Great Myths of Education and Learning

Great Myths of Psychology

by Jeffrey Holmes

Great Myths of Education and Learning  reviews the scientific research on a number of widely-held misconceptions pertaining to learning and education, including misconceptions regarding student characteristics, how students learn, and the validity of various methods of assessment.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 7, 2015

Reviews

[Anne]

Fascinating look at the (lack of) research underpinning some ideas about education that we take for granted.

[Ietrio]

A typical case of straw man fallacy. The author takes an affirmation he dislikes. He inflates it to absolutes, generalizes up to ridicule and than proceeds slowly and wordy to cut down the straw man himself built, eg "Lecturing is broadly inferior to other teaching methods" or "Rewards always undermine students' intrinsic motivation"

This is a parody of a study, where the "overwhelming" general opinion is built with a mysterious and undocumented web search and the shallow, ignorant opinion of the author is based on name dropping and some limited observations.

[Javier]

I only got to page 74 and it took me forever. I decided it was better to put the book down and not waste my time. The book cites a lot of studies and the subject is interesting but it is the driest read I have encountered this year (and I just went through grad school).

I think in addition, the author's biases are pretty clear despite their citation of numerous studies.

Would not recommend unless you absolutely had to read it.