Obligatory YouTube from Willingham (mentioned in article).
The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
51–60 of 104 posts
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every time someone someone tries to sell me on this tired idea, I ask them: ... Now it might be time to turn the table and ask: is it equally easy for everyone to learn bird calls? Or maybe people have different abilities? Edit: my point is not that this hasn't been used to sell a lot of useless ideas but rather that people are actually different. For your bird call example the obvious way to learn it is by listeni…
"Learning history" is an interesting example. As far as actually studying history goes, one needs to carefully examine real evidence, and restructuring the evidence in a way that is appealing to the observer's "style" is almost certainly damaging to its authenticity. To a large extent, user preference shouldn't even be a factor here. OTOH, "textbook history" is, bluntly, mostly about memorizing fact/oids embedded in…
> More charitably, though, part of the goal of reading textbooks is to develop textual parsing (reading) skills, so again if you take that away from a dyslexic student, what are you really trying to accomplish as an educator? Making them feel good?
No. You make the pass every mandatory exam. Many of the pupils who struggle most at school makes excellent carpenters, fishermen, chefs etc. Source: my father is a specialist teacher and tells me he get really good feedback on some of those who have struggled to even pass mandatory subjects.
And if reading barely passes and they get a medium good grade in some other subjects because they learnt better from audio books that is so much better than barely passing in all those subjects, right?
Not everyone is cut to be an engineer. Not everyone even wants which is why I argue that in addition to teaching more STEM, earlier we should also work to increase the status of other professions.
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#53Are there styles which are not tied to the type of sense input? I know that I sometimes learn some things by rote, going through a linear process, and subsequently discover patterns in it. Other times, I need to know the abstract principles behind a procedure before I can work in the details. Anecdotally, that suggests that there are two different ways of conceptualizing tasks (i.e., something close to "learning styles"), and also suggests that different tasks require different learning styles.
Is there any research into this meaning of learning styles, as opposed to tied to sensory modes?
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#54My SO teaches elementary math, and we've had a few discussions about this. When teaching a new concept, say the area of a parallelogram, she will present the concept in multiple different ways: - Give printouts of parallelograms on graph paper, so the students can count the number of squares in a parallelogram. Also give them scissors and see what happens. - Give students two triangles and a square (which they know h…
You might like Lockhart's Lament: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
I love it, and I think most people here will as well.
And it highlights how important it is to not force one method of learning on children. So even if one thinks that we shouldn't teach multiple learning styles, it's important to keep the lessons in Lockhart's Lament in mind:
Discovery is important. Variety is important. Rote memorization is not.
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#55My SO teaches elementary math, and we've had a few discussions about this. When teaching a new concept, say the area of a parallelogram, she will present the concept in multiple different ways: - Give printouts of parallelograms on graph paper, so the students can count the number of squares in a parallelogram. Also give them scissors and see what happens. - Give students two triangles and a square (which they know h…
I strongly agree in presenting a topic in a variety of ways since being able to relate new information to information already known is a major key to learning new concepts. The more ways a topic is presented, the better chance a person's brain can relate it to something already known.
I have a strong assumption that when many people hear "learning styles", they assume it to this instead of auditory vs visual.
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#56yet another phenomenon plenty of people experience subjectively being 'disproven' by experiment. It's no wonder the stock of so-called experts is diminishing...
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#57My SO teaches elementary math, and we've had a few discussions about this. When teaching a new concept, say the area of a parallelogram, she will present the concept in multiple different ways: - Give printouts of parallelograms on graph paper, so the students can count the number of squares in a parallelogram. Also give them scissors and see what happens. - Give students two triangles and a square (which they know h…
> So while "learning styles" may be a misnomer, I do believe that presenting one topic in a variety of ways is beneficial.
Absolutely. I think "learning styles" is a reductionist view of Universal Design for Learning [1], which is essentially what you described how your SO teaches.
It's quite possible that at a given time, someone may be inclined to visual learning, but may be more kinesthetically inclined in another setting/moment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Design_for_Learning
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#58Every time someone someone tries to sell me on this tired idea, I ask them: if you had to teach someone the difference between different bird calls, e.g. that of the robin vs. the sparrow, and you're told that person is a "visual learner", do you mean to tell me you'd opt to show them the oscilloscope representation of the sound wave that each bird makes rather than playing them an actual recording of each call? It's…
I have what (may be?) a counter-example. I'm a moderately accomplished amateur musician. I play the trumpet in an orchestra and sing in a chorus. Both the orchestra and the chorus consist primarily of amateurs. The director of the chorus is adamant about having it be open to anyone in the community, regardless of their musical background. To support that (laudable, IMO) position, he attempts to teach the music by ear…
I'm not sure this is a counter example. It sounds to me like you are learning faster by unifying 2 streams of information. You read the music notes and you listen to the performance.
How would you perform just studying sheet music the night before and not playing at all.
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#59Every time someone someone tries to sell me on this tired idea, I ask them: if you had to teach someone the difference between different bird calls, e.g. that of the robin vs. the sparrow, and you're told that person is a "visual learner", do you mean to tell me you'd opt to show them the oscilloscope representation of the sound wave that each bird makes rather than playing them an actual recording of each call? It's…
It does seem to me that the people who argue most passionately for different learning styles also tend to be the same people whose preferred learning style is the most passive - usually "visual learners" who somehow feel like they're absorbing more by looking at it rather than actually engaging it (by, for instance, working actual problems).
Re: The Myth of 'Learning Styles'
#60Since it's an identity thing, I'm guessing people are not going to want to let this one go. Just like they won't let go of their identity as a Meyers-Briggs I-N-T-whatever-the-hell, even though there's zero evidence for it as a meaningful framework.
I've found that M-B or the like is really useful to give people words to talk about who they think they are (which can be incredibly difficult without some starting point). When you have words to describe something, you can start to talk about it and in this case, how your personality interacts with others. That is, where are there things in the ways others describe themselves that you recognize in yourself or that y…
Or just as a starting point to realize that people are different and view the world differently. Many users approach software differently than programmers for example.
The problem comes when you start doing things like match people to jobs or tasks based on their MB profiles.