I truly wish these models were available when I was in University. As a visual learner it would have been much easier for me to understand certain topics with illustrative diagrams rather than reading a wall of text.
This may be a myth. Big paper in 2009, but nobody's proved it's real in the 15 years since.
In a 2009 review paper entitled Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, researchers investigated the “meshing hypothesis,” which is the idea that students learn better when instruction is provided in a format that matches their learning style. Their conclusion is a hard pill to swallow. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers wrote. “If classfication of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.”
2009: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-...
2022: https://fee.org/articles/learning-styles-don-t-actually-exis...
APA goes so far as to say (2019) believing in learning styles is detrimental:
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...
Edit: just to test myself I asked Nano Banana 2 to generate “an undergraduate infographic poster about how atoms work” - and the result was something right out of a middle-school science textbook and very Bohr…
There's definitely more dogfooding that needs to be done. And id argue that if your purpose is truly to learn or to teach, the process of describing that image will do wonders for retention.
If you're wanting to learn then you won't have the expertise to craft a prompt that has the correct details or to spot when the model makes a mistake in its output.
If you're in a teaching position then you won't have anything to learn.