog post of its own. The short version goes like this:

• Because I read faster than others speak, I’m constantly reading ahead of the speaker’s current point in the text. I must therefore stop and go back multiple times. All this back-n-forth adds to my cognitive muddle.
• With captions, I have to focus either on the WORDS that the captions present or the IMAGES in the video — and that back-n-forth also adds to the cognitive work I have to do.

For the dual-coding folks reading this post, remember: dual coding advocates that words and images complement one another — not that they represent precisely the same information.

Putting It All Together

1. I found NO research with objective measures of neurotypical K-12 learners reading same-language captions. The one study that comes closest hints — but does not say — that captions might interfere with word recognition for early readers.
2. Meyer’s redundancy principle gives us a good reason to be VERY skeptical of claims saying that “captions benefit everyone.”
3. If you find research that matches the criteria above, please send it my way. I always want to keep this blog as up-to-date an accurate as possible.

In the meanwhile, here are my suggestions:

a) Be wary of claims that captions benefit most learners — especially neurotypical K-12 learners reading same-language captions.

b) Be ESPECIALLY cautious if the video includes cognitively complicated material — where cognitive load is already high.

c) Be aware of legal requirements, especially for students with diagnosed learning differences. Also, I myself would be more open to the benefits of captions for students watching videos in languages they don’t speak fluently. I haven’t done a deep dive into that research pool, but common sense suggests such captions could have real benefits.

Gernsbacher M. A. (2015). Video Captions Benefit Everyone. Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences, 2(1), 195–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732215602130

Linebarger, D., Piotrowski, J. T., & Greenwood, C. R. (2010). On‐screen print: the role of captions as a supplemental literacy tool. Journal of Research in Reading, 33(2), 148-167.

Lovell, O., & Sherrington, T. (2020). Sweller’s cognitive load theory in action. John Catt.

Few topics lead to greater despair at Learning and the Brain conferences than “neuromyths.” Teachers cling to these “brain-based” beliefs despite the absence of research supporting them — and despite all the zealous debunking from our experts.

No:

• Learning Styles are not a thing;
• Left-brain/right-brain distinctions have no teaching implications;
• Fidget spinners don’t help students attend or learn;
• Power poses don’t matter;
• “Enriched environments” don’t benefit students;
• Brain gym doesn’t help…

This list could go on at wearying length.

Sadly, I’ve got even worse news. Belief in these myths extends across the globe, and persists despite all our best efforts to stamp them out. One recent article reports that 89.1% of teachers believe in the visual/auditory/kinesthetic learning style myth. (Please picture the ‘gnashing teeth’ emoji here.)

For all these reasons, scholars in this field search for the best ways to revise teachers’ misunderstandings. The article I just mentioned — published last year in Mind, Brain, and Education — offers a detailed narrative looking at different strategies and their (depressingly small) effects.

Rather than review those strategies, I want to back up a big step and consider a crucial problem in these efforts. I think that MANY efforts won’t work because we’re thinking about the problem the wrong way. Our misunderstanding begins with the word itself: “neuromyths.”

It’s All Stuff In The Head

The field of “Mind, Brain, and Education” brings together at least three different disciplines:

1. Mind = the study of mental function. We call that “psychology.”
2. Brain = the study of the physical object of the brain (and nervous system). We call that “neuroscience.”
3. Education = you know, teaching and schools and chalk dust.

The difference between mind and brain — between “psychology” and “neuroscience” — might seem too technical to merit our attention. After all, they’re both ways of studying “stuff going on inside the head.”

But we really must focus on that difference. If we don’t, the resulting confusion and mis-direction make our work less effective.

Let’s start with neuroscience: a kind of biology. If you’re looking at..

• brain regions — like the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex, or
• neurons, or
• myelin, or
• neurotransmitters…

…you’re talking neuroscience.

While neuroscience studies biological objects, psychology studies mental function. If you’re studying…

• attention, or
• motivation, or
• memory, or
• anxiety, or

…you’re talking psychology.

For most of the 20th century, these fields regarded each other with deep suspicion, and would be surprised that anyone would have trouble telling them apart. But in truth, the distinction can feel tricky to non-experts.

One way to distinguish between them is to ask: “what is the researcher doing to study the question?”

• If you can tap it with a scalpel or look at it with a microscope or an fMRI gizmo, it’s neuroscience.
• If you give students a test to see how much they remembered, or a questionnaire to see whether or not they paid attention, that’s psychology.

(I should be clear: I’m answering a complicated question with a few hundred words. I’m trying not to oversimplify, but reasonable people would want me to rephrase some of those sentences. If you want a deeper dive, check out this podcast where I discuss the question with Zach Groshell and Kris Simmers.)

