The DOI matches its Crossref record; 14 of the 14 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education
Open accessAbstract
This article takes a critical look at three pervasive urban legends in education about the nature of learners, learning, and teaching and looks at what educational and psychological research has to say about them. The three legends can be seen as variations on one central theme, namely, that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning. The first legend is one of learners as digital natives who form a generation of students knowing by nature how to learn from new media, and for whom “old” media and methods used in teaching/learning no longer work. The second legend is the widespread belief that learners have specific learning styles and that education should be individualized to the extent that the pedagogy of teaching/learning is matched to the preferred style of the learner. The final legend is that learners ought to be seen as self-educators who should be given maximum control over what they are learning and their learning trajectory. It concludes with a possible reason why these legends have taken hold, are so pervasive, and are so difficult to eradicate.
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Cites
Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006) · Educational Psychologist · doi:10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1 · Cited by 7,776 · cited 1×
“This was demonstrated for the learning styles hypothesis but also, for example, by Lalley and Miller (2007) with respect to the learning pyramid and by Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) with respect to minimal guidance during instruction.”
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van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Sweller, J. (2005) · Educational Psychology Review · doi:10.1007/s10648-005-3951-0 · Cited by 2,206
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Learning Styles and Pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review
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Cited by
The promise and challenges of generative AI in education
Giannakos, M., Azevedo, R., Brusilovsky, P., Cukurova, M., Dimitriadis, Y., Hernandez-Leo, D., Järvelä, S., Mavrikis, M., & Rienties, B. (2025) · Behaviour & Information Technology · doi:10.1080/0144929x.2024.2394886 · Cited by 543
Stop propagating the learning styles myth
Kirschner, P. A. (2017) · Computers & Education · doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2016.12.006 · Cited by 459
Self-citationChoi, H.-H., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. (2014) · Educational Psychology Review · doi:10.1007/s10648-014-9262-6 · Cited by 413
Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019) · Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education · doi:10.1177/016146811912101102 · Cited by 394
Järvelä, S., Kirschner, P. A., Panadero, E., Malmberg, J., Phielix, C., Jaspers, J., Koivuniemi, M., & Järvenoja, H. (2015) · Educational Technology Research and Development · doi:10.1007/s11423-014-9358-1 · Cited by 373
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Metadata
- Authors
- Kirschner, P. A., & van Merriënboer, J. J. G.
- Venue
- Educational Psychologist
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2013-07
- Volume
- 48
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 169-183
- ISSN
- 0046-1520 (ISSN-L)
- 1532-6985
- OpenAlex
- W2130005184
- Cited by
- 655
- References
- 14
- FWCI
- 84.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
