In elementary school, it was always the slow learners who the teachers classified or who self-selected as "kinesthetic learners" when this topic came up: Hands-on teaching was far more patient than lecturing. Lazy students like me were called "visual learners" because we didn't care to bury ourselves in state texts written for 10 year-olds. I sensed that the theory was bunk then, and it's bunk now. From the cited UVA article: http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-Oc...
> 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.
That point is made clear by other comments in this thread treating the existence of these "styles" as a matter of fact.
Differences between students don't prove that learning is constrained to a single sense. It's a bizarre hypothesis and it only serves educators.
I don't like this article. Here are my main concerns:
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.)
My main issue is that the article spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the learning process as something that primarily happens within the confines of a teacher-student relationship in a subject-driven, classroom environment.
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.
Re 3: I think it's likely that there are diminishing returns the longer you present material the same way, and that switching it up makes students more interested.
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.
>> Re 3: I think it's likely that there are diminishing returns the longer you present material the same way, and that switching it up makes students more interested.
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.
I taught an advanced adult course for a number of years. I taught something north of 700 students in 40 and 80 hour courses over that time. I also later developed curriculum for another instructional program involving around 300 hours of instruction time that taught complex technical skills to another 300 people (equivalent to 2 B.S. degrees in terms of class-time) and graduated them as instructors in their subject. So I feel comfortable claiming I'm a professional educator (at least with adults). I also feel comfortable claiming that there are definitely different learning styles.
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.
Interesting. Are you aware of ways of teaching new modes of learning, or even have a list of modes? And whether it can be done with reasonable success (ie. given that people think in different ways, can one person become as competent in other modes or are they limited by their hardware? Are there studies around this?)
I'm a strong believer that students have to "complete a circuit" with new concepts. That means they have to be able to express as output what they just took in as input. If they read or hear something, they have to be able to explain it back in both writing, speaking and demonstration. Knowledge has to go in and come out of a student so it exercises as much of their brain as possible and the semantic links are built. I model this a little on language acquisition, you have to be able to both recognize and produce in your new language before you can say you've learned it. I think the same is true for any subject.
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.
I recently finished Make It Stick by Peter C Brown, who also says the learning styles myth is bogus.
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
Great points!! I just did a coursera course, learning how to learn, in which the professor emphasized some of these points. I have started using the Anki software and has helped me.
I feel that everyone can learn in all the major ways, although using a variety of learning styles makes it more engaging and fun.
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.
Exactly. Proponents of the notion of learning styles have focused on individual differences, but it's somewhat of a red herring. The vast majority of people, whatever their strengths may be, benefit from approaching a subject using MULTIPLE learning styles, not just one.
Annie Murphy Paul, the author of the article kindly submitted here, is a very thoughtful author on psychology and education research. I see she cites the path-breaking article by Daniel Willingham, which led to his Learning Styles FAQ,[1] which I encourage all of my friends here on Hacker News to read to better understand what this issue is about learning styles. People do tend to take somewhat differing approaches to learning new material, but at least part of what I have noticed about effective learners is that they learn new ways of learning, and gain "learning styles" as they grow up and become more versatile in what they can do.
After reading the article and the comments, it sure seems the subject (the "learning styles" hypothesis) arouses considerable passion in supporters and detractors.
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.
I can't believe people don't have different learning styles.
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.
It's interestng that you should say that, because the reason I don't usually like lecture videos is that they're too fast to keep up with, especially if you're writing notes. The worst thing is a guy talking and clicking through slides both at the same time, and we're talking about slides with equations the like, things that really have to be read and thought about.
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.
The concept of "learning styles" is something _we_ invented. It's not as if it has any intrinsic reality as a category, at least until we demonstrate it does.
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.
While you might be able to insert knowledge into your brain with any of the better methods there are still methods people prefer. And over the long run you will learn more with your preferred style, because you spent more hours doing it.
<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.
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 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?
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
Differences between students don't prove that learning is constrained to a single sense. It's a bizarre hypothesis and it only serves educators.