No evidence to back idea of learning styles | Hacker News Reader

No evidence to back idea of learning styles

theguardian.com

59 pointsteslacar23 comments

Teacher here. Unfortunately this myth is incredibly resistant to attempts to dispel it. It is still included in teacher training and professional development and many schools still require teachers to address it in their learning plans.

I feel it's hard to address because, among other reasons, 1. Its useful for administrators. Parents and students want to feel that you are teaching them on an individual level. Learning styles is "legitimate" enough to point to for administrators.

2. It's something of a personal belief for many teachers.

Education bias suffers insane bias. I've never seen a study (though I'm sure there are some) where the researchers rejected the teaching techniques they advocated.

Specific Example: I've been in flipped classrooms. They suck. Everyone hated it. The instructor justified it by showing studies "proving" how great flipped classrooms work conducted by people who advocate and teach in flipped classrooms

Education research was probably the first field to adopt NHST[1], so it is not surprising it is messed up. Psychology was next. The most recent (still in progress) is physics. Sometime in the middle it happened to biology/medicine. You can see the order is inversely correlated with the reliability of the modern results.

[1] See eg Gigerenzer 2004 for an intro: http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf

> I've been in flipped classrooms. They suck. Everyone hated it. The instructor justified it by showing studies "proving" how great flipped classrooms work conducted by people who advocate and teach in flipped classrooms

That everyone agreed on disliking the flipped classroom format is at best very weak evidence against their effectiveness. Ebbinghaus' 1885 research [0] on how people learn and remember still doesn't inform the teaching of any subject goes in any national education system. If it did revision would be a great deal more integrated into teachers' practice. And we have a great guess at why.

It feels less effective than moving on to the next topic and doing all your revision before the test.

The same domination of what people think works, what feels like it's working over what actually works better is seen in the greater popularity and use of massed practice over distributed, which works better[1].

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_practice

But lets pull out one key point from amongst all the negatives in this article: "Students will improve if they think about how they learn"

The formal frameworks we have come up with haven't been effective, and trying to put them in a classroom haven't been effective. But that doesn't mean that everyone learns the same and we should just force everyone into the same box either. Our educational systems need work. We may not have the best answers yet, but we should keep looking.

i.e. learning styles may still be bullshit, but they can get you to self-reflect on how you learn.

Perhaps instead of considering students to have different learning styles, it would be more appropriate to say they are more or less resistant to various "teaching styles" (used as a catch-all term for teachers' cognitive biases that leave some students behind more than others).

I've been struggling with this a lot lately. I'm in a Masters program. I'm struggling. After a lot of reflection, it's due largely to the way the class is taught. I need lots of examples over the field. Don't throw a wall of math at me. Show me how to do Thing1, then Thing2, and then Thing3. I'll induce a process.

So while it's not the types of learning offered in the article, I think there is style around inductive learning and deductive learning. I think the math folk are deductive learners, and teach that way. People like more, more on the art side of software design spectrum, are inductive learners. The two don't mix.

So neuroscientists reading this post, please to to the NSF for grant money about this. We might get more masters level or PhD's if a) there is such a distinction and b) we can adjust programs appropriately.

> I'm struggling. After a lot of reflection, it's due largely to the way the class is taught. I need lots of examples over the field. Don't throw a wall of math at me.

Vast majority of people are this way. The current educational system is fundamentally flawed and works fundamentally differently.

Hm, true.

In school, when the material was basic, I listened to the explanations of the teachers, did a few examples and got my B or C.

In my bachelor lectures I failed most exams on the first try, because the tutors were fast as hell. They did all school math in the first week and kept that pace to the end of the semester. I switched my learning style from going to lectures to reading stuff at home at my own pace, which worked much better.

In my master I didn't even bother with lectures at all, I just started a remote degree program, where they sent me all the material so I could learn myself at home.

One thing I notice in learning styles - is they don't seem to test retention rate months later.

I may be able to cram my brain with crap - but in 2 months time, i'll be able to remember what I can visualise, not what i heard or learnt with a lecturer yapping on about.

Do you really think this occurred to none of the authors of the linked document? That no one has ever tested this? When you can come up with a counter argument in less than 30 minutes on a topic that single academics have put over a thousand hours into researching the likelihood is that this specific question has been investigated.

I'm an academic.

If you have a link to a paper which tests this please do send me a link.

Note: your post came across very attacking - without adding any insight, info or sharing knowledge.

I could very well agree that there's no evidence for, but I am not convinced that there's sufficient evidence against.

I'm finding it really, really hard to believe that everyone learns the same way... and I don't trust the current system to be capable of making such an assessment, learning styles or not. It may not be written vs visual, it may be something else, maybe it's a lot more complex.

Total anecdote, but I absolutely learn better when graphs/charts/drawings/illustrations are part of the instructional material.

The statement could be true, but has nothing to do with learning styles. Because everyone "learn better when graphs/charts/drawings/illustrations are part of the instructional material".

I don't. I learn better through reading. Visual aids are rarely very helpful for me, unless I already understand what I'm looking at.

I guess this explains why every time I took one of those "learning style" tests, I always scored equally on each style.

Not really :)

So what? It's certainly still beneficial to present and repeat information in different formats.

That's not really what learning styles were supposed to be. Commonly, with learning styles a student was considered an auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learner.

Timmy is an auditory leaner? He should learn to calculate voltage through lectures and song.

Timmy is a visual learner? He should learn to calculate voltage through pictures and diagrams.

Timmy is a kinesthetic learner? He should learn to calculate voltage through dance.

It's a shallow understanding of how learning really happens. No one learned how to throw a football by singing about it and no one has a strong understanding of circuits and how to design them just by listening to lectures.

My entire life, listening to classroom lecture has been an absolute struggle for me. It requires a monumental amount of effort and willpower to pay attention, process and retain all that info at the same time.

On the other hand, I can read something once and If I can handle the material, I typically retain it effortlessly. I know a lot of other people that cannot self-educate via reading.

This study seems to be suggesting something similar to a denial that introverted and extroverted types exist. How can they not?

Im a little suspicious of the proposition:

poor results when current matching styles to lessons = learning styles do not exist.

Is this really a problem with teaching styles?

Sounds more like a general problem that also happens to impact your learning performance.

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