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As a student I was similar to you, I learned best by reading a textbook and working through problems. But I also knew other people who learned best by going to lectures. And still others who learned best by having a TA work through problems or questions with them and have a one-on-one conversation with them (as a TA I was often the other side of that). For some visual imagery was extremely helpful. For others (including myself) not as much.

And what works best can even depend on the subject material for a single individual.

In my experience, the way people learn best is far more variable than a fixed set of learning styles.

And the way our education system works is usually a shotgun approach where they same material is taught in multiple ways and hope that one of them works. Which ends up wasting a lot of the students time with the approaches that don't work for them. And of course there will be students where none of the methods quite work for them.

Well run classes have the textbook chapters your suppsed to read for the upcoming lecture. So your ready and can interact and ask questions. Learning isn't supposed to happen there. Then it's reinforced with hw.

The lazy thing to do is sit down and have someone talk to you. So this doesn't happen in practice.

It's crazy that the prevalent teaching method is sitting for long periods while listening to someone else's, constant-pitch voice. That's literally the best way to fall asleep, as shown in sleep meditation videos and the like. I was a terrible student, could not keep my eyes open in any class, lost interest, never made it to colleague. Then a few years later I did self-paced distant learning and got my degree in no time while working.

I’m sure most instructors would, if they had a choice, cut lectures and just have discussion sections/labs. But this would require that everybody read the book and come to the discussion sections ready to engage.

Lectures seem more like a failure-mode that has somehow become the standard. Assume the students won’t read, and have a human take the book’s job. Humans are… not great books.

It is weird that video-lectures+in person discussion sections didn’t become the standard by, like, 2010 or so.

The lecture style appears to come from a time before the printing press when access to information was poor, enabling students to be essentially human photocopiers to copy the material to bring back to the home for the rest of the family to learn from.

Seems we still do it because we have a love of tradition.

YMMV, which is kind of the entire point here. Personally I found lectures to be a great way to learn, given the right teacher. A big key for me was to stop taking notes so that I could actually focus on what was being said instead. Another was, for lack of a better word… humanity. Video lectures just don't capture me the same way at all.

I always had to take notes, still do, if I want to be able to focus on the speaker. Something about how I process speech.

I'm very skeptical about the "there are no learning styles" results.

The idea is that it is unlikely that individuals can be neatly categorized into one specific learning style among of set of learning styles. What allows one to learn best is highly contextual and ever changing.

This wouldn't work well in my engineering classes unfortunately. Sure you might follow along better, but then you'd have no example problems to study and would be screwed when it came time to study for the test.

Wasn't there a math prof that did exactly that? Can't find the link now, but after some getting used to the results were overwhelmingly positive.

TBH, just staying at home and watching YouTube videos (on the same topics) is likely better than sitting in the average lecture, even if students don't want to read at all...

>TBH, just staying at home and watching YouTube videos (on the same topics) is likely better than sitting in the average lecture, even if students don't want to read at all...

Good luck getting the students to watch the videos.

When I started college in 2009, most large classes were videotaped and posted online within a day or two. Still had to show up for discussion and small lectures but at least those usually involved more student engagement

Yeah, especially since COVID that seems to be popular. But, it doesn’t really lessen the workload on the instructor. IMO it would be better to just take the “best hits” video lectures from the last couple years, give those to the students, don’t do lectures at all, and then focus 100% on discussion sections (which really benefit more from the personal touch). But, for some social reason or something, this wouldn’t fulfill student expectations.

Some people make that monotone work. I have avidly listened to one smooth monotone speaker talk for 45 minutes, while falling asleep in minutes for a different speaker at the same time of day (different day) who seamingly was much more energetic.

I have no idea what the difference was, but i've observed it.

Most professors I knew would much prefer people read, and the class be used for summary, discussion and problem solving. The problem is they could never get the students to read prior to the lecture.

I think lectures as a form of teaching were invented in the middle ages, before the printing press was available. The whole university might have owned only one copy of each book, so learning by reading it wasn't an option for most students. So the professor, who had read the book before, would lecture them on its contents.

Good lecturers are far better than books. Then engage with the class, ask questions, adapt the content to what the students want to know or have trouble with, etc

I've spent a bunch of time over the last couple of years working on learning and enablement programs. The main thing that I've learnt is that nobody likes the bulk of online learning efforts: dated videos with forced Q&A interspersed.

I've got a strong hunch that learners have an overall learning modality: some prefer video, some prefer audio, some prefer long form text, and so on, but--there's also a local preference based on their current context: you might have a stronger preference to video for commuting or perhaps you like to print out materials and read it.

Finding ways to allow learners to come along their own journey that meets them where they are right now is key to generating better outcomes.

> I can't listen to lectures at all. Like I just fall asleep.

Falling asleep doesn't mean you didn't learn from the lecture. I fall asleep during lectures and still learn a lot from them, I get sleepy when I learn stuff so falling asleep during learning is natural.

So don't conflate "I focused" with "I learned". You don't learn by focusing, you learn by rewiring your brain, and you rewire your brain best when you sleep.

I think people who got praised for working hard rather than for learning seek out activities where they work hard rather than activities where they learn, and conflates that for learning styles when it is just their own mental bias. Or people who prefer one style since it is more comfortable etc, people are really bad at evaluating how well they learned something.

Idk. Hard to learn when the professor put you to sleep like a lullaby