After nearly five weeks of the class writings, it’s time I collected some of your myths and superstitions into one place. In no particular order of importance here are five of the myths and superstitions you’ve written about since the beginning of the semester. I’m not singling anybody out. Many of these have been pronounced by more than one student on more than one occasion.
Myth 1. “The internet is dangerous.”
I left a comment tonight about this and we’ve talked about it before but it’s worth repeating. The internet is not any where near as dangerous as your kids’ ride home on the school bus. There is an immense amount of mis-information being passed around out there. Most of it has to do with the danger of sexual solicitation. One of the early studies reported that one in five kids between 10 and 17 were sexually solicited online. What was NOT revealed in the rush to publication was that over 3/4s of the solitications came from classmates they knew from school.
Yes, kids talk about sex. The internet is the modern equivalent of “out behind the barn.” We need to be as aware of the dangers, risks, and liabilities of the internet today as our parents were in another time. We also need to be aware that the incidence of problem is very low and that in trying to control it and protect children, we may, in fact, be doing more harm than good. Protecting kids “at any cost” means something very, very bad when protection becomes prison.
Here’s a little statistic to consider while you’re pondering the dangers of online solicitation. While 1 in 5 may have been solicited online by the time they’re 17, nine out of ten high school senior girls have been sexually solicited, inappropriately touched, or otherwise assaulted by a classmate while at school. Which is more dangerous? MySpace or Prom Night?
Myth 2. “My students are visual learners.”
No, they’re not. I know you believe it. I know you’ve been taught to pander to superstitious belief. Some of you even categorize yourself one way or another. Sorry. Superstition. There is no credible evidence that a) learning styles exist or b) catering to them effects learning outcomes. On the contrary, some work done by Gavriel Solomon in the 70′s indicates that presenting content in a mode that is perceived by the student to be difficult (that is, not in their favored or familiar mode) results in greater effort on the part of the student and that the greater effort actually does produce improved results.
According to Solomon’s work, if you really think you have visual learners, then don’t give them pictures if you want them to learn something. Make them read it in a book.
Myth 3. “Boys are better at … “
This one came up early in the semester and I produced the refutation. There has been some more gender-learning research done just lately that also debunks the myth. The problem is that the UK studies that are often cited as justification for this are actually valid studies on gender outcomes but the studies themselves show that the differences in educational outcomes are based on differences on the way teachers treat boys and girls. This one isn’t so much myth or superstition as self-fulfilling prophecy.
When you only teach math to boys, and only let girls do literature, you shouldn’t be surprised when the boys do better in math and the girls do better in reading. Ashamed, maybe, but not surprised.
Myth 4. “I’m too old to learn…”
Adults have this funny idea that they should know everything. Anything they don’t know, they’re “too old to learn.” The fastest growing segment of internet adoption according to a Pew study is the population over 55. You are not too old to learn. You just need to get over it. You maybe impatient. I know I am. But you’re not too old. You don’t have to work any harder than anybody else. What you need to allow yourself to do is be a novice and learn. Remember my personal motto:
“Age and treachery will beat youth and speed every time.”
Myth 5. “Online students have to be more self-directed”
This may be the least ‘mythical’ of the five, but it’s still not true. It is true that most online students have a liability that classroom students don’t have. Novice teachers. The majority of online courses are dreadful. It’s not the teachers’ fault. The majority of online teachers have no training, skill, or experience in the use of online tools. They are given a “hammer” in the form of Blackboard or WebCT and told that everything is a nail. It’s no wonder they do so badly.
If online students need to be more self-directed than classroom based students, then it’s to counter the ineptitude of the teachers.
The reality is that any self-directed, motivated student will outperform anybody who isn’t. It does’t matter what the environment is. What matters is the student. When we start comparing students, let’s keep in mind that if a student needs an extraordinary skill to do well in a class, then it’s not the student body that’s the problem. It’s the class. As teachers, you know this, so don’t fall into the novice error of thinking that it’s different online.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:55 PM
1. You’re right, sexual solicitation does occur a lot more out in the real world than the cyber world, but still both are dangerous, despite the percentages. I always have the image of those Dateline specials about online sexual predators with men who are in the mid 30s going to a high school student’s house. Its just a scary thought. However, I agree with you that we shouldn’t live in fear of the Internet. There are so many great things you can find and do on the Internet.
