8 ms·

The concept of “learning styles” is one of the greatest neuroscience myths

116 points by tokenadult 11y ago

dhimes 11y ago
Sadly, he is right about there being no concrete evidence supporting learning styles. I have been following this for quite some time, both my Egorg products and (soon to be) Study Swami are based on the idea that students differ in how they learn. The interesting thing, though, is that any teacher with a decent amount of experience (I taught physics for 15 years, both as a TA and as a community college professor) sees that students do seem to learn differently. Some students need a clear, verbatim explanation of something. Others need to dance around the concept first, getting a feel for it, before they able to even parse such an explanation. I'm not sure what it is linked to. I suspect that our 'bins' of learning styles are too narrow, or somehow else incorrect. The obvious ones came first, more-or-less 5 senses with each sense being aligned with a 'style' (I learn math better by smell...</s>). The students in the studies are categorized into different learning styles (usually) based on a survey (which, I would argue, really amounts to learning preferences rather than styles). It would be interesting to see tests of actual learning done with different presentations for forming the baseline assignments to a particular style. But even then the problem is that the bins are pre-decided (verbal or visual? global or sequential?) I think this is a little too simplistic. So while I suspect that there is actually something to the idea of learning differently (rather than just 'g'), for the moment, anyway, learning styles seem to be bullshit.
- pumblechook 11y ago
  Perhaps it has to do with someone's dominant behavior style? Someone who is naturally gregarious probably doesn't enjoy sitting still for an hour during a lecture, just like someone who is naturally analytical might not enjoy a lot of group work. If each person's brain learns the same way, but the effort required to cope with the format of delivery is different, it could lead to differences in the amount learned.
- devindotcom 11y ago
  Yeah, we have to be careful not to take this debunking too far. It seems pretty clear that the formalized definition of 'learning styles' as codified in various teaching manuals and classroom planning tools is bogus. But students do learn differently, and likely can be grouped into different general styles for which different approaches may be more or less effective (how effective they would be compared to, for example, just having smaller class sizes or more resources is another question). The bathwater's bad, but hang onto that baby.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Kluny 11y ago
  I really think it's more about repetition than anything else. If a student has been "primed" for the topic at hand by some prior exposure, like overhearing their parents talk about it or encountering a similar situation on a different subject and being able to draw parallels, they'll be ready for straightforward explanation and be able to internalize it. If it's their first exposure to the topic, they'll need to dance around it and see it from different points of view before things start to make sense. For example, at age 12 I read a book that made no sense to me whatsoever. I somehow finished it but didn't get much out of it. 12 years later at age 24, I read Terry Pratchett's book, the Lost Continent, and gradually realized it was the same book. In 12 years I had gained enough background understanding of concepts such as Evolution, Australia, Satire, and Wizards to get the jokes and the plot, so that time the book stuck with me. Learning style had nothing to do with it - it was me that changed.
- Nadya 11y ago
  >Some students need a clear, verbatim explanation of something. Others need to dance around the concept first, getting a feel for it, before they able to even parse such an explanation. Different experiences. Memories thrive when connected with other memories and most everyone will have different memories. So it stands to reason different ways of providing the same information will have different results based on each individual's lived experiences. If I can relate an unknown X to a known Y - or even an unknown X to an unknown Y - I always learn better than if I learned about an unknown X that I'm not able to relate with. Mnemonics play a large role in things - unfortunately I can't find any studies offhand to that prove mnemonics actually help.
zepto 11y ago
"Low-cost and easily implemented classroom approaches can certainly cultivate wishfulness amongst educators, especially if they are fun and therefore likely to be well received by students." Sounds like the Hawthorne effect at work. However this shouldn't be taken as a dismissal. Anything that makes learning or work less rote and more fun will improve motivation and thus improve outcomes.
jrcii 11y ago
Here's the original paper https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....
dopamean 11y ago
My mother taught high school for 23 years and I went to a private school with a unique curriculum and philosophy around education. I then went and taught and a coding bootcamp for a little while. In all my experience in education - as a student, teacher, and son - I have repeatedly heard about different learning styles but have yet to see any evidence of them in the wild. It always felt like pseudoscience or BS theories. The things I heard were often difficult to argue with as well. One thing that often made me feel like it was BS was that I never heard a learning style that fit with how I learned and I don't believe I'm special.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Maybe self-selection going on?
- vorg 11y ago
  Many people majoring in a second language learn better aurally/orally, whereas those at a coding bootcamp perhaps learn better visually. Perhaps the obvious existence of these two primary learning styles has been expanded on and exaggerated so much that it has now become largely bogus, e.g. those explained on Wikipedia's learning_styles page.
  - jacalata 11y ago
    How are those obvious? I majored in French and am a programmer and haven't come across this stereotype before.