Why the Difference Matters

Here’s a plausible logical chain:

1. Neuromyths result from a misunderstanding of neuroscience. (The clue is right there in the name!)
2. Therefore, we can reduce belief in neuromyths by teaching people accurate neuroscience.

But this logical chain starts with a flaw. Most neuromyths aren’t primarily neuroscience claims. Most “neuromyths” are primarily psychology claims.

For example: claims about “learning styles” rest fundamentally on claims about mental behavior. “Visual learners” learn one way; “auditory learners” learn another way.

In this claim, “learning” is a mental behavior — it’s psychology — because I should test it using psychological methods. For instance, I would “align instruction with students’ learning style” and see how much more they learn. (To be clear: students don’t learn any more. The claim is false. It’s a myth.)

When challenged, champions of learning styles theory might try to defend their claim with neuroscience terminology. But the theory itself isn’t about the electrical or chemical behavior of neurons; it’s fundamentally about the mental behavior of learners.

In brief, learning styles theory isn’t a neuromyth. If anything, it’s a pschyo-myth.

To keep this blog post relatively short, I won’t go through each “neuromyth” claim to demonstrate that it’s a “psychomyth.” But almost all of them are — including the ones that have the word “brain” in them. (I’m looking at you, “left-brain/right-brain” and “brain gym.”)

Why does this difference matter?

Because: we can’t debunk “neuromyths” by teaching neuroscience. The myths don’t rest on neuroscience.

Although well-meaning, these neuroscience education efforts almost certainly won’t succeed.

Opportunity Costs Matter

At this moment, I can imagine a reasonable-sounding objection: “teachers benefit from learning neuroscience even if that knowledge doesn’t change their neuromyths.”

I have three concerns with that response:

First: I’m skeptical that neuroscience knowledge does benefit teachers. I can’t think of any classroom teaching advice that derives from neuroscience, not psychology.

Second: if the goal is to reduce belief in neuromyths, let’s choose a strategy that actually reduces teachers beliefs in neuromyths.

Third: we’re talking an ENORMOUS amount of time here.

• In one PD intervention — described as “very brief” — teachers spent a “short” fifteen hours learning neuroscience.
• Another study looked at the effect of neuroscience courses in schools of education. A full term course — over forty hours — “showed no effect on beliefs in neuromyths.”

As a PD presenter in schools, I’m lucky to get three hours with teachers. The idea that we’ll devote fifteen hours — or forty hours — to an approach that probably doesn’t work seems…unwise.

Uplifting Conclusion

I’d love to offer one. Here’s the best I can do:

If you have a more effective strategy, please let me know!

Rousseau, L. (2024). Dispelling Educational Neuromyths: A Review of In‐Service Teacher Professional Development Interventions. Mind, Brain, and Education, 18(3), 270-287.

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119.

The US Department of Education recently released a video on eX/Twitter encouraging the use of “squishy toys” to calm students. In the video, an earnest school psychologist says that such toys help his students focus without distracting others.

The uproar that followed — “they’re vital!” vs. “they’re dreadful” — followed the usual eX/Twitter pattern.

Of course, here on this blog we’re interested in narrower questions than “are squishy toys good or bad?” We want to know:

• do we have a consistent body of research giving us useful guidance on using squishy toys in K-12 classrooms?
• if they have benefits, what are the boundary conditions? That is: perhaps they help some students but not others?
• what kind of benefits are we talking about here? At a minimum, I think we want students to focus better and learn more. In other words: if the benefit is “students like ’em,” that’s not a good enough reason to consider squishy toys a research-supported classroom tool.

So, what happens when we start investigating those questions?

The Home Team Looks Worried

When people offer teachers “research-based” advice, we’d like them to cite the research. That’s both common courtesy and common sense.

Sadly, the video itself — and the tweet that contains it — doesn’t provide a citation or link to any research. The school psychologist, as far as I can tell, is making an experienced-based claim, not a research-based claim.

Of course, teachers and school leaders rely on experience all the time, so this approach isn’t obviously ridiculous. At the same time, given that we can research a question like this, it’s surprising that the initial advice doesn’t take advantage of the research that is (almost certainly) out there.

So, what happens when we go looking for the research supporting the use of squishy toys?

Let’s imagine the following conversation:

ANDREW: You should take this medecine; research says so.

YOU: Tell me about this research.

ANDREW: It was done by a doctor who bleeds his patients to cure their fevers.

YOU: Wait…he bleeds his patients? That’s medical malpractice…it’s been out-of-date for decades, even centuries!

ANDREW: So what’s your point?

At this point, I suspect, you’d stop taking my medical advice.