2. You say there is no credible evidence that learning styles exist now, but I think its just a matter of time before someone conducts a study that exposes them to the world. It may be a decade or even more down the road, but it will happen eventually.
3. I have seen boys and girls both excel in all subjects. I’ll have to look into this one a little bit more.
4. I think it is more fear of failure than anything else. I’ve had many non-traditional students tell me they can’t learn Math because they are too old and gave up. But, I think they just need to understand that you can’t be perfect at everything. Adults don’t want to appear weak to the youth, but they could learn a few things from them and vice versa. They just have to get over their pride and take a step to learn something new and master it.
5. This is so true. I am going through a Blackboard training session and a lot of the professors in there have never used Blackboard to teach a online class. I feel that their first couple of courses are going to become the guinea pigs and suffer because the teacher just doesn’t know how to use Blackboard to the fullest. Like you said, its not their fault, but they just need proper training on how to use online tools.
September 21st, 2007 at 6:29 AM
This is an encouragement to me. Not a lot of time to write this morning, but read the post and have to say that I agree with everything. I think fear results in many of the myths we believe in education. The internet is a relatively new environment and we are afraid of what we don’t know. Once a perception is formed, we are masters of evidence in validating that perception.
Just wanted to let you know the post was an encouragement.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:15 AM
“I always have the image of those Dateline specials about online sexual predators with men who are in the mid 30s going to a high school student’s house. Its just a scary thought.”
It’s meant to be a scary thought. The world *is* a dangerous place. But the reality is that the Internet is much safer. More kids get bullied on the school bus every day than get cyberbullied each month. Remember that the Internet, if it were a country, would be the third largest in the world — only very slightly smaller than India. For it to be “as dangerous as” the real world, there would have to be millions of assaults every day.
But nobody seems to want to address the issue of kids being beaten on their way home from school by allocating millions of dollars and taking Congressional action to combat the problem.
It’s an issue of reasoned risk analysis. Americans don’t do it well.
Contrary to popular belief, “protecting kids at any cost” is not a viable option because the logical conclusion to that is “lock them up and keep them from contacting the world.” Once that option has been discarded, the “at any cost” clause gets tossed and we have to admit that we need to “protect kids in a reasonable manner” — and that includes exposing them to some risks in order to help them learn, cope, and grow.
I don’t expect to win this argument, but I don’t lock up my own kids. I think they’ll be better for it.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:24 AM
“You say there is no credible evidence that learning styles exist now, but I think its just a matter of time before someone conducts a study that exposes them to the world. It may be a decade or even more down the road, but it will happen eventually.”
There’s lots of research now. It’s just that none of it is credible and the studies that support the idea are flawed — mostly by confounding the outcomes between delivery modes and encoding. This is the problem with media comparison studies. If you don’t re-code the messages to take advantage of the medium, then the message is flawed. If you do re-code the messages, then the methodology is flawed because you can never be sure if it’s the medium or the re-code that made the difference.
So if I have a “visual learner” lesson — and I want to test to see if the student is an “audio learner” — I have to recode the lesson to be audio and then compare the outcomes between the two. So I find a difference. What’s the conclusion? Either the student has a “learning style” or the recoding made the difference. But there is no valid and reliable way to separate those two.
Learning styles *may* exist, but nobody can prove it and since our classroom practice is supposed to be based on research-based practice, there is absolutely no support for this practice of catering to learning styles except administrative fiat and superstition.
I don’t expect to win this one either, but I’m gonna keep fighting it because the reality is that content should drive delivery mode. Teachers should pick the mode of delivery that best suits the content encoding for a particular context and not for some hypothetical learning style for a particular student.
