The idea of learning styles is a fad that came and went in a flash, but the useful parts struck a chord with lots of people. [ … ]
A written article revealing revolutionary insights will never get absorbed by my brother until the audiobook comes out. If I want him to know a thing, then writing better articles with better insights isn’t actually what I need to do; I need to read the ones I have aloud.
One of the reasons it was a fad that went was that the “useful parts that struck a chord with lots of people” don’t seem to done well in scientific studies and those studies that were done suggest that giving different people different teaching based on their learning style doesn’t improve learning outcomes. If you think there’s a way that learning styles are useful, how do you account for the academic results?
Because frankly my opinion of the current American education system is that it is slightly worse than chance at teaching people things regardless of the pedagogical method; just because a blind man can’t shoot straight doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the gun.
I admit I haven’t read any scientific studies on learning styles and would cheerfully read any two that you wanted to point me at. It’s possible the studies you’re thinking of didn’t involve schools or conventional teachers, and if that’s true then I’m more interested in reading them. My experience with learning styles was mostly firsthand in school, and there the educational system made a few strange choices that (I think) blunted the usefulness of the approach.
To use my brother as an example: the school classified him as an auditory learner, but their auditory teaching methods involved having him give oral presentations in place of certain essay writing assignments. This was a small step forward since he could speak clearer and easier than he could write (though its impact on his grades was wiped out by the fact that drawing was hard for him and they had him do the visual learning assignments as well) but at no point did the school offer him an audiobook version of something instead of the paperback.
My prediction for the studies is that they had a specific list of learning styles each with a different specific study technique and/or that they asked each student to use each technique. This resulted respectively in some students not improving at all (because the technique that would help them wasn’t on the specific list) and/or the best students doing worse (because they had to spend time using techniques that weren’t suited to them) with the result that overall performance declined.
There are a lot of different ways to try and learn something. (Listen to it on loop, anki decks, write an essay about it, try to teach someone else, etc.) I think that humans naturally vary in which methods of learning are easiest and most effective for them, and a good idea is to try a lot of different ways of learning material, to keep track of which ways work best for you, and then to use those techniques to learn everything you want to learn going forward. The index cards that help me learn best aren’t in any of the official Learning StylesTM technique lists the teachers had, but once I found them I started using them for everything while not expecting them to work especially well for the median student. That’s the useful core at the heart of Learning Styles, even if they were never used to great effect.
Does that fit with the studies you’ve seen and your own understanding?
One of the reasons it was a fad that went was that the “useful parts that struck a chord with lots of people” don’t seem to done well in scientific studies and those studies that were done suggest that giving different people different teaching based on their learning style doesn’t improve learning outcomes. If you think there’s a way that learning styles are useful, how do you account for the academic results?
Because frankly my opinion of the current American education system is that it is slightly worse than chance at teaching people things regardless of the pedagogical method; just because a blind man can’t shoot straight doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the gun.
I admit I haven’t read any scientific studies on learning styles and would cheerfully read any two that you wanted to point me at. It’s possible the studies you’re thinking of didn’t involve schools or conventional teachers, and if that’s true then I’m more interested in reading them. My experience with learning styles was mostly firsthand in school, and there the educational system made a few strange choices that (I think) blunted the usefulness of the approach.
To use my brother as an example: the school classified him as an auditory learner, but their auditory teaching methods involved having him give oral presentations in place of certain essay writing assignments. This was a small step forward since he could speak clearer and easier than he could write (though its impact on his grades was wiped out by the fact that drawing was hard for him and they had him do the visual learning assignments as well) but at no point did the school offer him an audiobook version of something instead of the paperback.
My prediction for the studies is that they had a specific list of learning styles each with a different specific study technique and/or that they asked each student to use each technique. This resulted respectively in some students not improving at all (because the technique that would help them wasn’t on the specific list) and/or the best students doing worse (because they had to spend time using techniques that weren’t suited to them) with the result that overall performance declined.
There are a lot of different ways to try and learn something. (Listen to it on loop, anki decks, write an essay about it, try to teach someone else, etc.) I think that humans naturally vary in which methods of learning are easiest and most effective for them, and a good idea is to try a lot of different ways of learning material, to keep track of which ways work best for you, and then to use those techniques to learn everything you want to learn going forward. The index cards that help me learn best aren’t in any of the official Learning StylesTM technique lists the teachers had, but once I found them I started using them for everything while not expecting them to work especially well for the median student. That’s the useful core at the heart of Learning Styles, even if they were never used to great effect.
Does that fit with the studies you’ve seen and your own understanding?