Lately I’ve seen how mythbusting can be used as a tool to push your own opinion. I don’t like this, so let’s call it a myth. As co-author of a book in which Paul, Casper and myself try to debunk edumyths, I want to explain how we tried not to make this mistake.

First of all we use 3 categories to discuss the different items in our book:

1. Myth
   The statement is untrue or almost completely untrue or there is no proof.
2. Nuanced
   The theme is still a subject of discussion and science has not yet provided conclusive evidence.
3. Unproven
   We and we emphasize “we” found no scientific evidence during the writing of this book

A second thing we did is that we checked each others texts for possible biases. The three of us have opinions of our own, but our book is not about us. E.g. we have a famous scientist in our team who co-wrote a very important article about discovery learning. Still, we labelled it nuanced as this is still a discussion in educational sciences.

To me this is very important. Some of the myths we debunked actually did hurt for myself, but Urban Myths is not about me or us.

At first I didn’t want to write this post, because I know Christian Bokhove will discuss this also at length in his ResearchED-talk next week. Still I did because I saw the mythbusting-technique being used once to often to try to convince other people of their own idea. I do recommend you attend ResearchED and more specific Christian’s talk.