When I asked Elicit.com to find research about using squishy toys in K-12 classrooms, the only relevant study it located notes that:

“Kinesthetic learners used the stress balls more consistently and their attention spans increased more when compared to other learners.”

This observation would be interesting if “kinesthetic learners” existed, and if we haven’t known for decades that learning styles theory isn’t supported by evidence. At a mimimum, we shouldn’t trust this study’s conclusions that squishy toys benefitted students.

To be clear, the study includes other key limitations:

• It’s a self-described pilot study, including 29 students.
• It mostly measures self-reported variables — not an especially persuasive foundation for teaching advice.

It’s not looking good for Team Squishy.

Don’t Stop Yet

I’ve tried two steps to verify the squishy-toy claim:

1. Check with the person who made the recommendation.
2. Look on Elicit.com.

Although those attempts didn’t pan out, we’ve still got several other avenues to pursue.

I checked with Scite.ai; it couldn’t even find that kinesthetes-love-squishy-toys study. (It’s REALLY rare for Scite.ai to come up short this way.)

I next went to ConnectedPapers.com to look for other studies surrounding that study; here’s the image it generated. (The study I started with is in the purple circle.)

So, I started poking around at the studies surrounding the first one. Of course, I didn’t look at them all — life is short. But, here’s what I found with some random checks:

• “Fidget spinners negatively influence young children with ADHD’s attentional functioning, even in the context of an evidence-based classroom intervention.” (This from the Graziano study right in the middle.) ¹
• “Due to a recent surge in popularity, fidget spinners and other self-regulatory occupational therapy toys have yet to be subjected to rigorous scientific research. Thus, their alleged benefits remain scientifically unfounded. Paediatricians should be aware of potential choking hazards with this new fad, and inform parents that peer-reviewed studies do not support the beneficial claims.” ²
• “Student performance was lower when they were allowed to use fidget spinners than when the fidget spinner was removed. The current study suggests that fidget spinners may cause a deficit in student performance. However, the effect of fidget spinners may actually lessen as the students habituate to the objects.” ³
• “Using a fidget spinner was associated with increased reports of attentional lapses, diminished judgments of learning, and impaired performance on a memory test for the material covered in the video. The adverse effect on learning was observed regardless of whether the use of fidget spinners was manipulated between‐subjects (Experiment 1) or within‐subjects (Experiment 2), and was observed even when the sample and analysis were limited to participants who came into the study with neutral or positive views on the use of fidget spinners.” ⁴

I could go on. From this quick investigation, I notice two important patterns.

First:

No one seems to be researching stress balls (a.k.a. “squishy toys”) at all. The ONLY study I found on that topic is the pilot study with the kinesthetic learners.

Second:

Scholars ARE studying fidget spinners … and not finding any good news. Whether you’re teaching K-12 students or college students, neurotypical students or students with ADHD, kinesthetic learners or students who really exist: none of them receives classroom benefits from a fidget spinner.

Third:

To be on the safe side, I looked for meta-analyses — both ones that focus on squishy toys, and ones focusing on fidget spinners.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t find ANY looking at squishy toys. And — equally unsurprisingly — I the fidget-toy meta-analyses sounded consistently discouraging notes. (For example, this one.)

My Current Conclusion

When I do this kind of research deep dive, I usually find conflicting evidence. As a result, I typically write a tentative, partly-yes and partly-no summary: “strategy X seems to work well with these students studying these things, but we don’t have good research outside that small group.” Or something like that.

In this unusual case, the research picture seems unambiguous to me:

1. We have NO reliable research showing that squishy toys benefit (or harm) students.
2. We have LOTS of research showing that fidget spinners provide few benefits, and can indeed interfere with learning.

If you have research that contradicts these conclusions, please let me know.

1. Graziano, P. A., Garcia, A. M., & Landis, T. D. (2020). To fidget or not to fidget, that is the question: A systematic classroom evaluation of fidget spinners among young children with ADHD. Journal of attention disorders, 24(1), 163-171. ↩︎
2. Schecter, R. A., Shah, J., Fruitman, K., & Milanaik, R. L. (2017). Fidget spinners: Purported benefits, adverse effects and accepted alternatives. Current opinion in pediatrics, 29(5), 616-618. ↩︎
3. Hulac, D. M., Aspiranti, K., Kriescher, S., Briesch, A. M., & Athanasiou, M. (2021). A multisite study of the effect of fidget spinners on academic performance. Contemporary School Psychology, 25, 582-588. ↩︎
4. Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2020). Putting a negative spin on it: Using a fidget spinner can impair memory for a video lecture. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 34(1), 277-284. ↩︎