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The idea that individuals have different learning styles, such as auditory or kinesthetic, is a pernicious myth. Boser compares it to the flat-earth myth — highly intuitive, but wrong.

Almost 90 percent of respondents agreed that simply re-reading material is "highly effective" for learning. Research suggests the opposite.

On the topic of "growth mindset," more than one-quarter of respondents believed intelligence is "fixed at birth". Neuroscience says otherwise.

In American public schools, the principal is the most complex and contradictory figure in the pantheon of educational leadership.

A few years ago when I walked the hallways of a high school with my five-year-old niece Evie, she remarked, without prompting: “There’s the principal’s office: you only go there if you are in trouble.”

Most remarkably, those very people who did not understand what a principal did were often the first to argue for the abolition of the role.

I can’t recall the last time I saw students passing actual paper notes in class, but I clearly remember students checking their phones (recently and often).

Despite the proliferation of handwriting eulogies, it seems that no one is really arguing against the fact that everyone still writes—we just tend to use unjoined print rather than a fluid Palmerian style, and we use it less often.

My experience with fountain pens suggests a new answer. Perhaps it’s not digital technology that hindered my handwriting, but the technology that I was holding as I put pen to paper. Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely touch it.

She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.  Worse than that,” she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”[5]

This is the sort of outcome that may not be noticed by an assessment specialist who is essentially a technician, in search of practices that yield data in ever-greater quantities.

The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.