September 22nd, 2007 at 10:14 AM
[...] I began thinking about this topic after reading Dr. Lowell’s post here dealing with myths that have come to light in my distance education class. Hopefully, in the future, technology may act as a tool to alleviate some of the teachers’ work load so that they can use more of their time to contribute to the refining of how to teach best based upon research instead of just maintaining as we have done for such a long period of time. Posted by madscientist76 Filed in Uncategorized [...]
February 10th, 2008 at 5:41 PM
“On the contrary, some work done by Gavriel Solomon in the 70’s indicates that presenting content in a mode that is perceived by the student to be difficult (that is, not in their favored or familiar mode) results in greater effort on the part of the student and that the greater effort actually does produce improved results.”
In a perfect world, I can see how this would work. The textbooks I have for this semester dont’ have pictures, and it drives me crazy. But it makes me concentrate on it more and work harder. HOWEVER, I am wondering how in the world this would work with adolescents. I can see this happening in my class and the kids just “shutting down” because they have to work at something. How would you motivate them to try? They have a mental block… if it’s hard, then they just give up. It’s learned helplessness. How do you overcome years of reinforcing that behavior?
February 10th, 2008 at 9:15 PM
Works the same way with adults who’ve had even MORE years of re-inforcement. I don’t accept a shut down.
The reality is that engagement is engagement regardless of medium. If they’re shutting down it’s probably not because of the mode of delivery.
Graphics can be powerful tools, but there’s no valid research to support the construct of “learning styles” as a driver of practice. So? If you want there to be graphics, have the students draw them… or have them write a “radio play” .. or something.
Humans are born to learn. My strategy is to gIve them something worth learning and get out of the way.
August 29th, 2008 at 8:22 AM
[...] OLDaily in her recent post and that made me think that it’s probably time to wheel out the Top Five Myths post. I’m not sure what it says that we’re going down this road so early in the class (Note [...]
August 29th, 2008 at 5:06 PM
I must reply to Myth #1. I have always wondered why parents always want to place the blame on something or someone else. The internet is out there… eventually children will discover it no matter how hard some people try to avoid it. Why not teach children about internet safety and expose them to the possbilities. So they don’t miss out on experiences that could change heir lives in a positive way. With any other “danger” (guns, strangers, etc.) we expose our children to the truth and they understand..but if we hide from it and pretend it doesn’t exist, they are bound to discover it on their own, when we are not there to lead them in the right direction.
August 30th, 2008 at 12:06 AM
If there is no credible evidence for learning styles, what about Howard Gardner’s work? What makes something credible, in your estimation.
August 30th, 2008 at 12:47 AM
Gardner’s work in Multiple Intelligences is often confused with Learning Styles.
Gardner’s work is exactly the kind of credible research that the whole learning styles movement lacks.
The Learning Styles school of thought holds that each student has one “preferred” mode of learning and that by catering to that mode, teachers can achieve better outcomes. This is not supported by any credible research that I am aware of. If you have some, send me a link and I’ll check it out.
The Multiple Intelligences school of thought holds that some people have innate talents in specific areas — linguistic, numeric, musical, etc. There is no part of Gardner’s work that suggests one can get better outcomes by warping the content to fit a particular student’s special intelligence.
These are not related ideas.
Credible research is valid and reliable. It uses a consistent methodology and reaches conclusions based on the findings. Ideally it has been replicated.
August 30th, 2008 at 11:32 AM
I think that some of the myths are pretty funny. I do not find the internet to be very dangerous. If kids are taught and supervised on how to use the internet just like they are taught and supervised on how to cross the road or not talk to strangers then it is not a worry. How many parents are going to explain to a child how to cross the road and then not watch them while they are doing it? Hopefully not very many.
I do not think that you can ever be too old to learn. I hear this from people that I work with when it comes to using technology. “I didn’t grow up with computers like you.” ” I hope I don’t get a Promethean Board…it’s just something else that will sit in my room that I can’t use.” I think it’s pure laziness and bad attitudes, not the inability to learn.
I also agree that horrible online teachers are what can cause an online class to be more self-directed. I had one that had to learn how to change things on blackboard and didn’t post anything for 2 1/2 weeks at the beginning of the semester. It went downhill from there. It was a long semester!
