Study: Students did not benefit from studying according to “learning style”

I always thought it was counter productive to “pigeon hole” oneself as only able to learn one way. The whole “I’m a visual learner” becomes a self-fulfilling reinforced statement. Sort of like people who say they are not a “math person”... well if you think that way you certainly won’t be.

Quite understandably, there's a lot of wishful thinking in education. Most teachers have good intentions and want to see their students succeed, so they struggle with the reality that a lot of students just aren't academically inclined and really struggle with the basics of the curriculum. It would be nice to think that everyone is a genius; the "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" theories offer the very appealing notion that everyone is gifted deep down and a teacher just needs to find the appropriate tools to unlock that inner brilliance.

Unfortunately, this wishful thinking can lead to an inadvertent cruelty of unrealistic expectations. Through no fault of their own, some people just aren't very intelligent and have no real chance of excelling academically. We encourage those people to go to college, without considering whether they have any real chance of graduating. We lumber them with a few semesters worth of student debt for no good reason. We offer them no good alternatives in terms of vocational training or apprenticeships. We don't provide them with the educational, social and emotional support they need to make the most of their potential and find a path towards a fulfilling life. The flip side of "anyone can succeed if they really set their mind to it" is the rather callous "if you didn't succeed, it's only because you didn't try hard enough".

>No such thing as learning styles, it's a myth.

Some studies go one way, other studies go the other way on the matter.

Plus studies in such soft sciences are notoriously feeble, and there's also the whole replication crisis.

I don't think we're ready to discard the whole idea just yet.

It's really weird how people desire to classify their personalities. I suppose it's a human instinct to classify and organize all information.

Same with Meyers-Briggs personality types, which are accepted as truth by so many that some companies use the test with new hires. It's about as scientific as a horoscope. All the personality traits described are tuned to that magical level of vagueness--vague enough to describe literally anyone from time to time, as we are all many different people as time goes on, but specific enough to seem eerily accurate. We want to believe things like this.

Same with "learning styles." It's a convergence of cognitive bias. We want to classify, name, and organize everything--especially when it pertains to ourselves. We want to be unique and know ourselves. It has an added bonus of being an excuse for our failings as well.

I think most people don't know what science really is, but they think they know how it sounds. So people easily believe and even self-diagnose themselves with pseudoscientific phenomena like this. It's so important to be able to look for predictions that are being made and then confirmed or disproven, and the rigor of an experiment to prove it's not just wishful thinking or bias.

If you decide you have a different learning style because [brain words], then do an amateur experiment to try to assess how it has affected you, it's really hard to actually nail down what's happening. You might simply be focusing harder because of the novelty of the situation. You only have a single subject for your experiment, and the subject is also the observer. Terrible setup. But most laypeople will believe that seeing is believing, and that they have proven something to themselves beyond doubt. Thus pseudoscience spreads.

In mathematics there's always several ways to apply one's senses to understand and manipulate a concept. For example, an equation can be understood as being a string of symbols or a commutative diagram, or as a string diagram. These emphasize symbolic processing and spatial manipulation to varying degrees.

It would be perverse to tell a mathematician to use only their best intuition to learn. These sort of thing lean on each other to make one another stronger. Why would it be any different for any sort of learner?

I know I have horrible auditory memory, and really good visual memory; which at first gives some credibility to learning styles being a thing.

But then I read this: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-audi...

According to that article, the brain remembers visual/tactile memories equally well and better than auditory memory.

So in order to prove learning styles exist, we'd need to find people who provably have better auditory memories than visual memories.

I've not seen any studies or data for this, so I'd hesitate to call it a myth until I did, since on the surface the idea seems plausible. Wish the paper referenced in that article wasn't paywalled. Be curious if it's been shown that all (or a large majority) of people tested show the same result (visual/tactile > auditory).

I'm largely of the opposite group. Having names that aren't pronounceable helps me read code faster, as I don't try to pronounce it, and can just treat the entire word as a unit rather trying to "read" it.

I do the same in English when reading fast. I distinctly remember reading "Hermione" in Harry Potter as a child, and, because it was a name I hadn't encountered before, just "reading over" it and not thinking about the actual pronunciation. I didn't think about the actual pronunciation until some years later (probably when it was brought up in the books). Even now, if I try to pay attention to my internal monologue whilst reading, it's often words running into each other or being skipped, unless I deliberately slow down, because I'm not actively subvocalising and I'm reading faster than I would pronounce them.

