The Myth of 'Learning Styles' | Hacker News Reader

The Myth of 'Learning Styles'

theatlantic.com

220 pointsJtsummers99 comments

My SO teaches elementary math, and we've had a few discussions about this.

When teaching a new concept, say the area of a parallelogram, she will present the concept in multiple different ways:

- Give printouts of parallelograms on graph paper, so the students can count the number of squares in a parallelogram. Also give them scissors and see what happens.

- Give students two triangles and a square (which they know how to get the areas of already), as well as some tape.

- Simply give students the length of the base, height, and the area of multiple parallelograms.

The interesting thing is that there will be a somewhat equal split among which way makes the concept click for the students. Some will instantly start counting squares on graph paper and figure it out. Some will tape the different shapes together and go from there. Others will play with the base and height numbers and arrive at a formula.

So while "learning styles" may be a misnomer, I do believe that presenting one topic in a variety of ways is beneficial.

You might like Lockhart's Lament: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

I love it, and I think most people here will as well.

And it highlights how important it is to not force one method of learning on children. So even if one thinks that we shouldn't teach multiple learning styles, it's important to keep the lessons in Lockhart's Lament in mind:

Discovery is important. Variety is important. Rote memorization is not.

I strongly agree in presenting a topic in a variety of ways since being able to relate new information to information already known is a major key to learning new concepts. The more ways a topic is presented, the better chance a person's brain can relate it to something already known.

I have a strong assumption that when many people hear "learning styles", they assume it to this instead of auditory vs visual.

> I have a strong assumption that when many people hear "learning styles", they assume it to this instead of auditory vs visual.

Or the assume each individual only benefits from one in all situations (being half awake, interested in the subject, etc, etc). Which is a ridiculous assumption once you really think about it.

And yet I've have teachers growing up who gave classes workshops to help them identify their learning style, as if it was as inherent as a pokemon type.

> The more ways a topic is presented, the better chance a person's brain can relate it to something already known.

Well there’s that, but it also goes further. The more ways a topic is presented, the more context there is for the learner to see how those things relate to each other. Give me both a formula and a graph and I will be able to use them together to better understand the concept. They reinforce each other.

> So while "learning styles" may be a misnomer, I do believe that presenting one topic in a variety of ways is beneficial.

Absolutely. I think "learning styles" is a reductionist view of Universal Design for Learning [1], which is essentially what you described how your SO teaches.

It's quite possible that at a given time, someone may be inclined to visual learning, but may be more kinesthetically inclined in another setting/moment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Design_for_Learning

The best part of this is the simple fact that they're helping the students understand why the formula is what it is, and not just learning it by rote.

What you're describing is usually called teaching methods, rather than learning styles. Teaching methods are real, figuring out which ones work best is a field of its own, like mathematics education research. But the article is specifically about learning styles, which is a specific term in psychology and a different idea. I think it's unnecessarily confusing to mix up the two, learning styles aren't real and definitely not a "misnomer".

Teaching methods are something I’m very interested in as a technical writer, and I’d love book / article recommendations.

Something like this, it has further reading references at the end? http://www.md.utoronto.ca/sites/default/files/What_works%2C_...

The way we define area is in terms of little squares. (We could use little equilateral triangles or little right-angled isosceles triangles or some other unit instead, but we don't, conventionally preferring squares.)

So the way to learn about areas in general is to start with the area of a unit square = 1, and then clarify the properties of area in general, notably that we can cut and paste shapes without changing the total area, as long as we don't overlap them, which means we can count up the number of unit squares and that tells us the area of a figure. Most of the rest can be figured out by students if guided by a well organized set of problems which build on each-other.

We can proceed to first finding areas of shapes made using axis-aligned sides of natural number lengths on a square grid. For these the area can be found by directly counting squares, and e.g. by natural number multiplication in the case of rectangles. Then we can look at the areas of other shapes with vertices on a square grid. Then we can look at the areas of rectangles with rational side lengths (no longer nicely on the original unit grid; instead we need to make a finer grid to count, resulting in rational-number areas, since we must relate the grid units). Then we can next proceed to parallelograms – in a square-area-unit conventional world these are arguably more fundamental than triangles, but we could deal with right-angled triangles at about the same time. Triangles where we can find base and height can come next; these can be split into a pair of right-angled triangles or duplicated and glued into a parallelogram. After that finding areas of other shapes (e.g. with irrational side lengths) takes more machinery from Euclidean geometry (starting from the Pythagorean theorem), and can be delayed a while.