    - vorg 11y ago
      It's obvious to me based on my own experiences. Of course I'm talking about a "French as a Foreign/Second Language" major, not "French" like they teach in American high schools. And I'm talking about Computer Science or Software Engineering majors, not self-taught webpage developers. The rough visual-verbal spectrum for learners is obvious for me, and when teaching, we need activities that utilize both the visual and verbal faculties. I'm surprised you haven't encountered this continuum.
jasonpbecker 11y ago
The best evidence suggests that presenting information multiple times, multiple different ways benefits everyone because it creates a richer set of connections to those ideas and concepts. It's not the case that one person learns through sights, another sounds, and yet another through movement (roll eyes)-- instead it's the case that doing things multiple ways and multiple times is better for memory.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  A corollary for this is learning the same information in the same manner, but in a different location. Study in your bedroom, on the train, at the library, under a tree in a park, while walking the dog, at the beach at dawn, etc. This removes environmental cues out of the learned material and makes recall much more effective.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    Interesting idea. A thought I had: what if you studied some topic while always listening to the same song on repeat. Could you improve recall by humming the song (or better, playing it)? I would think a study about this has already been done.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Yes. Actually one of the most effective ways would be to study in the same room that you will later be tested in. Basically information is never learned independent of the location and the location bleeds into your memory of the abstract concept. When you think about how memory evolved this makes perfect sense - you want to remember how to fish for example, but also where and when to fish. The same thing apply to things like addiction where location plays a very strong role in reinforcing the addictive behaviour. One of the ways of helping to overcome addiction is to change your location so the environmental cues are removed.
paulpauper 11y ago
writing, repetition, and reminding seem helpful.
dsmithatx 11y ago
My ex-boss used to have me spend hours of doing Powerpoint because he claimed to be a "visual learner". I always theorized that this sounded like a load of BS. My theory was that he was just too lazy or ADD to actually sit down and read and comprehend things. I learn things looking at graphs. I learn things by reading but, it just takes more focus. I never believed in this theory of learning. There are just sometimes better ways to convey different information. Some people are idiots and some people have enough passion or care enough to put more effort in.
- tokenadult 11y ago
  My ex-boss used to have me spend hours of doing Powerpoint because he claimed to be a "visual learner". I always theorized that this sounded like a load of BS. My theory was that he was just too lazy or ADD to actually sit down and read and comprehend things. If you haven't seen Edward Tufte's writings about PowerPoint[1] yet, you should. A funny take on what's wrong with PowerPoint is Peter Norvig's online essay about the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address.[2] [1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002PP https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... [2] http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
- peteretep 11y ago
  I am also a visual learner, and I find it (really) hard to learn from prose. I virtually flunked high school, and then (through a fairly convoluted process) ended up very literally top of my class in a masters at a top 5 university; the masters allowed me to learn my own way. It is possible I'm an idiot, lack passion, and am lazy, but my academic references don't support that theory.
VikingCoder 11y ago
Physical Education will now consist solely of sit-ups. Trying to get kids to perform physical exertion with Baseball, Basketball, Football, Soccer, Swimming, has proven to not improve their standardized scantron test scores. My snarky point is that when science finally determines how we can best measure the success of a child, we'll have a way to objectively measure given techniques. Until then, we're researching in a flawed framework. Creating a student-teacher bond, making students feel valued, making parents feel like their kids are getting something out of their tax dollars, long-term impacts on students, student eagerness to engage in a lesson... I question whether neuroscience has explored these aspects. Let alone teacher job satisfaction. Cripes, we're seeing all kinds of proof that we're beating creativity out of students. I can guarantee that mixing up how lessons are taught has a positive impact on student creativity. Does each student have their preferred learning style? I can't say that. But I strongly suspect that teaching lessons in varied styles has a positive impact. Relevant: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3978 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3978
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  >Does each student have their preferred learning style? I can't say that. But I strongly suspect that teaching lessons in varied styles has a positive impact. You seem to be implying that belief in learning styles would lead to more varied lessons. But couldn't it do the opposite, trying to sort students and feed each group the same type of lesson as much as possible?
  - VikingCoder 11y ago
    No, I think there's something there in Learning Styles, which may be as simple as Varied Learning Technique. Going from Varied Learning Technique all the way to Learning Styles may do harm. I can't say.
abruzzi 11y ago
I think the persistence of the myth is at least partly due to the fact that it aligns well with informal observations. You have a class, and some of the students have difficulty absorbing the material. So those students are taken aside and taught to in different ways, which are, sometimes, successful. So, informally, people come to believe that those students were better reached by the alternative methods, when in reality it may have been the repetition, extra attention, or something else that improved their scores.
- mhuffman 11y ago
  I might be missing something here but isn't there a big difference between "we don't have any conclusive evidence yet" and "this is a myth and is false"? Also, I think some of the persistence of this "myth" is that people (adults) will flat-out tell you that they may not be able to absorb certain information without seeing some visual representation of it, whereas others will tell they can understand more easily, for example, just from a verbal description.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    Thus far, falsifiable hypotheses test to "false." Perhaps we are not framing the problem properly. Here's a quick assessment: When somebody gets directions from Google maps, do they prefer the written, listed directions, or the map (in the happy circumstance where both conveyed the same information)? Some people prefer the lists; some the maps. So we might think of the former as verbal learners and the latter as visual. The problem is, in the context of learning, both (self-described) verbal and visual learners seem to learn better visually.