Do you go all the way to

Good: “begin”, “end”. Bad: “{“, “}”, “:”

? I’m asking because one can also see keywords as punctuation, adm punctuation tends to be short. That would make “fn” better than “func” (λ wold be even better, if it were easier to type on common keyboard layouts)

FWIW I follow your argument but my perception is not visual at all but “grammatical”. Do you read punctuation out loud in your head? If not then whatever you do is how I chunk “fn”, which if it has to be verbalized gets pronounced by inserting schwas wherever convenient so like “fun”

I think this has more to do with how our brain processes words written in a phonetic alphabet.

When reading words we are familiar with, our brain treats the word as a single symbol linked to meaning (or pronunciation).

When we encounter words that we aren't familiar with, the brain has to revert back to "manual mode", sounding it out to see if there is a link to any known meaning.

If you use one of the spellings you currently consider bad regularly, it will eventually be recognized as a symbol and treated as such.

For instance, reading "knife" shouldn't provoke a negative reaction unless you're not familiar with the word; despite it having a silent K which is just silly.

What's hard in pronouncing "fn"? It's "ef-en". You don't pronounce "PC" as "p'k" or "PR" as "prr", do you?

In regards to self guided study, don't fall into the trap of thinking that because you could do it, everyone else could.

This is going to sound really conceited and condescending, but I'm going to write it anyway:

I reckon that I could've finished my BSc in Computer Science in probably half the time required. I attended only about 2 weeks of lectures per semester, generally didn't start assignments more than a week before they were due, and didn't study more than about 3 days before the exam.

For most people though, that doesn't work. They need to go to lectures, they need to study for a couple of weeks before exams, they need to attend the tutorials. Structured learning and the education system is made for the bottom 95% of the population. Schools spend a lot more time, money, and effort on special education and learning support for less gifted students than they do for the gifted ones. It's different at every school, but I remember that through most of primary school, there were no supplemental learning or other activities for gifted students. I was stuck in the same normal stream as everybody else. It wasn't until I got to high school, where students were streamed into different classes, that I actually got pushed to learn and use my abilities, the top stream was basically pushed a year ahead of all the other students.

Even for the normal stream of people though, there are people who will excel in certain areas and struggle in others. But a teacher has a class of 30 students to teach. The education system is made for the masses, we would likely get better educational outcomes from having much smaller class ratios, 10 students per teacher maybe, but nobody has the money to pay that many teachers, and there aren't that many teachers out there.

Anyway, my point is that for the HN community, being given a set of learning goals and being told to find a way to learn them would work. For most people, they would flail around and struggle.

As someone who found their path earlier than most, and has a bit of the protestant work ethic I see the appeal. However, there's two problems to this that I can see:

First, most folks do not know what they wish to be from a reasonably young age. For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a geologist, probably until about high school, despite having discovered computing at an early age. Funny enough, I never really recognized that I could turn programming into a career. To me it was just something fun that I did.

Consider the trope of the college kid who goes to school to find themself, bounces around majors, and graduates late. I know some nations have success tracking students earlier, but that is usually around the high school timeframe at best. Part of early education is setting the foundation and teaching one how to learn. This reduces the amount of years available for "Doogie Howser" self-study down to only four or so, plus an additional three or four for higher learning.

Second, even if someone "knows" what they want to do I think many don't necessarily have the drive and resilience for self-guided study and the associated struggle. Many need the structure, and "hand-holding" that comes with a normal classroom.

Additionally, some see value in the "well rounded" model of education and so depending on what you want to be it may or may not make sense. Having been of the "I speak English, why study it" school of thought, well, I'm sure this "essay" and the comma atrocities therein speak for itself. Just imagine if I had spent even less time in an English course.

If we wanted a more utilitarian society of technicians this would be a good idea, but there are many facets to education besides occupation.

The most important skill I learned in school was how to deal with other people when you have to be together every day.

If you are interested in this topic, the book you're really looking for is Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...

One issue is learning is largely prepared and delivered as a linear experience.

Our paths in life, are not linear.

What we learn, grow from, transfer skills through is not as pretty as a sequential grade or degree system.

Employers care about hiring competencies - institutions try to call it holistic but there remains a poor signal to noise ratio in terms of transferable skills.

The traditional 2,000 year old form of higher education is no longer able to keep up with the rate of change in society.

Today by the time higher institutions prepare new learning material release, it's outdated.

Great example, rocket science, let’s throw a bunch of 15 year olds who say they want to be a rocket scientist into nasa. What could go wrong? The mit engineering grad has proven for a few more years that he’s less likely to screw things up. The system sucks but it’s not an easy problem to solve

Lectures are a notoriously inefficient method of teaching, though, so you probably aren't comparing "merely" listening vs reading. One simple way to introduce a difference is if you're just passively listening to a lecture vs actively studying material when reading (conventional theory says the latter is better, because of it being active, IIUC). You might have decent study skills of your own.