While talking about parallelograms it would be nice to take some squares and other rectangles outside and look at the shadows they cast on the ground. This is a nice chance to introduce the concept of affine transformations, which preserve parallel lines and area ratios, as we can see by observing the shadow cast by a square grid (e.g. made of wire or drawn on a transparency sheet), especially if we have some translucent shapes lying on the grid. Basic transformation geometry (especially discussions of reflection/rotation/translation [isometries] and snowflakes, wallpaper tilings, etc., and affine transformations) is accessible at quite a young age and some hugely valuable topics to introduce early so that kids will be prepared to extend them later. More general projective transformations can wait a while.

Around 20 years ago, I met Dawna Markova at a conference where she spoke about the work she had done in learning styles. My recollection is that the Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic forms was not about how you "learn", but rather on how you stay "focused".

Researchers found that there were three brianwave patterns that corresponded to your level of focus. For me, Visual stimuli kept me focused. Auditory stimuli practically put me to sleep. And Kinesthetic stimuli are transitional for me. In meetings where there is just discussion or words on a chart, I find myself fidgeting, and that helps me stay focused. So I am V-K-A. (The first letter for what keeps you focsed, the second letter for the transitional mode, and the third letter for what causes you to drift into la-la-land.) The research found that the six combinations of these three types of stimuli was equally distributed in the population.

The lesson for teachers and presenters is that you should provide all three stimuli in your presentation so that all people get what they need to stay focused.

Markova wrote a wonderful book called "How Your Child Is Smart". It was fantastic resource for bringing up our children and helping them stay focused in all of the ways they actually learned.

I agree with your comment on being "focused." In analyzing my own learning preferences, I found it is much easier for me to stay focused if I can speed my way through something. Speed is the key for me, not the format.

For example, if I have the choice to learn the same information via a video or book, I'd opt for the book because I know I can read a lot quicker than the person in the video is going to speak. This helps me to stay focused. On the other hand, if I can speed the video up to 4 or 5 times its normal rate, I would opt for that over the printed page because I can listen faster than I can read. For me, it isn't the format as much as the speed at which I can complete my learning that is important.

I highly doubt you absorb much at 4-5x speed. 3x speed is very fast -- if the speaker talks quickly, it's borderline unintelligible.

It depends on practice. I'm at roughly 2x speed for podcasts, and a blind acquaintance I know hits 4-5x, especially for TTS.

My internal voice while reading is around 2-3x as fast as most people speak (this is natural speed, without trying to speed-read). It's also one of the main reasons I stumble over words when speaking - they get jumbled together because I can't actually speak that fast. So I don't find that unbelievable at all.

I understand where you're coming from. When I first started doing this, 1.5x was the maximum I could go and still retain information. After a while, I was able to retain information at 2x, then 2.5x and so on. It took me a year or two of practice to get to this speed. It also depends on what you're trying to learn, how clearly the speaker is enunciating, and whether the speaker has a heavy accent or not, I guess, but it works for me in most cases.

I've never even really considered the different learning styles; maybe because I'm not an educator (other than TAing, tutoring in grad school, etc .. stuff you kinda figure out as you go based on how people taught you).

I've never even though that people used these styles to try and reach everyone as the article suggests. I thought it was always more of a "What will keep me engaged/focused."

as a complement to that perspective, i think we're all basically experiential learners, and seeing, hearing, and touching/moving are simply parts of the "experience". sure, one person might focus a little more on the voice of the speaker, and another might be watching more intently, but all of those components combine to create the immersive experience that locks new information into our brains. but as you say, teaching should incorporate mutiple modes of stimuli, because all learners need all of the modes.

incidentally, that's why most conferences and such gatherings are not so useful for learning new things--they're designed so that people talk at you, rather than involve you. the purpose is often to display the superior knowledge/ability of the speaker, for various commercial purposes (having been on both sides of this).

Meaning no disrespect my friend, but I disagree. See my post above for my experience trying to learn to read by experiencing reading. It didn't work for me.

A dyslexic will be different than someone with auditory difficulties due to damage to the temporal lobe. These people will benefit from one form of instruction more than the other. To pretend everyone is the same flies in the face of science. Some differences like iq and personality may not have any important pedagogical implications, but if a student is hearing impaired or blind, you can bet visual and auditory instruction will be differential in value.

Another thing I just remembered on this topic of what "focuses" you, there is a clever and interesting way to learn which of the three forms keeps someone else focused.

It is in how a person tells you they don't understand something. A visual person will say "I don't see that." An auditory person will say "I'm not hearing you" or "You need to say that again." A kinesthetic person would say "I don't get it" or "That doesn't feel right."

Interesting. And small hints.

This is a good article, but it only touches on the main issue with learning styles. Multiple independent groups of educational psychologists (if I remember correctly it was three) reviewed all the articles they could find on learning styles. They found that the majority of the studies had poor experimental design, since they were missing proper control groups. Of the remaining studies there were more examples of negative results for learning styles than positive results. This was pretty damning, given the publication bias for positive results in academic research. The article links to one of these reviews, but here is another one: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....

