The concept of “learning styles” is one of the greatest neuroscience myths
qz.com
qz.com
1) A lack of control groups. In fact, she was told by her instructors that many journals consider it an ethics violation to use a control group, the logic being that in denying your experimental method to the control group you're putting them at a disadvantage.
2) Overgeneralizing results. It's common to use education students (i.e, future teachers) as experimental subjects in education research. Then the results are interpreted as applying to all students, ignoring all the ways that your typical education students are different from your typical high school or elementary school student.
While there were some examples of good education research, she said that by far the best education research she could found was actually published in psychology journals. So it's not surprising to me that myths and even pseudoscience will proliferate in education when the standards on research in the field is so poor.
Oh man. Someone should tell them about double-blind clinical trials for cancer treatment. (Those can be, and sometimes are, "stopped for efficiency", when a midway evaluation shows the treatment is so effective that they already have a statistically significant result. They then start giving the treatment to both groups, I believe.)
In medical research they have procedures and statistical techniques to detect significant results and allow for early stoppage. There's no reason the same techniques couldn't be applied to education research.
But you need control groups, or you don't actually know that you've made an improvement!
Talking to teachers, one of the biggest complaints with the last decade of education reforms, is that they have to redo their curriculum every year. Not only what they are teaching changes, but how they are evaluated. Everyone knows that education is broken, and "has a plan to fix it". But their plan is just a new set of arbitrary requirements. They rarely let a system evolve naturally, and instead opt for a yearly rewrite. Its a huge bureaucratic burden that's constantly changing.
The IT equivalent would be you need a minimum of 6 hours of training each time a library you use releases an update. The update may require you to use a new language. Using the most up to date version is required by law.
Except when the experimental method fails to meet its objectives, and those in the test group are put at a disadvantage!
> doing education science is unethical
lel
"we're going to teach you how to learn, be we refuse to learn how to teach"
I taught English as a foreign language for 5 years. But I also have the experience of taking more than 10 years of French lessons. I can not, nor have I ever been able to speak French. And yet, I passed more than 10 1-year courses on the subject. In the 5 years that I taught English -- to literally thousands of students, some over the period of 3 years, none of them learned how to speak English as a result of my teaching. Although, I was praised for my ability to teach.
I speak Japanese fluently. I learned it on my own as an adult. I have never taken a Japanese course and nobody ever taught me Japanese. And yet, I managed to survive 2 years of married life without once speaking English (my wife has since learned to speak English).
So the not-so-trivial question is: how do you measure learning? And how do you assign that learning to different teaching techniques? Not only are the papers generally quite poor, the thing they are trying to measure is incredibly elusive. It is a breeding ground for self deception and outright fraud.
The interesting thing, though, is that any teacher with a decent amount of experience (I taught physics for 15 years, both as a TA and as a community college professor) sees that students do seem to learn differently. Some students need a clear, verbatim explanation of something. Others need to dance around the concept first, getting a feel for it, before they able to even parse such an explanation.
I'm not sure what it is linked to. I suspect that our 'bins' of learning styles are too narrow, or somehow else incorrect. The obvious ones came first, more-or-less 5 senses with each sense being aligned with a 'style' (I learn math better by smell...</s>). The students in the studies are categorized into different learning styles (usually) based on a survey (which, I would argue, really amounts to learning preferences rather than styles). It would be interesting to see tests of actual learning done with different presentations for forming the baseline assignments to a particular style.
But even then the problem is that the bins are pre-decided (verbal or visual? global or sequential?) I think this is a little too simplistic.
So while I suspect that there is actually something to the idea of learning differently (rather than just 'g'), for the moment, anyway, learning styles seem to be bullshit.
The bathwater's bad, but hang onto that baby.
For example, at age 12 I read a book that made no sense to me whatsoever. I somehow finished it but didn't get much out of it. 12 years later at age 24, I read Terry Pratchett's book, the Lost Continent, and gradually realized it was the same book.
In 12 years I had gained enough background understanding of concepts such as Evolution, Australia, Satire, and Wizards to get the jokes and the plot, so that time the book stuck with me. Learning style had nothing to do with it - it was me that changed.
Different experiences. Memories thrive when connected with other memories and most everyone will have different memories. So it stands to reason different ways of providing the same information will have different results based on each individual's lived experiences.
