Students are not hard-wired to learn in different ways

I find, through personal experience, that the most important way to teach differently to students is to build upon what each student already knows & their interests outside of the subject.

For example, a student who loves football might learn math better by creating games that incorporate popular players' & teams' stats. It is more likely to keep them interested which seems to be at least half the battle. It also shows them how learning this is useful in an area they're already interested in. A minor benefit, if you can truly create unique content for each student, you make cheating more difficult.

Through individualized content, students can also progress at their own rate. I find these methods of learning to be much more important than classifying things as "visual" or some other method.

This was always my understanding of why it is important for students to be taught in different ways.

I'm not sure I agree.

In sports some people can watch a new technique and instantly be able to copy the movements. Other people have to be guided through each step. It's a combination of visual data and proprioception.

Personally, if if calculations come up conversationally, I have to see the numbers, I can't process calculations aurally.

I also remember names better if I can see them in print.

My experience as a student is that there are methods of learning that work well for me but not all my classmates and vice versa. I feel like the issue is that these small preferences aren't generalizable into these abstract forms like "auditory learner."

I also feel like teachers catering to "styles" of learning cripples students in the long run. Instead students need to be encouraged to figure out how to manipulate the material into content that's understandable to them. For example, I hate PowerPoints. I don't get anything out of PowerPoints. But at my school, 99% of lectures are given in ppt, so I have to figure out how to distill that information into something useful. And that's MY struggle. No one is going to help you when you get to college or graduate level education. It would be far more helpful to teach students how to take charge of their own education.

Having three kids navigate the US school system, I have become very skeptical of the justifications given for almost any teaching method. I was saddened when my daughter came home from school with a one page worksheet that purported to show that she was a "kinesthetic" learner. This division of kids into categories makes them feel they can learn in only one way.

Other experiences with the education establishment included:

Early introduction of laptop/tablet convertibles in the sixth grade (an approximately $2000 Toshiba) with Windows XP, a stylus and an unresponsive low resolution screen. This was supposed to facilitate math instruction because homework problems and answers could be written out on the tablet instead of on paper.

Later when the tablets didn't work out they introduced iPads for use instead of textbooks.

World history being taught out of an Art History book (we were told that subjects like the Monroe Doctrine weren't going to be covered).

Everyday Math, from the University of Chicago. This math method introduces its own varied algorithms for the basic four arithmetic operations. I ended up having to buy some Singapore school system math books to teach my daughter over the summer.

I met with the headmaster of the school several times to inject my opinion, but naturally, not having an Education degree kind of disqualified my opinions from being taken seriously. (I have Math, EE, and CS degrees).

How about adults then? My buddy can't abide lots of drawings and diagrams - his eyes glaze over. He wants to read it in prose. Never mind how dense; he learns (prefers) only from written descriptions.

My wife had a classmate that paid someone to read his textbooks to him. Couldn't process it visually.

I know its anecdotes; but these folks have at least a very strong preference for different modes of learning.

> If learning styles exist at all, these are not "hard wired" and are at most simply preferences.

What does it mean for a learning style to be simply a preference?

I would think that such a preference (for, say, visual rather than text-based descriptions of a geometric concept) would be founded on something. And I suspect the "something" is that it's easier to understand.

Yet even if we all agree that it's just a preference, not something that's "hard-wired," does that really require a practical shift in how we teach things? Should we not defer to people's learning preferences, even if they are just preferences?

Two I know of, Sternberg's and Gardner's, both have no real evidence for. I think it's part of the difficulty when you try to come up with a model of learning that ignores the g-factor.

If you start to look at the "different ways" claims, they fall apart pretty quickly with basic logic.

One of the most common claims I hear is that someone is a "visual" learner.

If that were true, wouldn't it also mean that we're leaving kids behind that learn through taste? What if I'm an olfactory genius and I should be learning maths through scent?