I teach science, and it's frustrating that nearly all of my students can tell me their learning style. Their previous teachers have taught them about learning styles as a way to improve their studying, and they've jumped on that information. But the literature indicates that matching instruction to a learning style doesn't improve learning. This is a total waste because we're effectively giving students a magic talisman to help them learn science, because once students find out it's wrong they'll be less likely to take our advice on studying, and because the time we waste on it could be spent on telling people about real things that actually improve learning.

I thought this idea was dead. No one I know that design instructional materials (of which I know many due to my background) thinks this is real.

Sorry to hear it still survives.

The studies I have seen (I'll admit- I didn't read TFA- maybe I have in the past idk) all used some sort of survey to identify learning styles. Nobody, to my knowledge, has measured learning by modalities to identify them.

You are spot on that attempts to match instruction to learning style have been futile in the VARK-like learning style classifications. They also assume that if a student has a learning style, it will be the same across subjects. If it turns out there is such a thing as learning styles I woudn't be at all surprised if it varied by what you are learning.

Just as a thought, just because it doesn't improve learning outcomes doesn't mean it doesn't improve the learning experience. There might be a qualitative aspect missing from dismissing learning styles. Even if learning styles only improve experience as a placebo/illusion of self-control.

Since it's an identity thing, I'm guessing people are not going to want to let this one go. Just like they won't let go of their identity as a Meyers-Briggs I-N-T-whatever-the-hell, even though there's zero evidence for it as a meaningful framework.

Great point, I would have never considered that myself since I never took the concept personally.

I've found that M-B or the like is really useful to give people words to talk about who they think they are (which can be incredibly difficult without some starting point). When you have words to describe something, you can start to talk about it and in this case, how your personality interacts with others. That is, where are there things in the ways others describe themselves that you recognize in yourself or that you find entirely foreign. Then, you can ask how can recognizing these types of differences help you get along better.

I don't see M-B as a scientific readout, but it is helpful in giving tools to help people relate. It's only difficult when folks go off the deep end ("Aw shit, I'm a Hufflepuff!" syndrome) .

Or just as a starting point to realize that people are different and view the world differently. Many users approach software differently than programmers for example.

The problem comes when you start doing things like match people to jobs or tasks based on their MB profiles.

Identity is social... if you make a friend because you're a Pisces or whatever nonsense, regardless, that friendship is entirely real.

There’s plenty of evidence for it as a meaningful framework, it’s just very, very far from the best test psychometricians can design. All four MBTI components correlate with a Big Five component at an r squared between 0.49 and 0.74. There’s nothing corresponding to neuroticism.

Much better than astrology, much worse than a test designed and validated by psychometricians.

Tell that to Cambridge Analytica!

If you think MB and learning styles are bad, multiple intelligences is worse. There isn't even a test for that, so it's nothing but self-judging and the definitions are all inspirations coming from the head of one individual (Gardener). That's really one made for the "everyone's good at something" false self-esteem philosophy. The irony is that it turns out mental ability is positively correlated among many areas.

Every time someone someone tries to sell me on this tired idea, I ask them: if you had to teach someone the difference between different bird calls, e.g. that of the robin vs. the sparrow, and you're told that person is a "visual learner", do you mean to tell me you'd opt to show them the oscilloscope representation of the sound wave that each bird makes rather than playing them an actual recording of each call?

It's a patently reductionist and limiting idea that human beings have a stronger modality for learning any information regardless of the type. Yes, there may be a nugget of truth that some people will have profoundly more tactile sensitivity for example, and will thrive in activities like dealing cards, or juggling, or wrestling where that modality is embedded in the purpose of that activity. But the overgeneralization to say that this person will, for example, learn how to read better by touching words and letters rather than proven phonics methods is ridiculous.

> Every time someone someone tries to sell me on this tired idea, I ask them: ...

Now it might be time to turn the table and ask: is it equally easy for everyone to learn bird calls?

Or maybe people have different abilities?

Edit: my point is not that this hasn't been used to sell a lot of useless ideas but rather that people are actually different.

For your bird call example the obvious way to learn it is by listening.

Other times it is less obvious. A kid with severe dyslexia will probably learn history easier by listening while other kids will prefer to read it at my own pace (i.e. fast).

"Learning history" is an interesting example.

As far as actually studying history goes, one needs to carefully examine real evidence, and restructuring the evidence in a way that is appealing to the observer's "style" is almost certainly damaging to its authenticity. To a large extent, user preference shouldn't even be a factor here.

