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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

I think the context for this is important.

<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.

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That's not what people mean when they talk about "learning styles" and I'm pretty sure you know that. Heck, it's even right there in the first sentence of the article:

> 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

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard my students say something like "This explanation doesn't really work for me — I'm more of a visual learner" I'd be the Scrooge McDuck of nickels.

I agree that the current implementation of the idea is rubbish. However, it is important to note people can be vary bad at a wide range of things. Just as an example, some people really suck at spacial relationships.

In that context, covering every base is less important than having multiple approaches.

As a tutor, I've found that certain styles of explanations click more intuitively with some students than with others.

Do you have a mechanism to explain this?

Since a lot of teaching is shame based, whatever styles people have had the least bad experience with will be easier for them to work with.

Happy to dive in, but that's not much to go on!

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.

I do think "learning styles" can be easily used as an excuse to give up at the first sign of difficulty. However, I'm not sure that it's "rubbish". I've always been very good at spatial reasoning, so I often try to explain things in terms of pictures. Among generally intelligent people, some of them understand me immediately, and others require a lot of tries with different variations on the explanation.

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.

You'll note that I didn't say they were rubbish BECAUSE students use them as an excuse. What's more, I didn't say that students use "learning styles" as an excuse, only that they believe whole-heartedly in their reality. As evidence of the fact that they believe in their reality, they say things like "This explanation doesn't really work for me — I'm more of a visual learner."

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?

This explanation doesn't really work for me — I'm more of a visual learner."

Given that people say this, what do you think they mean by saying it?

It means they believe in the idea of learning styles and that whatever they're currently experiencing is accounted for by that belief.

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).

Well, for example, if you compare two persons, one who reads a lot, and one who doesen't read anything, the one that reads will have a much better time processing information in the written form.

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.

The "learning style" mentality can also have the opposite effect, though. My mentor says she never understood programming when she first started learning it and thought she was just inherently bad at it and was going to give it up. Then she started learning in a different way that she says was more in line with her "learning style," and it came much more naturally to her. Now she talks about learning styles as a reason NOT to give up.

It seems to me more like you have a problem with students using "learning styles" as a cop-out. I don't know how I compare with others, but I know I'm a visual thinker. So if I'm having trouble understanding something, and I think a visualization will help, then it's my responsibility to try to find one or create one.

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.

No, I didn't say that. I only said that students believe (very strongly) in the "reality" of learning styles and as evidence of this statement they say things like the quote I gave.

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.

There's another side to that story -- in many cases, the quality of written material or lecture is just not that good. Combined with laziness, it's easy for people to convince themselves that they only learn a particular way.

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.

Did you even read the review article?

Yes, but I don't think my comment was understood.

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.

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