Do Students Really Have Different Learning Styles?
blogs.kqed.org
blogs.kqed.org
> Third, learning-styles theory has succeeded in becoming
> “common knowledge.” Its widespread acceptance serves as
> an unfortunately compelling reason to believe it. This
> is accompanied by a well-known cognitive phenomenon
> called the confirmation bias.
Differences between students don't prove that learning is constrained to a single sense. It's a bizarre hypothesis and it only serves educators.
1) The review article cited at the start concludes its abstract with this:
"Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.
We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all."
I would happily replace the entire linked article with these two half paragraphs! Note that this means we don't know there isn't learning styles; we just know that those handful of ones so far tested have proven ineffective.
2) That a classroom does better with a math-through-music approach does not mean that all students do better through that. The cited article for this study doesn't appear to make that claim or any claim about the existence of learning styles (but it's paywalled). Clearly a classroom learns better when instructed in a language that the students understand - does that mean that learning styles don't exist?
3) That classes learn best when given a mixture of styles of information does not mean that there are no learning styles. (If you told me that mixing styles improves a class's learning, that would make me think it more likely that learning styles exist - otherwise it's more likely that there's some optimal single method that is better than trying all available methods.)
Humans learn by doing. The best teachers and parents can do is provide feedback and mentorship, where packaged "lessons" with flash cards and rehearsed song and dance are not usually a possibility, and instead feedback is provided on demand and in-context of what the needs of the student are in the exact moment.
When we talk about that the KEY is to integrate different forms of learning or diversity in teaching material: Although it has some uses, we've already abstracted ourselves away from reality and reliance on inherent motivations for learning, ie. IMHO we're already failing at that point.
When I read that part, I assumed they were talking about the individual students performing better, not the class in aggregate. If it's student by student, that is (weak) evidence against learning styles.
Maybe as important, variety helps keep the instructor from losing interest in what he/she is teaching. If the instructor sounds interested, that makes the subject sound interesting, and that undoubtedly is good for learning. See the Hawthorne Effect.
>> When I read that part, I assumed they were talking about the individual students performing better, not the class in aggregate. If it's student by student, that is (weak) evidence against learning styles.
The bigger issue is the the lack of evidence in favor of learning styles. Without supporting evidence, there's no particular reason to believe they exist.
The ones that have been studied are most likely the most widely-believed and plausible ones.
In addition, after being identified as a "special gifted student", I myself went through a nonstop progression of tests and evaluations as a student starting in elementary school and continuing all through high school so I'm extremely familiar with the tests and results being talked about here.
I'd say as both a subject of these tests and as a former professional educator, yes, absolutely, students have different learning styles. But I agree with the article that the kinds of styles and methods used to identify the learning modes don't really work.
Even worse, once students learn the results of these diagnostic tools, they use this knowledge as a kind of crutch to explain areas they are weak in. I'm sure there's a term for this phenomenon. Students then expect the teacher to treat them as a special snowflake and teach in the mode that they believe they learn most naturally in.
I believe that these diagnostic tools are being used incorrectly. They should be used to identify where students have weak modes of learning, and then their education should focus on building up those modes, not streamlining the educational process for efficiency and optimizing only for where students are already strong.
It's like a person who already has strong biceps doing nothing but curls in the gym and not only skipping leg day, but telling everybody else in the gym that they don't do legs because they're biceps are already well developed and their legs don't work so well.
This is a continuation of the notion that public education is an assembly line process like building cars and needs to optimize for the fastest way to shove knowledge into a student's head. This is a hopelessly dead-end approach to pedagogy.
Education should be about teaching people how to learn themselves. If a student opens up multiple modes of learning, they can already multiply their capacity to learn. If you are weak in an area, then you should concentrate in that area. Learning is both a talent and a skill that needs cultivation.
In terms of pedagogy, the best I could do was to make sure each lesson in the curriculum provided as many modes to learning as possible with as many opportunities for them to produce as possible with a very strong focus on high interactivity with the instructor and the material:
For visual learners: strong visual presentation with every idea possible presented as pictures as well as with a written description. Presentation was both in detailed slides, a take-home textbook as well as supporting dynamic whiteboard versions of what was on the slides. This covered people who "think in pictures" who "think in words" and who "think in sequences" (provided by the whiteboard portion).
