Why the Learning Styles myth spreads
blog.delta-academy.xyz
blog.delta-academy.xyz
Learning is complicated and involved and it's hard to show students that learning is a marathon not a sprint.
I wish they stopped teaching this myth completely because it gives rise to this inherent sexism and binary view when comparing creative and logical thinking. There's no right-hand dominant or left-hand dominant brain. I don't know if it's changed in more recent generations but I was taught that girls are more creative and boys are more logical and that's why more boys go into math and sciences. That kind of thinking is the root of the current gender imbalances among stem and engineering fields. In most ways they are orthogonal.
https://www.thersa.org/blog/2018/09/creativity-and-logic-avo...
People in general like labels and categories.
I do agree with the general point of your comment, on how this can significantly account for individuals decisions and self-understanding.
I think it's a fair assessment based on the stories I hear from my friends and the kids I tutor about what made girls choose certain areas of focus compared to boys. It was even more enlightening hearing about my women friends who ended up not completing a major in stem and especially CS to graduation.
I have to admit it's not a hard quantifiably scientific. I still choose to believe it.
It's not going to be one little thing that will fix gender imbalances, but in my opinion, these kind of practical changes is where you see longer term positive consequences.
I have a brilliant friend, finished a doctorate, nurse practitioner. We talk about our journeys and she still talks about feeling somewhat insecure that her "brain isn't made for math" and I always call her out, she finished some of the most rigorous years of schooling in healthcare and she still doesn't believe she would be good at math. I don't think she has to do math unless she happens to find interest in it, she doesn't have anything left to prove to herself or anyone else. I just feel frustrated as an educator by how rigid that kind of thinking is and how long it follows students through their life.
This is a challenging subject to be objective about, considering it quite literally has a subjective component. Cheers
I spent decades playing jazz using mostly what I would now call compensatory techniques because ear training is so much harder for me than theory and harmony. I only became a really good player when I spent a VERY long time learning in the least comfortable and most humbling way for me.
The biggest issue is that most of the time learner is not qualified to determine which style works best for them, and confuses what feels best for what works best. Someone who has taught hundreds of people for many years knows what works (like my university teaching musician friends). And they never talk about learning styles.
That said, there definitely are people who are much better at the sub-skill exercised by a certain modality. But this is not a proxy for progress. My example, I could learn chord progression arithmetic very easily. So I would be seen as someone who learns music mathematically. But that's wrong, that's just what I happen to be good at, not how I learn. Focusing on it for many years was exactly the opposite of what would have given me maximum progress.
It's not just a myth, it's a trap.
I learn best through reading.
Now, it may be true that's because I grew up mostly learning by reading -- it may be a trained difference, not an inherent one -- but it's unquestionably a difference.
People believing their learning style is static and teachers treating learning styles as static is the actual issue.
As a basic example, if you are not familiar with how to read music, it would be hard to learn and build on music theory and harmonies. That doesn't make you an auditory learner, it just means you know how it's being taught. Abstracting the musical notes into colors or frequency isn't going to make it easier to learn just because you consider yourself a "visual" learner. Certain concepts may seem clearer and patterns could be more easily identifiable, but in practice it wouldn't be easier.
> not a inherent weakness that you can't work past.
Perhaps this is the real problem. Taking for the sake of argument that there are different inherent learning styles, perhaps the issue is that some believe that means you can't work past them. It seems much more likely that you can, with training and practice. We learn to overcome all sorts of other unique limitations, after all.
And there is some reason to believe that there are different inherent learning styles. There are many different sorts of "intelligence", after all, which implies that not everyone's brain processes information in the same way.
Personally, I don't know enough about this subject to have an opinion either way, but it's very interesting to ponder.
From my understanding the two major branches of intelligence are crystallized and fluid. Fluid being used to describes the ability to solve novel reasoning problems and crystallized being used to describe how you can solve deductive reasoning problems. Essentially how easily you can assimilate new information to a new problem and how easily you can re-apply and transform already learned information from an old problem.
Working memory is how you account for differences at an individual scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelli...
I personally believe people might be predisposed to certain strengths, similar to how a tall person may be more naturally competitive at professional basketball. But I believe for a majority of situations, the difference is negligible. Practice is more important than any inherent strength or weakness we might be born with.
I once met a guy that could draw the most amazing things, seemingly straight out of his own imagination. I asked him how he was able to do that, and he just said "I see a picture of it in my head, and I replicate it." Try as I might, I simply cannot visualize things like that. That might explain why I struggle to draw or whiteboard anything without using a visual reference.
I think it's unfair to compare yourself to an artist at that skill level because you can't judge the amount of hours it took to get to the level of being able to translate what they imagine onto paper.
I mentor all the time and the hardest is when I have to explain to kids starting out CS how I "know" what to do when I have to go from a figma mockup to a working proof of concept code. I don't know how, other than that it feels more like muscle memory than it does actual thinking. It's hard because even I don't know all of the little things I needed to learn to accomplish my goal.