If I can relate an unknown X to a known Y - or even an unknown X to an unknown Y - I always learn better than if I learned about an unknown X that I'm not able to relate with.
Mnemonics play a large role in things - unfortunately I can't find any studies offhand to that prove mnemonics actually help.
Also, I think some of the persistence of this "myth" is that people (adults) will flat-out tell you that they may not be able to absorb certain information without seeing some visual representation of it, whereas others will tell they can understand more easily, for example, just from a verbal description.
Here's a quick assessment: When somebody gets directions from Google maps, do they prefer the written, listed directions, or the map (in the happy circumstance where both conveyed the same information)? Some people prefer the lists; some the maps. So we might think of the former as verbal learners and the latter as visual.
The problem is, in the context of learning, both (self-described) verbal and visual learners seem to learn better visually.
Though I'm guessing verbal learners and visual learners both learn better when doing a task utilizing both visual and verbal senses, than they would doing either a visual only or a verbal only task. The verbal-visual distinction could be a distinction between 60% verbal / 40% visual on the one hand and 40% verbal / 60% visual on the other. I'd also guess that if students are forced to make some body movements (kinesthetic learning) at the same time as speaking/listening (verbal) and watching/diagramming (visual), retention of material is even greater for virtually all of them.
The business was interested in modernizing, and gradually weaned itself away from practices such as I described. We had to find a way to make it happen, that would also make the higher-ups happy about the effect on the bottom line. I don't want to name names, but today, it is a much different place.
To get over this issue requires something analogous to unit testing in software: You have to understand how the correct functioning of the full system builds on the properties of the units.
The things I heard were often difficult to argue with as well. One thing that often made me feel like it was BS was that I never heard a learning style that fit with how I learned and I don't believe I'm special.
Trying to get kids to perform physical exertion with Baseball, Basketball, Football, Soccer, Swimming, has proven to not improve their standardized scantron test scores.
My snarky point is that when science finally determines how we can best measure the success of a child, we'll have a way to objectively measure given techniques. Until then, we're researching in a flawed framework. Creating a student-teacher bond, making students feel valued, making parents feel like their kids are getting something out of their tax dollars, long-term impacts on students, student eagerness to engage in a lesson... I question whether neuroscience has explored these aspects. Let alone teacher job satisfaction.
Cripes, we're seeing all kinds of proof that we're beating creativity out of students. I can guarantee that mixing up how lessons are taught has a positive impact on student creativity. Does each student have their preferred learning style? I can't say that. But I strongly suspect that teaching lessons in varied styles has a positive impact.
You seem to be implying that belief in learning styles would lead to more varied lessons. But couldn't it do the opposite, trying to sort students and feed each group the same type of lesson as much as possible?
Going from Varied Learning Technique all the way to Learning Styles may do harm. I can't say.
Learning Styles is mostly considered snake oil. Of course different students learn differently. Assessment is hard. Instructional Design. There's so much material out there, I wish people would learn more before asserting and speculating.
I suppose I should just be pleased that people are interested. But I hope many posters will be encouraged to look further into this subject and develop expertise as they develop their opinions.
Here's one potential resource: http://www.learningandteaching.info/
Sounds like the Hawthorne effect at work. However this shouldn't be taken as a dismissal. Anything that makes learning or work less rote and more fun will improve motivation and thus improve outcomes.
It's not the case that one person learns through sights, another sounds, and yet another through movement (roll eyes)-- instead it's the case that doing things multiple ways and multiple times is better for memory.
A thought I had: what if you studied some topic while always listening to the same song on repeat. Could you improve recall by humming the song (or better, playing it)? I would think a study about this has already been done.
The same thing apply to things like addiction where location plays a very strong role in reinforcing the addictive behaviour. One of the ways of helping to overcome addiction is to change your location so the environmental cues are removed.
If it is about as coarse categories as "visual" vs "verbal", then debunking does not sound strange (but I guess mostly because not many people are very polarized wrt this axis).
But in general - well, almost each single person has her/his tastes (senses involved, brevity/verbosity, level of challenge, level of feedback, amount of social interaction, amount of noise, etc, etc). So, I would rather guess than psychological research are flawed (too few categories, misaligned categories, binning, self-reported data, etc) than anything else.
(I do have both experience with teaching and with doing research-level psychology.)