OTOH, "textbook history" is, bluntly, mostly about memorizing fact/oids embedded in a highly curated narrative. That a dyslexic student has trouble finding the needle in the haystack isn't surprising, but to me it suggests that we shouldn't have students digging in haystacks in the first place. I'm certain that a more topographically-simple representation of the "historical facts" would be beneficial to all parties.

More charitably, though, part of the goal of reading textbooks is to develop textual parsing (reading) skills, so again if you take that away from a dyslexic student, what are you really trying to accomplish as an educator? Making them feel good? FWIW, I have a friend who was very dyslexic, but managed to overcome it in high school, not coincidentally while he was taking a series of relatively rigorous history classes that involved a lot of reading and writing--now he reads a hell of a lot more than me. YMMV, of course.

> More charitably, though, part of the goal of reading textbooks is to develop textual parsing (reading) skills, so again if you take that away from a dyslexic student, what are you really trying to accomplish as an educator? Making them feel good?

No. You make the pass every mandatory exam. Many of the pupils who struggle most at school makes excellent carpenters, fishermen, chefs etc. Source: my father is a specialist teacher and tells me he get really good feedback on some of those who have struggled to even pass mandatory subjects.

And if reading barely passes and they get a medium good grade in some other subjects because they learnt better from audio books that is so much better than barely passing in all those subjects, right?

Not everyone is cut to be an engineer. Not everyone even wants which is why I argue that in addition to teaching more STEM, earlier we should also work to increase the status of other professions.

Your point is well made, but it's amusing that you use "proven phonics methods" as an example of something that's obviously the best way to learn something... Apparently, there's very heated debate on that subject. (News to me, as of a couple months ago.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-rea...

My wife is a reading instructor. I myself was a licensed teacher in a former life. Phonics is not the totality of reading education, but it's definitely core and dominant. The article you cite speaks to a political controversy, not a pedagogical debate backed by conflicting data.

Point me to the body of research on whole-language or some other approach as the dominant way to teach reading (basic reading to early primary grades, that is) and at least one school district that definitively promotes it as the dominant way, and I'll seriously reconsider that it hasn't been debunked.

I can't point you at research, but I can point you at a child who has learned reading through whole language and who emotionally resists any attempt to "sound out" words. If you spend time with ~5 year olds, I expect you'll met some who have started learning to read before they've joined kindergarten and started learning phonics.

See my post at the current top of this thread. I could not read until I had a teacher who taught me phonetics.

I have what (may be?) a counter-example. I'm a moderately accomplished amateur musician. I play the trumpet in an orchestra and sing in a chorus. Both the orchestra and the chorus consist primarily of amateurs.

The director of the chorus is adamant about having it be open to anyone in the community, regardless of their musical background. To support that (laudable, IMO) position, he attempts to teach the music by ear. He makes sheet music available, but highly discourages using it during rehearsal. What I have found is that I simply cannot learn music by ear - at least not in any reasonable length of time. I eventually memorize the music, but my memory of it is as visual (I remember what the written music looked like) as it is aural.

When digging into this further, I realize that there's a pattern here - tell me a name and I'll immediately forget it. But if I see it (also?) on a name tag, I'm much more likely to remember it. I have many other similar examples.

Other members of the chorus have thus labeled me as a "visual learner" rather than an "aural learner".

I'm not sure this is a counter example. It sounds to me like you are learning faster by unifying 2 streams of information. You read the music notes and you listen to the performance.

How would you perform just studying sheet music the night before and not playing at all.

If you had to teach someone to tell the difference between bird calls. A percentage of people would prefer to see the visual outputs vs hearing the sounds.

It does seem to me that the people who argue most passionately for different learning styles also tend to be the same people whose preferred learning style is the most passive - usually "visual learners" who somehow feel like they're absorbing more by looking at it rather than actually engaging it (by, for instance, working actual problems).

> tend to be the same people whose preferred learning style is the most passive - usually "visual learners" who somehow feel like they're absorbing more by looking at it rather than actually engaging it (by, for instance, working actual problems).

Trying to link a preference for visual learning/reading with passiveness comes off as weird for me. Reading almost certainly takes more activity from the reader.

Also your idea that visual learners tries to avoid workimg real problems seems to be that you have dealt with lazy people who tried to hide between learning styles.

For me, passive listening often makes me fall asleep or zone out. When I read I'm busy, I can read at my own speed and I can effortlessly go back and reread.

(When there is a podcast I actually want to listen to I'll prefer to listen to it while doing the dishess or driving or something. Somehow that calmes my mind enough to listen.)

> Reading almost certainly takes more activity from the reader.

