Study Myths That Students Should Stop Believing

The learning styles hypothesis — often called the meshing hypothesis — proposes that students learn better when taught in their preferred modality. It is one of the most widely believed ideas in education. However, researchers including Pashler and colleagues (2008) reviewed the available evidence and concluded that there is no reliable scientific support for the idea that tailoring instruction to individual style improves learning. What does matter is matching the method to the content: diagrams help explain spatial concepts for nearly everyone; verbal explanation helps with sequential reasoning. Students benefit from using multiple formats rather than limiting themselves to one.

Highlighting feels productive because it involves active physical engagement with a text, but cognitive science research — including Dunlosky et al.'s widely cited 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest — classifies both highlighting and rereading as low-utility strategies. They do not require the brain to retrieve, apply, or reorganize information, which are the processes that build durable memory. A more effective alternative is the retrieval practice technique: after reading a section, close the book and write down everything you can remember. This forces active recall and dramatically strengthens retention compared to passive review. For a plain-language explanation of retrieval practice and related terms, see Study Terms Every Student Should Know.

Cramming can feel effective because information is fresh immediately after an all-night session. The problem is the spacing effect: memory researchers have established across hundreds of studies that distributing practice across multiple sessions — with gaps between them — produces dramatically better long-term retention than the same total hours crammed into one sitting. This is sometimes called distributed practice or spaced repetition. The practical implication: a student who studies for 30 minutes on four separate days will typically retain more than one who studies for two hours the night before, even though the total time is similar. Build a study schedule that revisits material at increasing intervals.

Many students avoid self-quizzing until they feel certain they know the material, reasoning that testing before mastery is pointless. Research on the testing effect (also called the retrieval practice effect) shows the opposite: the act of attempting to retrieve information — even unsuccessfully — strengthens the memory trace and identifies gaps more reliably than rereading. Low-stakes self-testing tools such as flashcards, practice problems, and covering your notes and reciting key points all apply this principle. Getting answers wrong during practice is not a failure; it is information about where to focus next.

The brain does not truly perform two cognitive tasks simultaneously — it switches rapidly between them, incurring a cost called switch cost each time. Research published in journals including the Journal of Experimental Psychology has shown that students who study with distracting media open take longer to complete tasks, remember less, and make more errors. Even brief interruptions (a notification glance) fragment the focused attention that encoding new information requires. A practical approach: study in blocks with all notifications off, then take a deliberate short break before checking devices. For a broader look at what the research says actually works, see Principles of Effective Studying That Hold Across Any Subject.

A fixed-ability belief — sometimes called a fixed mindset — can cause students to avoid challenge, give up after setbacks, and interpret struggle as evidence of permanent limitation. Decades of research in developmental psychology suggest that intellectual skills develop through deliberate practice and effective strategies. Struggle during learning is not a sign of inadequacy; it is often evidence that meaningful learning is occurring. Students who reframe difficulty as a normal part of growth tend to persist longer and achieve more. This doesn't mean every subject comes equally easily to everyone, but it does mean that the ceiling for most learners is rarely as low as they assume.