Another was in some kind of corporate management training that I took, where we were also told about the Kubler-Ross stages.
These ideas take on a life of their own outside of the research community. From what I can tell, the effect is a fragmented and disorganized approach to teaching, for example, that's evident in the typical elementary school curriculum.
On an amusing note, there's an inside joke in my family, that "children have different ways of learning" is a euphemism for when somebody just did something really dumb.
I learn things looking at graphs. I learn things by reading but, it just takes more focus. I never believed in this theory of learning. There are just sometimes better ways to convey different information.
Some people are idiots and some people have enough passion or care enough to put more effort in.
If you haven't seen Edward Tufte's writings about PowerPoint[1] yet, you should. A funny take on what's wrong with PowerPoint is Peter Norvig's online essay about the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address.[2]
[1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
I virtually flunked high school, and then (through a fairly convoluted process) ended up very literally top of my class in a masters at a top 5 university; the masters allowed me to learn my own way.
It is possible I'm an idiot, lack passion, and am lazy, but my academic references don't support that theory.
On another note, everyone I knew in high school who really bought into "learning styles" were the kids who didn't like such-and-such class and wanted to whine.
I've sat in countless training sessions being taught about Six Thinking Hats, the three learning styles, the seven learning styles, the thirteen learning styles, left-right brain thinking, the learning pit, mindfulness, and growth mindsets.
Such a waste of time and energy that could have been used to prepare resources and assess work.
> Alan Turing demonstrated (discovered?) that information processing (computation) is necessarily universal. That is, no matter the physical configuration of the computational medium—DNA, brain, software, etc.—the underlying principles of its operation must be identical. This, it turns out, follows from the laws of physics; if it were not the case, sentient life could not have evolved from inorganic materials and processes. The implications a inordinately far-ranging, but one of them surely is that all learning must ultimately conform to the basic laws of information processing. In the end, to "know" something amounts to the same thing for everybody. Physical skills are an obvious example: no matter what "style" we think we discern, throwing a ball works only one way, and there is only one way to learn how to do it (practice). The same goes for reading and, yes, math.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/one-reason-the-learning...
If you want to help children then you're better off starting here:
Much of the learning styles stuff was put forth by Felder at NCSU Engineering (my alma mater). Is there a double-blind study? IDK, but it's interesting, and it resonated.
In the informal quiz in my intro to engineering class (Dr. Richard Porter's, not Felder's), it was interesting to see how preferred learning styles (from his quiz) lined up with majors. In short, mostly it was that a large number of people had visual vs written preferences, but the one thing different for C.S. students were they almost always learned globally (i.e. almost random access, not really understanding the whole, and things then popping into place as connections build up between ideas) whereas other majors preferred seeing things step by step always building on one another.
It resonated with me in general because I'm generally lost with something until I accumulate a lot of random concepts enough to get it.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Pap...
I think it's great people are trying to pay attention to way s people learn and how to present information.
This hit home really hard when doing docs for ansible - and I tried to present things in multiple ways (different ways of indexing, presenting big picture versus building things up, and vice versa) and in writing technical documentation and seeing bugs on understanding (and twitter complaints) on tech docs it is clear people DO learn very different on the sequential vs global axis.
I also really DO need diagrams, as large volumes of words get my lost, but strangely I produce large volumes of words and seldom any diagrams. I'm also strange in that if I take notes, I almost never read them myself, so this is perhaps why I'm so bad about learning from written text and always want to jump into code snippets. (Novels, sure, they are great). I also usually need a whiteboard as a buffer for understanding architectures visually, where I notice a lot of people don't need to draw things out, or it doesn't help them (or aren't as interested in those things?)
It's useful to present things in different ways and mix things up -- not that you have to repeat everything 4 different ways. That was what Felder was trying to get across.
(A simple example might be it is good to present a diagram next to a paragraph describing a concept.)
I'm not formally trained in education, but physics. As such I have to allow for the possibility that his ideas resonate with me partly because he speaks my language.
Nevertheless, the evidence is scanty.
IOW, if we accepted absence of evidence as evidence of absence, there'd be no scientific research. Just because most research thus far has been crappy doesn't mean learning styles are bullshit. It intuitively seems, at least, that some people are more visual than others, and some are more capable of abstract thought than others, etc.