People who make this kind of claim seem to think "visual learning" means being shown pictures or videos (not reading)

> Also your idea that visual learners tries to avoid workimg real problems seems to be that you have dealt with lazy people who tried to hide between learning styles.

I think that's exactly what GP was trying to say.

> Every time someone someone tries to sell me on this tired idea, I ask them: if you had to teach someone the difference between different bird calls, e.g. that of the robin vs. the sparrow, and you're told that person is a "visual learner", do you mean to tell me you'd opt to show them the oscilloscope representation of the sound wave that each bird makes rather than playing them an actual recording of each call?

(Note: I'm explicitly not taking in this comment any position on whether or not there is anything to this "learning styles" stuff)

That doesn't seem to actually be an argument against learning styles. Learning to recognize bird calls by ear is an inherently aural task. Of course everyone will learn it best by listening to bird calls.

I don't think anyone arguing for different learning styles claims that for any given person there is one style that is best for everything they try to learn regardless of the demands of the task they are trying to learn. I think they are claiming that when a task can be learned in different ways, some people will do better with one way then another.

> do you mean to tell me you'd opt to show them the oscilloscope representation of the sound wave that each bird makes rather than playing them an actual recording of each call?

Useful visual representations of bird calls do exist. For example: http://earbirding.com/blog/specs

...And from this page [0] I now know what a warble is. There's at least one additional pattern not on that grid that I've always thought was a warble, but apparently isn't - in my head it's basically a sine wave, but maybe I'm getting it confused with a "series" pattern?

Quite glad you posted this counterpoint. I mentioned it elsewhere, but I've informally done the same thing back when learning Spanish to assist in pronunciation.

Quick edit: The "possible fifth pattern" isn't a fifth pattern, it's actually on this page [1], a "triplet series".

[0] http://earbirding.com/blog/specs/the-four-basic-patterns-of-... [1] http://earbirding.com/blog/specs/changes-in-speed-and-pitch-...

Well designed graphical representations of bird calls would be very useful, after the association has been made between audio and graphical features. Graphics can be examined out of time, as it were: there is no need to replay them in a loop, many can be compared at a glance, particular details can be examined carefully without distraction by the rest, etc.

There is a reason people make graphical displays of many types of information: the visual system is a low latency, high bandwidth, high sensitivity, very effective pattern matching tool.

Among other things this is why we read instead of only listening to spoken language, and why we write music using graphical notation.

Personally I believe it's all about random success through variety: Present the same idea enough different ways and you're more likely to stumble across something which happens to click for a given student at a given moment.

In some cases, the overlap between different (individually unsatisfying) attempts to teach may itself be valuable, helping the student eventually make whatever intuitive leap is necessary for that moment of epiphany.

I keep seeing these articles, but I think they're only debunking the craziest interpretation of learning style theory. Obviously it's not going to be perfect, and you're a fool to pigeon-hole yourself into one mode of learning. But there's too much anecdotal evidence to dismiss the whole idea. When I've raised this before, over person suggested that we view learning styles as deficiencies in particular modes of learning, rather than special abilities, which I think fits both the evidence and the overall theme of learning styles just fine.

People's brains are different, and learning is an important thing we do, so it should surprise no one when people learn differently. It should also surprise no one when those differences turn out to be complicated and hard to measure, just like our brains. So yeah, the pop psych version is over simplified, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If I had a nickel every time a student came up to me and said, "I'm an x learner and your class is very y," I'd have a lot of nickels.

Every single time what they really mean is, "I'm doing terrible in your class, and even though it's probably my attitude or study habits or preparedness, I'm going to blame you."

In my own experience of studying during my life - which admittedly is a sample size of one and hugely biased, I would say that without fail, every class I've failed to gain traction in is because I was uninspired or lacked critical prerequisites in my understanding that helped my understand during the class, or some combination thereof.

I'm an X learner is a symptom of this. I'm an X learner means that I have pigeonholed myself as only being able to effectively learn when (for example) I am being taught by a highly engaging orator who exudes passion for their subject that exhibits as a charisma so drawing that I am excited by the material...

...I wonder how many teachers fit that description... looking at my history of taking classes, I'm going to reach into my farcically small data set and suggest almost none.

So... perhaps given that, I need to find a way to discover how engaging a topic is of my own accord so that I'm inspired to dig deep and understand it from the most fundamental levels required in order to absorb the material presented by my motivated, but somewhat uncharismatic teacher.

So for me, an X learner, my X is someone who absorbs material most effectively when my teacher is amazing... and I've done the leg work to understand what they're talking about before I sit down in their class and start asking stupid questions to disapproving tones of the other students.

I'm a fun learner and your class is very... not fun :P

I’ve been in plenty of situations where I was an X and the class was a Y. But rather than complain to the teacher about it, I would just self study harder and stop attending lectures. It usually worked.