[1]>"Groot's first experiment seemed to confirm this theory: He placed twenty different pieces on a chess board, imitating the layout of a possible game. Then, de Groot asked a variety of chess players, from inexperienced amateurs to chess grandmasters, to quickly glance at the board and try to memorize the location of each piece. As the scientists expected, the amateurs drew mostly blanks. The grandmasters, however, easily reproduced the exact layout of the game. The equation seemed simple: memory equals talent.
But then de Groot performed a second experiment that changed everything. Instead of setting the pieces in patterns taken from an actual chess game, he randomly scattered the pawns and bishops and knights on the board. If the best chess players had enhanced memories, then the location shouldn’t matter: a pawn was still a pawn. To de Groot’s surprise, however, the grandmaster edge now disappeared. They could no longer remember where the pieces had been placed."
The science on effectiveness of lectures is pretty strongly against them and has been for decades.
https://epigeum.com/downloads/uct_accessible/uk/01_lecturing...
> Lectures are the best way to convey information.
> Feedback: Inconclusive evidence. Lectures can be effective for conveying information – but not more so than a whole range of other methods, including independent study of textbooks.
> Lectures are the best way to develop students' understanding and thinking.
> Feedback: Contradicted by evidence. Developing understanding requires active effort by students and most lectures make students passive and so are much less effective than a range of alternatives that involve more active learning.
> Lectures are the best way to develop students' attitudes and beliefs.
> Feedback: Contradicted by evidence. Attitudes are changed by engaging in open debate, and one-way communications are relatively poor at changing what people believe.
> Lectures are the best way to inspire interest in the subject.
> Feedback: Contradicted by evidence. While a few lecturers manage to inspire their students, most do not. Lectures rarely lead to more subsequent study effort than do other methods.
> Lectures are the best way to 'model the discourse' of your subject, demonstrating how arguments are formed.
> Feedback: Inconclusive evidence. Perhaps this is because students cannot always spot the forms of argument that teachers are trying to model or realise that is what they should be paying attention to.
> Lectures are cheaper than alternatives in the use of teachers' time.
> Feedback: Inconclusive evidence. Large-class lectures are clearly cheaper than smaller discussion classes. However, they may take up a lot of teachers' time in their preparation and there may be ways of giving students access to the course content that use no teacher time at all.
> Lectures pace students through a course, making it clear what they should be studying each week.
> Feedback: Inconclusive evidence. Arguably this is quite important – and you might notice problems if you took the lecture away – but there is little evidence about this role.
> From a pragmatic perspective, the concerning implications of these results are moderated by a number of methodological aspects of the reported studies. Most used convenience sampling with small samples and did not report critical measures of study quality. It was unclear whether participants fully understood that they were specifically being asked about the matching of instruction to Learning Styles, or whether the questions asked could be interpreted as referring to a broader interpretation of the theory. These findings suggest that the concern expressed about belief in Learning Styles may not be fully supported by current evidence, and highlight the need to undertake further research on the objective use of matching instruction to specific Learning Styles.
So, they may just be talking past each other. Is it possible to express ideas with both words and visuals? Is doing both a good idea? Does a person always learn every idea best by only being taught with a specific style?
edit: the lady they link to as calling the debunkers racist seems to have a good grasp of things to me:
> The debunkers' core claim is based on what's known as the meshing (or matching) hypothesis –– the idea that if learning styles exist, experiments should show that students will always learn better if taught in their preferred style. But in defining learning styles (a theory about the brain) as equivalent to the matching hypothesis (a theory about instruction) the debunkers have created a straw man. As Kozhevnikov points out, "the fact that a simple version of the matching hypothesis – which rests on the assumption that a given person can be characterized by a single type of style, independent of the task –– has not been supported does not imply that the concept of cognitive style itself is invalid."
The way this gets used in schools is almost always with respect to the meshing hypothesis
These don't seem matching specific to me. Seems like the disclaimer at the top is itself unscientific.
It's just a list of study tips, arranged in sections.
If she believes that different types of brains need to be taught in different ways than other types of brains, that's a far stronger claim that deserves some evidence.
> The best exercise is the one you'll stick with!” is a cheesy, cliche answer that you've heard a thousand times before. But it's true. By the most objective definition, the most effective exercise is the one you'll do. Because heavy squats are fantastic for strength, unless you don't do them.
And someone saying, no you still get excercise even if you do the thing you're not going to stick with.
What can you make predictions about if the matching hypothesis isn't true? What does this actually tell you about the world? Nothing.
With regards to learning styles, I have been around enough students and been around enough teachers to think that there actually might be something to it. That different people might learn better with different modalities.
I used to always skip homework because I thought I understood the subject.
But you learn a lot from 'doing' esp. all the weird corner cases. It makes you think about it in an applied way.
