A Stronger Foundation

Rather than focusing on what science has discovered about how children learn, most teacher training programs encourage their students to develop their own philosophies of teaching (Walsh 2019)-including teaching decoding, where the evidence is overwhelming that the most effective approach is systematic instruction in phonics (Seidenberg 2017). Information about the learning process that is standard fare in an undergraduate course in cognitive psychology may not show up, or at least not stand out, in a teacher training program (Willingham 2017b). In addition to accepting the idea that the way to boost reading comprehension is to teach "skills," many teachers-like many members of the general public-are firm believers that individuals have different "learning styles." [...]while people may have different learning preferences-and while it makes sense to present the same information in different ways to the whole class-studies have found no evidence for the concept of learning styles (Pashler et al. 2008; Willingham 2018).