The Evidence on Teaching

Explore the evidence

7 of 88 decisions · clear everything

Survives the gold standardIndependent, durable, rigorousThe debunked shelfCheap winsFor parents at homeFamous numbers, deflatedWhere we admit ignoranceThe terrain
evidencealldrop DA–BA only
evaluatoranyno dev-ledindependent
durabilityanyfollow-up≥1yr≥2yr
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Your situation · from the applicability layer — absence means “not yet assessed,” never “doesn’t apply”
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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

Feedback on the task helps modestly; feedback on the person backfires — a stable third of studies reverse. The famous 0.4–0.7 number has no computed source.

mixedconf: highgc: low
18/1812/48connected:Retrieval practice (the testing efDoes teaching music produce musicaPlacement and mastery diagnosis

Feedback and formative assessment · feedback · ages 5–18 · method

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

A missed day costs little (~0.005 SD); interventions reliably buy days back cheaply, but nobody has shown the recovered days move achievement.

mixedconf: mediumgc: medium
14/1439/48

Chronic absenteeism — does raising attendance raise achievement? · time · ages 4–18 · input

Taking time away hurts measurably; adding it back buys almost nothing. The return per hour is ~0.02-0.03 SD, concave, and near zero in disorderly classrooms.

mixedconf: mediumgc: low
23/2338/48

Length of the school day and year, time-on-task, extended time, and summer · time · ages 4–18 · structure

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.