For auditory learners: Detailed lecture explaining each part of the presentation, try to provide stories and catch phrases for each part of the presentation. For each subject, learn your script so you aren't inventing the material on the fly and end up confusing the students while you figure out what to say next. Use key phrase repetition for minor concepts to build up a kind of mnemonic vocabulary and assemble that vocabulary into major concepts. Explain each topic in at least two different ways. Get the class to repeat back difficult terms and phrases. This covers people who use different kinds of memory aids (mnemonics, catch phrases, stories, etc.) to semantically find things in their memory, and verbally constructs ideas into language-like features. The presentation above acts as a primer for the teacher as well and provides links between the visual and auditory worlds.
For tactile/kinesthetic learners: phase 1) a live demonstration first to show, phase 2) a hands-on demonstration (students followed along with the teacher step by step) to teach, phase 3) then a student only exercise for mastery -- followed by a step-by-step review of the student only exercise to fill in gaps and cement in the ideas. Kinesthetic opportunities are also provided through instructor interactivity, getting students provide some of the whiteboard demonstration, exaggerated body movements during class (I even eventually introduced some silly dances, teachers have to have no shame), hand motion, physical demonstrations, consistent object positioning in real space and on visual material. The 3 phase exercise system also provided plentiful hands-on time. I found that all students are kinesthetic to some extent. Part of being a mammal I think. I modeled this off of big cats teach their young to hunt.
The lessons were all carefully ordered to ensure prerequisites were properly covered, then reused as the foundation for new knowledge. New knowledge was always presented as single items, then slowly grouped into pairs and triples of concepts, with interactions and complexity between concepts explained. Often time examples of a new concept were demonstrated in 2 or 3 forms to help reinforce the concept as distinct from the specific implementation we were going to use for the exercises.
Groups of lesson blocks were then collected into mastery exercises to reinforce what they learned up to that point (which were reviewed step by step like in phase 3 of the three phase kinesthetic exercise above) and then entire courses had a capstone exercise (where the students were encouraged to break the exercise down and assign pieces out to each other, to work together and to ask questions of each other, even across teams) with full blown presentation at the end of each capstone. The capstone exercises were purposely open to interpretation so there was no "right" answer (but there were definitely wrong answers), but the students were encouraged to ask questions to each other during the presentation and the instructor was to ask students to justify specific claims.
Realistically, every single class breaks down into 3 categories of students:
The top of the class, who are eager learners and who know how to pay attention and apply the lessons immediately. They never get bored, even when the subject was boring, they always find something to learn or reinforce. There's almost always at least 1 of these in every class.
The middle of the class, the bulk of the students. They represented the typical student, interested in learning, but not willing to put lots of effort into it. Smart enough, but require frequent reinforcement and enormous efforts on the part of the instructor to ensure interactivity. Usually by the end of the class most of these students were engaged, paying attention and at least minimally passing all portions.
The "1". There's always one student who's completely unreachable. No matter how much time or effort you put into them, they're unable to learn the material. I've observed that most of these people have some kind of strong singular personality trait: usually people very self absorbed into their own personal problems, whatever they might be (family trouble, divorce, work issues, car having trouble, chronic health problems, etc.). They typically were bored in class, frequently absent or tardy, and consistently lacked basic and fundamental skills.
Most often they just wanted a procedure guide to follow or list of steps to remember -- the worst possible educational outcome, rote memorization. When those students finished the course and went back to their workplace, very few of them maintained long-term employment in their job as well -- often resigning once the first complex task landed on their desk.
This "1" usually emerged by the end of the 1st 8-10 hours of instruction. After a while you learn as a teacher you really have no choice but to leave this person behind. If they ask questions or show interest, always help them, but don't pace the class to that person. Their fundamental problems are something they brought with them as a burden into the class and you will not be able to overcome those even if the entire class is turned into an extended 1-1 session with them focused on nothing but teaching that individual student the material at the expense of every other student.