I used to like the kids who did well despite not doing homework, now I like the kids that do their homework.
I don’t think those are strong arguments for claiming experience is better than a study. Methodology-wise, experience doesn’t pose a hypothesis first and then tests it, and doesn’t statistically evaluate conclusions. That leads to the risk that conclusions get drawn on a few outliers or more ‘visible’ students. Sample size wise, decades of teaching or large classes will have more subjects, but they’ll be more diverse, too, and their attributes aren’t tracked well.
On the plus side, experience doesn’t feel the “publish or perish” pressure. That significantly decreases the risk one starts shouting around conclusions that aren’t fully supported by the evidence.
If you replace 'learning style' with 'preferred learning style', which I think is more accurate, the whole discussion becomes moot.
Another example: the school system in Oakland, CA, in 2015 abandoned its phonics-based approach to reading instruction, which was actually helping kids learn to read and get good scores in reading. The reason was because the teachers felt the curriculum was "colonizing" and they didn't have enough agency to determine how to introduce reading to kids. The fact that phonics has proven to be a good basis for instruction in mapping written words to sounds, even in a phonetically bizarre language like English, and everything else including "whole word" instruction and whatever learning-by-osmosis method the Oakland district ended up adopting, has produced poorer results, was irrelevant to the school board who made this decision.
Which is to me unconscionable: when it comes to education I favor whatever gets kids to learn. Especially in a place like Oakland; if you've ever been there, you'll know those kids need good education. But that's how it goes when egos, entrenched bureaucracies, and the wishful thinking of powerful people are on the line.
In an unrelated field, it also resembles the fixation the biochem community had on beta-amyloid proteins in Alzheimer's. It was an enticing theory because it seemed so simple: clear away the plaques and the brain would heal -- no more Alzheimer's! Of course it didn't work that way in reality, but it worked so well in mouse models, leading to more intense wishcasting by other researchers and on it goes.
Not sure about the comparison with beta-amyloid though. There are good reasons to think it is involved with Alzheimer's - genetics, histology, etc.
And I don't think many researchers thought that would be the problem solved. It was just a very logical target in tackling a very challenging disease (like all neurodegenerative diseases, basically none of which are cured).
I can pinpoint over 10 dumb decisions taken by my corporate, as a result of office politics and jockeying for various positions.
There are many myths corporate britain believes, from forcing develipers back in the office to improve productivity despite having concrete evidence that it doesn't, to hiring 'agile practitioners', etc.
No union required for dumb decisions
And teachers' unions in the USA are unions of government workers, not corporate.
This, times 10. I worked in a lab on education-related subject at a top university and it was wishful thinking all the way down: from Ministry bullshit like "education 5.0" and grants to whatever buzzword heavy proposal was thrown, to researchers ignoring obvious flaws in their dumb but cool things that are set to fail from the start, to arranging the reality of collected data (from weak protocol) and their interpretation, etc. It was full of people trying to make a name for themselves but very few solid research. Most of the papers were flawed, irrelevant or kinda stretched reality.
The article includes quite a bit of history about reading instruction, insights from neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene [1], a reference to a 2000 report from the National Reading Panel [2], and reports by education reporter Emily Hanford on why the science of reading has not been rapidly adopted [3].
[0] https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670021105 [2] https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/p... [3] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/10/23/hanfordandread...
> The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.
Then it's a bad sign. I'm glad they don't let us get past the second paragraph before turning it into a culture war.
The Minority View in the 2000 report seems a bit less 'culture war' and more thoughtful:
> In the end, the work of the NRP is not of poor quality; it is just unbalanced and, to some extent, irrelevant. But because of these deficiencies, bad things will happen. Summaries of, and sound bites about, the Panel’s findings will be used to make policy decisions at the national, state, and local levels. Topics that were never investigated will be misconstrued as failed practices. Unanswered questions will be assumed to have been answered negatively. Unfortunately, most policymakers and ordinary citizens will not read the full reviews. They will not see the Panel’s explanations about why so few topics were investigated or its judgments that the results of research on some of the topics are inconclusive. They will not hear the Panel’s calls for more and more fine-tuned research. Ironically, the report that Congress intended to be a boon to the teaching of reading will turn out to be a further detriment.
> As an educator with more than 40 years of experience and as the only member of the NRP who has lived a career in elementary schools, I call upon Congress to recognize that the Panel’s majority report does not respond to its charge nor meet the needs of America’s schools. In spite of the Panel’s diligent efforts and its valuable findings on a select number of instructional practices, we still cannot answer the first and most central question of the charge: “What is known about the basic processes by which children learn to read.” We still do not know what types of instruction are suitable for different ages and populations of children. We still do not know the relative effectiveness of the three models of reading as bases for instruction. We do not even know whether the existing body of research can answer those questions. Therefore, I ask Congress not to take actions that will promote one philosophical view of reading or constrain future research in the field on the basis of the Panel’s limited and narrow set of findings