Learning styles are a surprisingly specific idea (i.e., it refers to specific differences between people and makes specific predictions about how well they'd do when learning in specific ways, which is what doesn't turn out to exist), so you could totally have learning styles turn out to be bunk, yet have plenty to say about different teaching methods. Education research literature is full of stuff by people trying different things, that's where inverted classrooms came from, but that's not anything to do with learning styles.

I feel like all people learn better his way. The current system is a remnant of a time when books were expensive and a farmers son might have a hard time affording books.

I am working on an educational related project.

Pretty much what I do is have traditional textbook type materials for students to read. I also have the same materials in a visual interactive type lecture that basically explains/shows how to do something followed by some sort of interactive exercise where the student can apply the previously taught materials. The interactive exercises also act as a way to teach material as well. By analyzing how the student interacts with the exercise I can determine how well they understand the lesson. Nothing is locked in. If students don't want to read the textbook then they don't have to. Likewise, if students don't want to listen to the lectures then they don't have to either they can skip to the exercises.

After learning about 10 of these lessons that compose the chapter they can take a skills quiz to see how well they know the material. I intentionally make all the skill quizzes extra hard just to make sure students know the material before progressing to the next chapter.

If you have ever used codecademy then it is very similar. The only difference is my project is focused on entire college courses. If you took MIT OCW and combined it with codecademy then that is basically what I am working on. I am combining the formal structure of a college course with the technological innovation seen in codecademy.

Yup. I might read one section over a few times before moving on, and/or spend way less time in others. Reading I go at the pace I can digest it, not the pace of the lecturer.

The reporter doesn't make any claims like that. The word "prove" or "proof" don't appear at all. Instead they say, "The findings do not support the learning styles concept," and "Student grade performance was not correlated in any meaningful way with their dominant learning style or with any learning style(s) they scored highly on."

If there's a complaint to be had here, it's that the HN poster changed the word "did" to "do" in the headline while posting here.

> “Another nail in the coffin for learning styles” – students did not benefit from studying according to their supposed learning style

> By Christian Jarrett

> The idea that we learn better when taught via our preferred modality or “learning style” – such as visually, orally, or by doing – is not supported by evidence.

Specifically, x is "when taught via our preferred modality", and y is "we learn better". The first sentence of the article gets it right, but the headline is where the false leap of logic occurs. Perhaps the headline-writer is a different person to the article-writer.

Edit: As pointed out by sirclueless, the headline was further distorted by empath75 when posted on HN.

It's hard to justify funding if "all you're doing" is in/validating or peer-reviewing work so it gets repackaged at a breakthrough =(

It's a complete misnomer. It's such a bad fit, it has to be marketing.

First and foremost this is just another social sciences study. Most of everybody is aware of the reproducibility crisis yet seem to fail to connect the dots to new studies - it's not going anywhere which means that science, particularly in the social and physiological sciences, is somehow deeply flawed. That said, this study confirms my own biases so I want to believe. One big reason is to consider the academic output of schools in places such as Korea and China. Learning is extremely structured and more analogous to a factory line than a school, in the US style, and their output absolutely dwarfs ours. The typical argument against this system is that mechanical teaching leads to mechanical thought, which is is supposed to support things such as the fact that China has an abysmal rate of Nobel laureates.

However, something missing there is that Nobel Prizes are frequently rewarded long after something is first done when its relevance is proven or otherwise becomes more clear. For instance Stephen Hawking never received a Nobel prize, yet if we observed Hawking Radiation - he likely would have been awarded one for a theoretic hypothesis dating back to 1974. The point there is that as recently as the 1950s Chinese were starving to death by tens of millions and they had little to no academic culture to speak of. Their riveting success is a very much a new thing and so the lack of Nobel standard achievements is something that's not [yet] a reasonable indication of much.

Having fun is different from learning. If fun learning is ineffective, it's not good learning.

Well phonics was also considered a fad and the optician that diagnosed my dyslexia asked if I had been taught using phonic's as that was though to have worse outcomes for Dyslexics (neurodiverse) students.

Doing, failing, reflection.

The article gives some examples, motly experiential engagement.

"Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand."

I have some connections to schools, and "learning styles" is not a major concept at all. "Teaching modalities" (lecture, reading, labs) seems similar at a glance, but it's quite different. It's not that each person has a preferred modality, it's that different modalities have different benefits in a relative non-student-specific way.

It's a weird contrarisn fad on HN to constantly rehash old debunkings of research no one in the real world cares about.