Classrooms are not navy flotillas, moving at the speed of the slowest ship. You have to reach the bulk of the students. With these "1" students, there's simply no magical teaching method or style that's going to suddenly overcome their years of personal educational neglect and bring them up to speed with the class and make them excel.
They have more remedial and fundamental issues with learning attitude that they have to solve. Perhaps they were taught that rote memorization and procedures are the correct way and they've come to believe that and feel uncomfortable and insecure in more open-ended environments -- but non-procedural fields can never be adapted to fit this mental model they've grabbed onto and they've never exercised the parts of their brain necessary to figure out things on their own (to learn how to learn, critical thinking and problem solving). You won't solve these kinds of lifelong issues in your class. They need a separate and specific educational approach that focuses not on a specific subject but on how to learn. Not learning is an addiction to them and until they're actively seeking help to break out of it, no teaching method will solve it.
Highly recommended book that changed the way read (I take notes and put them on flashcards).
The main point is that effortful retrieval practice is the key to learning effectively for the long-term and such that what you're learning can readily be connected to other ideas.
When practicing retrieval (quizzing yourself), he suggests:
1) spacing practice sessions so that it's hard but not impossible to recall 2) interleaving subjects (frustrating, but memories are much more durable and you can more readily connect leanrned ideas with others) 3) varying how you practice (same benefits as above) 4) rephrasing in your own words and attempting to solve tough problems before knowing the solutions
I view learning styles more like food preferences. Sure, I may like Italian, but that doesn't mean I should eat Italian for every meal. Variety is also important. In terms of nutrition requirements, I can get calories from any food and the rest of the requirements in many different ways.
Also importantly, the nature of the material may make certain kinds of presentation more useful. Visual for geometry. Auditory for music. Kinesthetic (physical, touch) for sports. They don't have to be solely in those styles, but the core material probably should be, with supporting material in other styles.
The easiest way to cater to learning preferences is variety. Have it in oral and written form, graphics and text, hands on experiential. Come at it from all angles. The most surefire bet for learning is to saturate them all, but it's rarely practical, so try to cover at least a couple.
[1] http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html
But polarization may be inevitable when the subject is at best indistinctly defined. Academic learning would surely be associated with high level and complex neuronal circuitry, which would not seem to be easily parsed into a few categorical formulations.
Saying someone is a "visual learner" is very likely a vast oversimplification. Thorough neuropsychological evaluation can reveal dozens of specific cognitive abilities and show areas of strength and weakness.
Normally the "peaks and valleys" of abilities have modest difference, but there are individuals with great variation: for example, genius level (IQ 180) in some areas, while adjacent skills are just average (IQ 105).
Such "unevenness" can produce major difficulty with task performance in school and jobs, as markedly inconsistent abilities can hinder learning or productivity in ways hard to understand and rectify.
"Learning style" may be controversial because it is a hard to study, and assessing individuals is too complicated and expensive. The pragmatic approach of using a variety of methods to teach a class of 30 kids is quite sensible. A good teacher knows some students catch on better with one approach vs. another, but in any case, for the students who can learn from any approach the repetition would probably do no harm.
For instance, a guy I work with loves training videos. He will sit and watch lecturers and all the videos in sequence and take copious notes. Not me. Unless it's something complex and physical (like changing a car part) I can't abide video instruction. I don't care for audio much either. It's too slow and you can't skim picking out relevant points, nor refer back up quickly to refresh a concept. I don't think my co-worker does this. If he did prefer to read, he would start reading, read every word and not go back to what he read before until he was finished.
Having observed the difference in our learning style and our relative skill set, it appears (from my biased point of view) that I know a lot more than he does, and I get a lot more done.
But it would be interesting to hear my co-workers take on me. I'm guessing he probably has the view that my "rapid overview and fill-in-the-details as they are needed" approach is flighty, dangerous and inferior to the systematic linear method. And he may have some valid points in this regard. To be fair, we complement each other and work well together as a team.
Then again, I don't like real-life lectures much either, unless I've already read the associated text for that lecture beforehand.
I wonder if people like lectures for the same reason that people like brainstorming, group work, etc, which is that it might feel like you're getting more work done than you actually are.
