Which Trendy Teaching Techniques Actually Work?

People who prefer visual learning will learn better from visualizations, right? And kids do better in school if their parents monitor, check, and assist with their homework, right?

Those ideas seem intuitively plausible—nay, obvious! Indeed, I probably believed them until I looked for controlled studies, experiments, and meta-analyses. This evidence can be stunning: many tests of trendy teaching techniques have had discouraging results—and some teaching methods may even hurt student learning!

Given how many of these teaching ideas remain popular, it is worth reflecting on some of the evidence. So, I will point you to a dozen educational techniques that have not been found to produce expected benefits and a handful of alternatives that have been found to yield some benefit.

1. Place Your Bets

If you test your knowledge of educational methods before reading further, you may be more likely to remember what you learn below—a.k.a. the testing effect (Adesope et al. 2017). If that's right, then you might want to jot down one educational method that you expect to be effective and one educational method that you expect to be ineffective.

Before reading this, I expected _____________ to be effective and ______________ to be ineffective. Read this post to find out if I was wrong.

Those who are brave and humble can share their bets when posting this article on social media. To avoid hindsight bias, you would need to post your bet before reading the rest of the article, of course.

2. Popular But Not Well Supported Methods

I have been adding controlled teaching studies, experiments, and meta-analyses to my digital library for years. However, when I recently searched through them, I was surprised by how many trendy teaching techniques were not detectably effective. Worse, some methods seemed detectably counterproductive! Here are some of the methods (and citations) in alphabetical order:

• Argument mapping (Dwyer, Hogan, and Stewart 2015; Hidalgo 2024, p. 17)
• Diversity trainings (Paluck et al. 2021, Appendix Figure 7)
• Growth mindsets (McNamara et al. 2023)
• Instructional visualizations (Jaeger & Fiorella 2023)
• Matching teaching styles to learning styles (Lyle et al 2023)
• Mindfulness training for mental health (Montero-Marin 2022; cf. mindfulness training for creativity in Hughes et al. 2023)
• Nudging students to ask questions during a Zoom class (Weijers et al. 2023)
• Positive psychology or well-being courses (Schlecter et al. 2023)
• Slides for note-taking or studying (Worthington & Lavasseur 2015)
• Text highlighting (Mason et al. 2024)
• Trigger warnings (Bridgland et al. 2023)
• Unsolicited monitoring, checking, and assisting one’s kids with their homework (Park et al. 2023),

How many of those have you, your family, or your organization adopted or recommended? I began adopting and testing at least one of these seemingly overrated educational techniques before I found the latest evidence that it may not be effective — stay tuned for the results of my own tests.

3. Seemingly Successful Methods

If the education methods above may not work as expected, what methods should educators prioritize instead? The good news is that there seems to be decent evidence favoring a handful of teaching and learning methods. Here are some of those methods (and citations), also in alphabetical order:

• Argumentation (Zhou 2023)
• Gamification (Staal et al. 2022)
• In-class intellectual conflict (Johnson & Johnson 2009)
• Learning communities that span multiple courses (Wurtz 2014)
• Mid-semester feedback (Wickramasinghe & Timpson 2006)
• Peer-led team learning (Quitadamo et al. 2009)
• Reading (Horning 2010) — thank goodness!
• Scheduling homework time (Cho et al. 2024).
• Studying philosophy? (Hatcher and Ireland 2024; cf. Prinzing & Velasquez 2024)

How many of these methods did you experience in school? If you are an educator, how many of these methods do you currently use? I experienced many of these as a student; and I used some of these methods as an educator (although not always because I found evidence to support their use).

4. Conclusion

I have been teaching for years, in both traditional university settings and other settings. I have multiple teaching certificates from institutions that do education research. I am not bragging or arguing that l am an authority on this topic. Quite the opposite! I am confessing that a professional teacher who was trained by professional teachers and education researchers can overrate trendy teaching ideas and fall behind on education research. Publicizing my embarrassment may be worth it if it spares a few teachers, administrators, parents, or students from the same fate. I am certainly not the only educator who can be more informed and reflective about trendy teaching techniques.

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Disclaimers

A. Scientists continue to improve their measurements, gather more evidence, and realize the need to control for more confounds. Moreover, this examination of the evidence is far from exhaustive or systematic. So science may vindicate seemingly overrated techniques or undermine seemingly successful techniques. In other words, this post should not be treated as the final word on teaching techniques. This post is intended only to get educators and learners to reflect more on evidence and — wherever possible — carefully assess their methods.

B. Conflicts of interest and publication bias may make the list of seemingly effective teaching ideas particularly vulnerable to correction. Many educators have a financial interest in showing that their methods work, especially educators who sell books, consultations, licenses, services, software, trainings, and the like. So when tests of their methods do not detect a benefit, they are incentivized to prevent the publication of those null results. (I am not speculating. I have seen it happen. Nonetheless, the rate at which I see it may not be representative—the true rate of conflicting interests and publication bias in the science of learning could be higher or lower than what I have experienced.)