The Evidence on Teaching

Explore the evidence

6 of 88 decisions · clear everything

Survives the gold standardIndependent, durable, rigorousThe debunked shelfCheap winsFor parents at homeFamous numbers, deflatedWhere we admit ignoranceThe terrain
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durabilityanyfollow-up≥1yr≥2yr
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The 10,000-hour rule is dead: practice explains ~14% of performance variance, is itself heritable, and identical twins 20,000 hours apart didn't differ. Necessary, insufficient.

mixedconf: highgc: medium
8/836/48connected:Does teaching music produce musica

Deliberate practice and the 10,000-hour rule · deliberate-practice · ages 6–18 · method

Unallocated money is the worst buy in the database; the same dollars as No-Excuses charters buy +0.3–0.4 SD/yr — and the average charter is a precise null.

mixedconf: highgc: low
8/839/48connected:TutoringBackground knowledge and vocabularTeacher qualityMath curriculum choice

School spending, charters, and what school-level choices actually move outcomes · school-structure · ages 4–18 · structure

Matching instruction to 'learning styles' does nothing: real matching experiments return d=.04. The correlational literature IS the myth.

debunkedconf: highgc: low
13/1324/48connected:Brain Gym, Whole Brain Teaching, a

Does matching instruction to a child's "learning style" improve learning? · debunked · ages 4–18 · debunked

Teaching coding teaches coding: the one clean school RCT gives g=0.47-0.68. Which approach you pick barely matters, and almost every effect size rests on an instrument the developers built.

moderate supportconf: mediumgc: low
22/2225/48connected:Does learning to code improve geneTalent and trainability

Does teaching programming actually teach programming — and does the method matter? · computer-science · ages 5–18

Never operationalised well enough to test: no MI-based trial meets even a loose evidential bar. Four decades in, a valid evaluation is still impossible.

insufficientconf: mediumgc: medium
4/412/48connected:Does teaching movement transfer to

Should Gardner's multiple intelligences be used as a basis for instruction? · debunked · ages 4–18 · debunked

Brain Gym, Fast ForWord, coloured overlays, the Mozart effect: tested and failed, or never evidence-based at all. Mozart works exactly as well as any other music.

debunkedconf: mediumgc: low
11/1118/48connected:Does teaching visual art produce aDoes matching instruction to a chiDoes working-memory or brain trainDoes learning music make children

Brain Gym, Whole Brain Teaching, and the smaller classroom brain fads · debunked · ages 4–18 · debunked

The URL is the state — any view you build here is a permalink you can hand to someone mid-argument.