Can someone explain to me what the data in this article has to do with learning styles as they're commonly thought of?
This article is arguing (rightly) that it's not a useful way of thinking about how people learn. Or, at least, obscures the reality of how people _actually_ learn and makes it more difficult for us to explore that reality.
<pedantic> So, blind kids get amazing value from a power point slide presentation... </pedantic>
Ok, now accepting their argument is clearly wrong in general case. They might be talking about some vaguely defined average child. But, when you start looking at a wide range of things from vision to audio acuity you find people don't clump as much as you might think.
In the end it comes down to a cost / benefit analysis on supporting learning sytles vs a generic education. And in that context there are far better ways to spend your money.
> Learning styles — the notion that each student has a particular mode by which he or she learns best, whether it’s visual, auditory or some other sense — is enormously popular.
It's the idea that every person as a particular sense or modality through which they "learn best" and it doesn't change with time. It comes attached with the idea that it makes sense to bucket students into "auditory learners," "visual learners," and so on. That in turn informs curricular and pedagogical decisions, e.g., "Make sure this lesson has a visual component."
I've been teaching programmers for two years, currently through CodeUnion (http://codeunion.io) and formerly through Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com), and my personal experience is consistent with two things:
1. The idea of "learning styles" is rubbish
2. EVERYONE believes it, especially students
I would be tempted to say that the people who don't understand should just be more willing to think spatially instead of being stuck in their other modes. However, then I imagine how it must feel for someone with perfect pitch to try to explain to me how to recognize pitches. I can't do it just by "trying" harder; I don't even understand what it is I'm supposed to be doing.
This is not to say that e.g. people who are not good at spatial thinking shouldn't still try to get better at it. But it does lead me to think that to some extent these learning styles really are, if not genetic, at least deeply embedded in our personalities and early childhood development.
Why do you think "learning styles" have any independent reality to begin with? Why do you think the specific sense/modality/medium is of primary importance when it comes to understanding or modeling how people learn?
It's probably more a thing of which method of "information gathering" are you more used to, and, of course, the notion that "it doesn't change with time" it is kind of stupid, as our mental processes are constantly evolving. But in the end, how used are you to process information in a certain mode will have an impact in the learning process.
Given that people say this, what do you think they mean by saying it?
As for how I translate that sentence into something useful for me as a teacher, I choose to hear it as: "Nothing in this explanation relates to anything in my picture of the world." It then becomes a problem of understanding the student's prior experience and current picture of the world.
The modality only matters insofar as it establishes congruence with the student's prior experience (IMO).
Have you not noticed that some students are consistently playing with something or tapping their foot as they're listening, while others don't? As I was told, that's part and parcel of "the whole learning style mish-mash", and definitely consistent with my experience.
At the same time, it was always made clear to me that people's learning styles are more like linear combinations of the main styles than something you could sort into a bucket. And I've never heard it explicitly said that they were fixed, so I don't think that's essential.
I do think students sometimes use the idea of "learning styles" as an excuse, although in my experience these are the types of students who will use whatever is within reach as an excuse. That has no bearing on whether "learning styles" actually exist, though.
I remember helping the 13 year old daughter struggling with math. IIRC it was a moderately difficult algebra problem -- unless you read the text. The textbook explanation of how to attack that problem was so horrific and convoluted, i did a double take.
Pictures are great because they cut out all of the bullshit, flowery language and other nonsense and lay the meat of whatever you are talking about right out there. That's why effective presenters use graphs, etc to underline key points.
Do you have a mechanism to explain this?
For starters, can you define what you mean by "style of explanation" and give me a few examples? For each example, give me examples of students with whom that style clicked, examples of students with whom it didn't, and your best explanation for why it did or didn't in each case.
In that context, covering every base is less important than having multiple approaches.
From the linked paper: "Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information." ...
"We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all. Further research on the use of learning-styles assessment in instruction may in some cases be warranted, but such research needs to be performed appropriately."
Their point is not that everyone learns in an identical fashion. It's, there is little evidence you need to tailor instruction to each students individual learning style.