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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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-...

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.

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.