5 Facts about Education You Won’t Believe Are False

“A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements. If you take too little they’ll have no effect. If you take too much they can kill you. If you take the right amount you’ll get better”

I n every field some basic ideas may eventually be proven wrong. “That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right” says physicist Carl Sagan. “[Understanding] is a self-correcting process. To be accepted new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”

According to new research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development trillions of dollars are spent on education policies around the world but just one in ten are actually evaluated. Our intuition about how we learn is often wrong in serious ways. Half-understood science is misleading and we pay too much attention to information that confirms our beliefs.

“The education sector is awash with popular myths and fads that have little if any grounding in evidence ” says University of Melbourne professor of education John Hattie.