I don’t expect that teachers can solve my problems, any of them actually, and especially when they are the problem what can you do?

i do actually learn best by reading. if the professor produces a set of authoritative notes for the class, i will get an A on every exam. as long as the professor makes it clear exactly what sections of the text are important, i will learn everything and still get an A every time.

if the professor says important stuff during lecture that cannot be read somewhere, i have no chance of retaining that information.

Writing own notes help in situation where informations is only said. Then you can read it. Pretty much no one is able to consistently remember heard information after single hearing, overwhelming majority of people need to revise it.

Writing helps because writing is an effective learning style, even if you burn the notes as soon as you write them. (Reading might help even more, but reading without writing helps less than writing + reading)

Learning style theory says that some people learn by reading, others by writing and yet others even differently.

Conversely, I retain almost nothing I get from books. But if you can explain something so I actually understand it, I don't even need to revise come exam time. If I understand it, or at least well enough to reconstruct a complete understanding on the fly, then I'll ace the exam. If you expect me to try and learn it from a book, I'll still do okay, but it'll take me 10 times longer to learn it.

Likewise, it's not a poor visualization because I/you are not a visual learner, it's a poor visualization because it's a poor visualization.

There's so much depth to presentation and feedback as broad concepts, and it's a real shame when improvement is stifled in favor of reductionist knee-jerk reactions like "This just isn't my style".

I'm sure there are a lot of parallels with "gamification" in learning/workplace environments.

It makes it easier if it's a learning style you enjoy. If a professor is just going to read from a book all day, I'm honestly going to have a bad time. I came to this class for you to convey the concept; hence why I'm paying for said class.

I had a professor who everyone seemed to love, but I did terribly in his class and just hated going. He'd constantly go off on tangents and every day he'd give us a totally illegible, handwritten page of notes. I never did well in his classes. Someone told me, "Well you rarely read the text books right; you just always go to class and take notes? Maybe you're not a book learner and people who like x are book learners?"

No, people who like his class put up with all his idiocy and find it cutsie pootsie. I took architecture classes in grad school that went over the exact same material (op codes and VLIW) and the professor was just better at explaining things. I was like, "Oh...this makes sense .."

It wasn't the teaching style, that other professor was just terrible at explaining these concepts (and really even understanding them).

Of course people differ in the way they learn and process information - but the division between visual/auditory/kinestetic is silly as claiming that someone learns better on a Tuesday because it was born on that day.

This article really just seems to be mincing words and debating what "style" means.

The fact remains: some methods of presenting information is worse than others. Some students will think they hate the subject material, but really what they hate is the teacher's relationship to the subject material. The teacher understands a subject a certain way, and that way might not make sense to a student. A different teacher will likely be able to present in a way that student will like.

Perhaps that's not a difference in "style" but it's a difference that matters.

The myth is that everyone has a learning style, that style can be summed up as one of a few categories, the style never changes, and will be stable year to year, and once you have identified what the style is with a questionnaire, you can tailor teaching to it to target particular students.

Once you weaken all those things, the predictive value of the theory is pretty well nil.

I've heard many more debunkings of learning styles than I've heard advocacies of learning styles. It's just fun to be contrarian.

In general, I'm of the opinion the current day style of teaching (someone supposed "expert" stands there and tells you stuff) is inefficient and a terrible way to teach anything. The best way to learn any concept, and I mean ANY concept is to see it in an application or tangible example. Without fail, that is how people will learn and retain information. That's why the only way to become proficient at math is to practice problems. The same concept applies in other fields. Receiving and relaying information are actually two quite separate skills. That's why the best way to know if you know a subject is to attempt to teach it yourself. Your knowledge gap should become immediately apparent. https://lifehacker.com/the-science-behind-how-we-learn-new-s...

Learning and Teaching are hard. Maybe learning styles are a "myth", maybe there just infinitely more complex things going on in a classroom/school than can be controlled for.

Also, some people are smart (read: have preexisting understanding of the concepts that precede the material being taught, typically combined with a desire to learn the material) and some people are stupid (read: the opposite of smart) and that can create its own set of hurdles.

I don't know if 'learning styles' are a thing or not, but I will point out that there are two broad categories. The first, which is often refuted in studies like these, I think of "sensory input" learning styles. The VARK (there are others) are basically, roughly, talking about how we get information into our brains. More or less the five senses.

More interesting to me are a second group, the cognitive learning styles, such as http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Lea...

These are more about the mental processing that goes on. Are you better at learning one step at a time, or do you need to get the "big picture" before the steps even make sense and are somewhat tractable to you?

