Research on (neuro)myths in education usually brings gloomy news. Teachers widely believe in learning styles, left- and right-brain dominance, brain gym, and other persistent misconceptions. And each new study seems to reinforce the same conclusion: we may know better, but we do not do better.
Recently, however, a study appeared that cautiously goes against the current – or at least suggests that a shift might be underway. Not naively optimistic, but genuinely and carefully hopeful. The new study by Erika Wauthia and colleagues, published in Teaching and Teacher Education, compares how pre-service and in-service teachers in the French-speaking part of Belgium think about neuromyths and evidence-based educational practices.
What sets this study apart is how the researchers ask their questions. Instead of testing agreement with abstract claims (“Students learn better if teaching is adapted to their learning style”), they confront teachers with concrete classroom situations. For instance, a teacher sees that students struggle to summarise a text. What should she do? Adapt instruction to learning styles, or use modelling and guided practice?
This design moves the debate out of theory and into real pedagogical choice.
And that is where the positive news emerges.
On average, both student teachers and experienced teachers favour evidence-based strategies over neuromyth-based practices. Not always, not perfectly, but consistently. They rate modelling and guided practice, spaced practice, differentiation, and metacognition as more effective than learning styles, brain gym, or hemispheric dominance.
That finding matters. A common worry is that neuromyths block the uptake of more effective teaching methods. This study suggests the opposite: many (future) teachers can already recognise what good instruction looks like.
The contrast between novice and experienced teachers is even more striking. In-service teachers, with an average of almost eighteen years in the classroom, endorse classic neuromyths less often than first-year student teachers. This runs counter to earlier studies that found little difference, or sometimes the reverse. The gap is clearest for learning styles, multiple intelligences, and brain gym. At the same time, experienced teachers show stronger confidence in well-established strategies such as modelling, metacognition, and differentiation.
Experience, then, does not simply breed cynicism. It appears to sharpen judgment. In this study, more years in the classroom go together with weaker belief in pseudoscientific explanations and stronger trust in robust didactics.
This result matters because earlier research often suggested that experience made little difference. Some studies even hinted that “more brain knowledge” increased vulnerability to myths. This study paints a more nuanced picture: not knowledge alone, but pedagogical expertise seems to make the difference.
Still, the findings reveal an important tension. Some neuromyths compete directly with genuinely effective strategies. Multiple intelligences, for example, score about as high as differentiation. Brain training is barely distinguished from spaced practice. The landscape remains confusing: concepts sound scientific, overlap in language, and mask fundamentally different views of learning.
The problem is therefore not only that teachers believe the wrong things. It is that the boundary between science and pseudoscience is often deliberately blurred. “Brain training” sounds far more attractive than “retrieval practice with spacing.”
Most importantly, this study challenges the idea that neuromyths stem merely from ignorance. They appear long before teacher education begins. Student teachers bring them from the media, popular psychology, their own school histories, and intuitive theories of learning. That makes neuromyths a structural training issue rather than an individual failing.
At the same time, the study delivers a hopeful message: teachers do learn. Higher levels of education and longer teaching experience go together with less myth-based thinking and greater confidence in evidence-based practices. Professional development works—slowly and imperfectly, but meaningfully.
The implication is not that the problem has disappeared. Some myths remain remarkably resilient. But the image of teachers as helpless victims of brain-based marketing no longer holds. Something is growing: critical judgment, pedagogical insight, and a preference for what works over what merely sounds convincing.