seven myths about education – what’s missing?

Old Andrew has raised a number of objections to my critique of Seven Myths about Education. In his most recent comment on my previous (and I had hoped, last) post about it, he says I should be able to easily identify evidence that shows ‘what in the cognitive psychology Daisy references won’t scale up’.

One response would be to provide a list of references showing step-by-step the problems that artificial intelligence researchers ran into. That would take me hours, if not days, because I would have to trawl through references I haven’t looked at for over 20 years. Most of them are not online anyway because of their age, which means Old Andrew would be unlikely to be able to access them.

What is more readily accessible is information about concepts that have emerged from those problems, for example; personal construct theory, schema theory, heuristics and biases, bounded rationality and indexing, connectionist models of cognition and neuroconstructivism. Unfortunately, none of the researchers says “incidentally, this means that students might not develop the right schemata when they commit facts to long-term memory” or “the implications for a curriculum derived from cultural references are obvious”, because they are researching cognition not education, and probably wouldn’t have anticipated anyone suggesting either of these ideas. Whether Old Andrew sees the relevance of these emergent issues or not is secondary, in my view, to how Daisy handles evidence in her book.

concepts and evidence

In the last section of her chapter on Myth 1, Daisy takes us through the concepts of the limited capacity of working memory and chunking. These are well-established, well-tested hypotheses and she cites evidence to support them.

concepts but no evidence

Daisy also appears to introduce two hypotheses of her own. The first is that “we can summon up the information from long-term memory to working memory without imposing a cognitive load” (p.19). The second is that the characteristics of chunking can be extrapolated to all facts, regardless of how complex or inconsistent they might be; “So, when we commit facts to long-term memory they actually become part of our thinking apparatus and have the ability to expand one of the biggest limitations of human cognition” (p.20). The evidence she cites to support this extrapolation is Anderson’s paper – the one about simple, consistent information. I couldn’t find any other evidence cited to support either idea.

evidence but no concepts

Daisy does cite Frantz’s paper about Simon’s work on intuition. Two important concepts of Simon’s that Daisy doesn’t mention but Frantz does, are bounded rationality and the idea of indexing.

Bounded rationality refers to the fact that people can only make sense of the information they have. This supports Daisy’s premise that knowledge is necessary for understanding. But it also supports Freire’s complaint about which facts were being presented to Brazilian schoolchildren. Bounded rationality is also relevant to the idea of the breadth of a curriculum being determined by the frequency of cultural references. Simon used it to challenge economic and political theory.

Simon also pointed out that not only do experts have access to more information than novices do, they can access it more quickly because of their mental cross-indexing, ie the schemata that link relevant information. Rapid speed of access reduces cognitive load, but it doesn’t eliminate it. Chess experts can determine the best next move within seconds, but for most other experts, their knowledge is considerably more complex and less well-defined. A surgeon or an engineer is likely to take days rather than seconds to decide on the best procedure or design to resolve a difficult problem. That implies that quite a heavy cognitive load is involved.

Daisy does mention schemata but doesn’t go into detail about how they are formed or how they influence thinking and understanding. She refers to deep learning in passing but doesn’t tackle the issue Willingham raises about students’ problems with deep structure.

burden of proof

Old Andrew appears to be suggesting that I should assume that Daisy’s assertions are valid unless I can produce evidence to refute them. The burden of proof for a theory usually rests with the person making the claims, for obvious reasons. Daisy cites evidence to support some of her claims, but not all of them. She doesn’t evaluate that evidence by considering its reliability or validity or by taking into account contradictory evidence.

If Daisy had written a book about her musings on cognitive psychology and education, or about how findings from cognitive psychology had helped her teaching, I wouldn’t be writing this. But that’s not what she’s done. She’s used theory from one knowledge domain to challenge theory in another. That can be a very fruitful strategy; the application of game theory and ecological systems theory has transformed several fields. But it’s not helpful simply to take a few concepts out of context from one domain and apply them out of context to another domain.

The reason is that theoretical concepts aren’t free-standing; they are embedded in a conceptual framework. If you’re challenging theory with theory, you need to take a long hard look at both knowledge domains first to get an idea of where particular concepts fit in. You can’t just say “I’m going to apply the concepts of chunking and the limited capacity of working memory to education, but I shan’t bother with schema theory or bounded rationality or heuristics and biases because I don’t think they’re relevant.” Well, you can say that, but it’s not a helpful way to approach problems with learning, because all of these concepts are integral to human cognition. Students don’t leave some of them in the cloakroom when they come into class.

On top of that, the model for pedagogy and the curriculum that Daisy supports is currently influencing international educational policy. If the DfE considers the way evidence has been presented by Hirsch, Willingham and presumably Daisy, as ‘rigorous’, as Michael Gove clearly did, then we’re in trouble.

For Old Andrew’s benefit, I’ve listed some references. Most of them are about things that Daisy doesn’t mention. That’s the point.


Axelrod, R (1973). Schema Theory: An Information Processing Model of Perception and Cognition, The American Political Science Review, 67, 1248-1266.
Elman, J et al (1998). Rethinking Innateness: Connectionist Perspective on Development. MIT Press.
Frantz, R (2003). Herbert Simon. Artificial intelligence as a framework for understanding intuition, Journal of Economic Psychology, 24, 265–277.
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P & Tversky A (1982). Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A (2009). Nativism Versus Neuroconstructivism: Rethinking the Study of
Developmental Disorders. Developmental Psychology, 45, 56–63.
Kelly, GA (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: Norton.