As far as the myths if visual learners and boys are better at…I think that students can be successful in all subjects. If teachers believe that boys are better at math then they may cater their lessons for those boys and leave the girls behind without even realizing it. I had a teacher like this in grade school. I teach my lessons using a variety of approaches not so much to appeal to the “visual learner” or the “auditory learner”, but to expose the children to a variety of instruction and keep them from getting bored.
August 30th, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Wow! We have hit them all and this is just the 2nd week of class! I know that I can not blame it all on the media, but they are definitely a factor. When you are flooded with information on the dangers of the internet, studies on learning styles, boys are better at math (which happens to be the opposite in my family), I am too old (I hear from my parents and in-laws all the time), and the self-motivation need in online learners; you begin to inadvertantly believe it. This got me thinking, so I started looking for articles that refute these ideas and it is a lot harder to find. You really have to look through the articles to find opposing comments or research. Could it be that we are being geared toward these beliefs? Definitely food for thought. Just goes to show that you can’t believe everything that you hear (or read). You have to dig a little deeper to get the whole story and then make a well informed decision.
August 30th, 2008 at 2:02 PM
One of the pernicious problems with these myths, and the reason they’ve become so deeply seated, is that there ARE so few counter claims.
The problems arise when people take them at face value and don’t look at the sources.
August 30th, 2008 at 4:20 PM
So, if I were to really do a student a service I would be bold and force him to do his work in a mode that really isn’t his preference, to produce greater effort and better work. I looked into the research a bit today, the difference between gardner and the learning styles school. The Learning Styles School seems to point at Gardner, but then doesnt do a very good job of replicating his results in a classroom setting. There’s not much out there, and there is a difference between learning style and innate gifts. They jump from gardner to other things, but in the end dont seem to have much more than gardner. The only one that really seems to do anything of worth in that regard is Marzano and his nine effective instructional strategies, but even those aren’t technically “Learning Styles”
August 30th, 2008 at 5:51 PM
Well the problem with forcing “him to do his work in a mode that really isn’t his preference” is that you can’t be sure what that preference is to begin with since the jury is still out on whether or not they actually exist. There’s no guarantee that you’d be actually presenting against preference.
The Solomon work was about perceived difficulty in understanding the delivery mode. His findings were a bit shaky, but they DID indicate that when the student believed that the lesson was going to be difficult, they did more processing and that incremental processing yielded better outcomes. Not surprising that more processing yielded better outcomes but interesting that the students’ perception of difficulty — not the lesson, or the content, or any other factor — was enough to trigger additional processing.
Hm… What an interesting idea for a course …
August 31st, 2008 at 2:19 PM
These myths are interesting and very true of what most of us believe. Myth #1 is definitely one to consider. I have to admit that I think the internet can be a dangerous venture, just as many other things today (such as letting your child play outside by themselves). This is why we must teach our children the safety of the internet, just as we teach them about strangers. (I like Ashley’s explanation on this topic). Myth #2 was interesting. I have always been taught about learning styles and have had to plan according to the different learning styles. When thinking about this issue, I do think that it could be possible to teach by Solomon’s thought. If something is difficult for me I do have to try harder and do seem to learn a lot from it. However, it is very hard to think in those terms when I have been taught that children learn in particular ways and we need to teach them according to their particular style. I have heard many times about myth #3. Personally, I do not believe this myth. I think that all children are capable of learning. I also think that if we “teach” our children that they are not good at a particular subject then they will not be good at it. Concerning myth #4–I don’t feel as if we ever get too old to learn. I think that our thinking changes and new technologies that we are not familiar to comes about and causes us to think we can’t learn as well. I think that myth #5 is something I have probably agreed with a little since I have begun to take online classes. It is not that my classes haven’t been well structured. With me, I think it is simply the worry that I am going to miss something of importance–maybe I just worry too much! I am trying to change my frame of mind. I guess I will get more used to things as I have more classes (My first was over summer II).