Carl Hendrick

1. The engagement illusion
2. The expertise illusion
3. The student-centred illusion
4. The transfer illusion
5. The easy-wins illusion
6. The motivation illusion
7. The discovery illusion
8. The uniqueness illusion
9. The performance illusion
10. The innovation illusion

29.08.25

Students who experienced phone bans in classrooms became significantly more supportive of such policies.

Full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Interestingly, while students felt a slight increase in FOMO, this did not translate into poorer well-being or reduced motivation.

Classroom spot checks showed fewer disruptions, more engaged teachers, and fewer off-task behaviours.

Classroom phone bans reduced academic inequality: lower-performing students gained most, whilst high achievers showed minimal change.

🧵Read more from Chi here: education.asu.edu/sites/g/file...

Again, this is why explicit instruction is so powerful. You’re not just delivering content, you’re checking for understanding, diagnosing thinking, exposing faulty models, and helping students rebuild them from the ground up.

This is why the ‘show your working’ heuristic is so powerful; You can’t repair a model you haven’t seen.
Effective instruction reveals the student’s model, compares it to the correct one, and creates enough conflict to prompt change.

So the problem is not that students don’t know something. This is not an ignorance problem, this is about a well organised misunderstanding.

These aren’t just wrong, they’re robustly wrong. They don’t yield to contradiction or accumulation of facts. They require a categorical shift, a rebuild from the ground up.

And then there are the deepest errors: Misconceptions caused by assigning a concept to the wrong category entirely. Eg heat as a substance. Force as a thing. These are what Chi calls “ontological category mistakes.”

But flawed conceptual models are more insidious. They’re coherent but wrong. Like the “single-loop” model of the circulatory system: internally consistent, predictively powerful, and completely wrong.

Take false beliefs. These are isolated and often easily corrected. Eg “The heart oxygenates blood” Just tell them it’s the lungs and you’re done. (Mostly.)

This will be familiar to anyone who has tried to reason with a conspiracy theorist. Conceptual change is hard because people who are wrong don’t think they’re wrong. Their model explains the world… until it doesn’t.

Contradiction is key. For change to happen, students must recognize that what they believed is incompatible with the correct view. If there’s no conflict, they may just absorb the new fact into the wrong framework.

This is why just giving students the right answer doesn’t always fix a misconception. It often gets absorbed into the wrong model. You can’t overwrite a misconception with a fact. You have to confront and replace the flawed model

They can hold scientifically accurate facts but embed them in entirely wrong frameworks. “Heat flows” sounds right until you realize the student thinks heat is a thing, not a process.

So student errors aren’t random, they’re completely logical within flawed mental models. In other words, students are reasoning correctly from incorrect premises. The logic isn’t broken, the assumptions are.

A child might say “the Earth is round” but still picture it as flat and say people could fall off the edge.

For example, take children’s models of the Earth. Vosniadou and Brewer (1992) found that many young children don’t picture the Earth as a sphere. Instead, they hold flawed but consistent models, like a flattened disk or hollow sphere.

So a student’s wrong answer might be the right answer according to their internal model. That’s the problem.

Put simply, a student’s wrong answer can stem from a well-formed but fundamentally flawed theory about how something works, rather than from a simple factual mistake.

Chi’s research revealed that misconceptions are not just small knowledge deficits; they are often coherent yet incorrect frameworks of understanding.

Not all wrong answers are equal. I used to think students just needed the right information to fix misconceptions but then I read the work of Michelene Chi🧵⬇️

Thank you for sharing this @equintero.bsky.social!

‪And thank you to @carlhendrick.substack.com for the thought-provoking essay:‬ "Deep reading..trains us in the moral dispositions that public life requires: attention, imagination, restraint." substack.com/home/post/p-...

*NEW* Research round-up - August edition carlhendrick.substack.com/p/the-resear...

NEW POST: A lot of the evidence on smartphones and kids is correlational but what does that mean for parents and schools? carlhendrick.substack.com/p/banning-ph...

When one book just isn’t enough:

I’ve learned so much about the #ScienceOfLearning thanks to these 3 incredible books:

📘Why Don’t Students Like School, @dtwuva.bsky.social
📘Harnessing the Science of Learning @nathanielswain.bsky.social
📘How Learning Happens @carlhendrick.substack.com
#BookBundles

“Perhaps the methods that work best are not always the ones that make us feel that they work.“ This article really chimed with what I have found in my research too. Just because we believe songs are super effective for learning languages, does not mean they actually are - we should check!

Teens say they are turning to AI for advice, friendship and 'to get out of thinking' Teenagers are increasingly turning to AI for advice, emotional support and decision-making, according to a new study.

“I think kids use AI to get out of thinking.”

apnews.com/article/ai-c...