I think it's hard to refute the idea that "certain people do better learning certain things in certain environments." It's hard to figure out which levers should be used (change the people? change the material? change the learning environment/teaching style?) to best educate.

I'm impressed that "Learning Styles" merely show no evidence of helping, rather than being actively harmful.

When I grapple with a hard problem, I will draw diagrams, talk to myself, use my hands or nearby objects as models, and also do the internal mental equivalents of all those things. In particular, I keep switching between things that might be called "geometrical visualisation", "formal reasoning" and "informal verbalisation".

I solve hard problems by tackling bits of them with whatever tool is works and then I try all the tools again on whatever parts of the problem remain. Thus the different tools work together, and are much more powerful combined than individually. If I stuck to using my "natural" tool, I might learn to use it very well, but I would get stuck as soon as it was the wrong tool. I would loose all that lovely synergy.

Bull Pucky!

Let me tell you my story. By third grade I could not read. I didn't get it. How could people remember all those words? Yet I had one of those off the wall IQs. In third grade they put me in Remedial Reading taught by Mrs. Gordon. If there is a Heaven, then there must be a special place in it for people like Mrs. Gordon.

Up until then we were supposed to learn to read by reading. It was the big thing then: learn to read the same way we learned to speak: by doing it. It worked for lots of kids. Not for me.

Mrs. Gordon taught me phonetics. That summer I was reading novels.

I once read a textbook on cognitive psychology. The author ranted about how awful phonetics was.

Clearly there are differences in learning styles. VARK appears to be wrong. It looks like too much thought and too little experimentation to me.

That doesn't mean there aren't differences in learning styles.

> Up until then we were supposed to learn to read by reading. It was the big thing then: learn to read the same way we learned to speak: by doing it. It worked for lots of kids. Not for me.

My impression is that it's pretty much settled science that Mrs. Gordon was right and phonics is better than or as good as look-say for the vast majority of children.

Most children might cope better than you did, but they may have done even better with Mrs. Gordon's phonics, and moreover the most successful ones may be "secretly" using phonics-type methods which they either worked out for themselves, or learnt at home or kindergarten.

Are there styles which are not tied to the type of sense input? I know that I sometimes learn some things by rote, going through a linear process, and subsequently discover patterns in it. Other times, I need to know the abstract principles behind a procedure before I can work in the details. Anecdotally, that suggests that there are two different ways of conceptualizing tasks (i.e., something close to "learning styles"), and also suggests that different tasks require different learning styles.

Is there any research into this meaning of learning styles, as opposed to tied to sensory modes?

I've never really thought about "learning styles" in this way. For me, it has more to do with nurture than nature (i.e. culture, upbringing, environment etc) than something inherent. I recall a talk on "systems thinking" and how certain tribes in Africa (? - I don't recall exactly) fared very poorly on certain Western tests that required them to group certain objects together. It turns out that due to their culture they thought of things in terms of their roles in a system, rather than classifications that may seem more fundamental to us. e.g. We might group cooking utensils together, whereas they (and this is just an arbitrary example) would group the utensils, food and seeds together because their taxonomy works on a "higher" (or rather, different) level. From this, it seemed obvious to me that certain learning "styles" are better suited to developing a certain type of thinking.

So from a practical point of view, I don't think that it's a myth at all...

Personally, I've never put much stock in the "style of learner" mantra. I can learn anything I want to via whatever means I wish. For instance, I can read sheet music and I can learn to play songs by ear.

Having said that, I definitely do have my preferences for learning, and sometimes I decide not to learn something simply because it isn't in a format I'm interested in ingesting at the moment. In nearly every case, it isn't as much about the format, per se, as the time it requires. I don't like spending a lot of time on something if I don't have to. So, if I know I can learn a song in half the time playing it by ear vs. reading sheet music, and all I currently have available to me is sheet music, I'll wait until later to learn the song; not because I can't learn it via sheet music, but because the motivation just isn't there with that particular format due to the time I perceive it will take.

The learning styles thing always confused me, because I would take the test to see which type I was, and get a different answer each time. I think it's because the way that you process different subjects just isn't necessarily consistent.

Ex: - Anything related to music is auditory. I learned to read sheet music, but I can never "visualize" the sounds from that. I would just have to play it and see what comes out. If I heard the first couple notes of a song I've heard before though, I can easily hear the entire song in my head and then figure it out on an instrument.

- Foreign languages, by contrast, I needed good printouts for. I'm slow at processing streaming sounds in real time, and even more so for unfamiliar languages. I think my brain just has to do a lot of post-processing with full context to make sense of verbal language. But I could read and write the languages just fine, and if the language is somewhat phonetic, I can lean on my spelling knowledge to speak it halfway decently.

- anything technical or mathematical requires that I solve some sort of problem with it to understand

- Any "softer" subject (psychology, history, economics) is best reinforced when I learn via interesting stories. I like that so many textbooks have those "real world application" sections or whatever to tie things into history or things I've seen in real life. A good orator though can also tell a compelling story to keep my attention engaged on the subject.

The absolute worst though is when an educator makes a slide show, prints those slides out and hands them out before class starts, then reads the slides and answers questions. That pretty much guarantees I have no investment in the class, as I don't really have incentive to take notes or listen, and I won't be surprised by anything because it only takes like 3 minutes to actually skim everything and see it's just bullet points pulled from the text book.

This is an example of a myth that just won't die. The Skeptics Society (to give but one example) has been trying for years to put this nonsense to rest:

https://www.skeptic.com/insight/the-myth-of-learning-styles/

I have even made multiple visits to my children's schools and tried to explain the actual research connected with pedagogy and communication but to little avail:

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....

Like the myth that "we only use 10% of our brains", the myth about learning styles seems immortal.

> Like the myth that "we only use 10% of our brains"

I've heard that the commonly-debunked version of this is a totally misrepresented version of the original claim. The debunked one being that we only use 10% of our brain matter ever, while the original claim was something more like "at a given instant in time, only ~10% of your neurons are firing".

> "at a given instant in time, only ~10% of your neurons are firing".

At any given instant in time, your computer is using less than 50% of its RAM: more than half of the bits are off!

So-called "learning styles" is only useful in that it forces the instructor to repeat the material 3 or 4 times thus reinforcing what he's already said. Repetition isn't necessarily a bad thing but wrapping it in this mythology leaves some to be desired. And this myth is alive and well at least where I go to school. One professor even has us go through a book and fill out a questionnaire to "determine" our style. And another, while not doing anything with it, brings the idea up frequently. I don't want to get a target painted on my back by going against orthodoxy so I play along. Sucks though. Feels like a real waste of time humoring this nonsense.

So glad to see this article. From time to time, my wife will ask me "how do I get the kids to learn X?" My answer is always the same: "Forget about the 'learning styles'. Drill baby, drill!"

Except that pedagogy matters and the way you teach things matters. Learning style don't exists research is not in opposition to that.

That's how you instill memorization, not comprehension.

I think the issue is more about teaching styles rather than learning styles. Teachers often only know one way to teach things and can't adapt at all to level differences. They often enjoy working MOST with the kids who ALREADY know everything due to tutors or parents.

So the kernel of truth is that different approaches are needed for different individuals but it jumped too quickly into specific archetypes.

Another kernel of truth is that everyone has the same potential but the majority flow often dienfranchises individuals who can't take advantage of the mainstream winds.

Clearly, the 'learning styles' propaganda we've been fed for decades was hogwash, like the type A/B theory or the MB personality style concept.

However, that doesn't mean that thinking about multiple ways to learn a concept is fruitless. Personally, the more ways I can be taught a concept, the better my chances are of understanding it.

I've benefited enormously from professors in math, physics, or computer science who've taken several approaches to teaching a difficult concept.

Even if there were distinct styles, seems like it would be better to develop the ones you're not good at, than the one you're already good at. Specifically this should be biased toward, and I say this in all seriousness, the teaching style that is cheapest. Because that is going to be the default not only in school but throughout life, and wherever people are concerned about costs, which is most places. Get good at that, and you've got it made.

> You can’t visualize a perfect French accent, for example.

Maybe not a "perfect" one, but you can visualize the sounds - pitch, hardness, etc. It's something I did back when learning Spanish to help memorize certain pronunciations. Think "maluma" vs "takete". But the shapes - which I'm hesitant to even call shapes - are extremely abstract, enough so it's not something I'd be able easily to draw on a piece of paper.

I think the only thing the referenced studies proved is that people don't know what their actual learning style is.

It only take one real counterexample to disprove something, so let me take a stab at this:

If learning styles were not real then why would people waste time making boooring videos when text is so much easier to both create an consume?

Or am I right that some people actually like those long winded videos? What about podcasts?

Spoken as someone who would sometimes skip the lectures, read the book and get best in class grades.

yet another phenomenon plenty of people experience subjectively being 'disproven' by experiment. It's no wonder the stock of so-called experts is diminishing...

the "but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s."

tells me that the author has a political axe to grind here

Obligatory YouTube from Willingham (mentioned in article).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk

I don't care who calls what a myth. I'm different, and I'm not arrogant enough to think I'm special.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226886/origin-of...

This doesn't apply to me, now even 40 years later. I hear and I remember, I see and I forget. The doing part is correct enough.

Much pedagogy, such as "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" is an effort to evade the reality that IQ is important and varies among students.

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