    - vorg 11y ago
      > both (self-described) verbal and visual learners seem to learn better visually Though I'm guessing verbal learners and visual learners both learn better when doing a task utilizing both visual and verbal senses, than they would doing either a visual only or a verbal only task. The verbal-visual distinction could be a distinction between 60% verbal / 40% visual on the one hand and 40% verbal / 60% visual on the other. I'd also guess that if students are forced to make some body movements (kinesthetic learning) at the same time as speaking/listening (verbal) and watching/diagramming (visual), retention of material is even greater for virtually all of them.
a-priori 11y ago
My wife is a science-educated high school teacher, and as part of getting her B.Ed she had to do a literature review. She was alarmed by the lack of rigour in education research. Almost all the studies she found in education journals were poorly designed, the biggest flaws being: 1) A lack of control groups. In fact, she was told by her instructors that many journals consider it an ethics violation to use a control group, the logic being that in denying your experimental method to the control group you're putting them at a disadvantage. 2) Overgeneralizing results. It's common to use education students (i.e, future teachers) as experimental subjects in education research. Then the results are interpreted as applying to all students, ignoring all the ways that your typical education students are different from your typical high school or elementary school student. While there were some examples of good education research, she said that by far the best education research she could found was actually published in psychology journals. So it's not surprising to me that myths and even pseudoscience will proliferate in education when the standards on research in the field is so poor.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  > consider it an ethics violation to use a control group, the logic being that in denying your experimental method to the control group you're putting them at a disadvantage. Oh man. Someone should tell them about double-blind clinical trials for cancer treatment. (Those can be, and sometimes are, "stopped for efficiency", when a midway evaluation shows the treatment is so effective that they already have a statistically significant result. They then start giving the treatment to both groups, I believe.)
  - a-priori 11y ago
    I know, right? When my wife mentioned this, that was the first thing I said: there are plenty of fields where the research has life-or-death consequences and they use control groups. Education, by comparison, is low stakes. In medical research they have procedures and statistical techniques to detect significant results and allow for early stoppage. There's no reason the same techniques couldn't be applied to education research. But you need control groups, or you don't actually know that you've made an improvement!
progressive_dad 11y ago
Most education research is about how to evaluate TEACHERS not children. If you want to help children then you're better off starting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
stared 11y ago
Could anyone link to the "learning styles" claim? If it is about as coarse categories as "visual" vs "verbal", then debunking does not sound strange (but I guess mostly because not many people are very polarized wrt this axis). But in general - well, almost each single person has her/his tastes (senses involved, brevity/verbosity, level of challenge, level of feedback, amount of social interaction, amount of noise, etc, etc). So, I would rather guess than psychological research are flawed (too few categories, misaligned categories, binning, self-reported data, etc) than anything else. (I do have both experience with teaching and with doing research-level psychology.)
- analog31 11y ago
  I can't link to it, but I've heard it cited in at least two training sessions that I've been in. The first was when I was hired to be an adjunct teacher at a Big Ten university. One of the presentations was about the different styles of learning. Another was in some kind of corporate management training that I took, where we were also told about the Kubler-Ross stages. These ideas take on a life of their own outside of the research community. From what I can tell, the effect is a fragmented and disorganized approach to teaching, for example, that's evident in the typical elementary school curriculum. On an amusing note, there's an inside joke in my family, that "children have different ways of learning" is a euphemism for when somebody just did something really dumb.
mpdehaan2 11y ago
I'd disagree on the myth part. I would probably agree with it being likely there isn't a lot of data. Much of the learning styles stuff was put forth by Felder at NCSU Engineering (my alma mater). Is there a double-blind study? IDK, but it's interesting, and it resonated. In the informal quiz in my intro to engineering class (Dr. Richard Porter's, not Felder's), it was interesting to see how preferred learning styles (from his quiz) lined up with majors. In short, mostly it was that a large number of people had visual vs written preferences, but the one thing different for C.S. students were they almost always learned globally (i.e. almost random access, not really understanding the whole, and things then popping into place as connections build up between ideas) whereas other majors preferred seeing things step by step always building on one another. It resonated with me in general because I'm generally lost with something until I accumulate a lot of random concepts enough to get it. http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Education_Papers-Chronological.html http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Pap... I think it's great people are trying to pay attention to way s people learn and how to present information. This hit home really hard when doing docs for ansible - and I tried to present things in multiple ways (different ways of indexing, presenting big picture versus building things up, and vice versa) and in writing technical documentation and seeing bugs on understanding (and twitter complaints) on tech docs it is clear people DO learn very different on the sequential vs global axis. I also really DO need diagrams, as large volumes of words get my lost, but strangely I produce large volumes of words and seldom any diagrams. I'm also strange in that if I take notes, I almost never read them myself, so this is perhaps why I'm so bad about learning from written text and always want to jump into code snippets. (Novels, sure, they are great). I also usually need a whiteboard as a buffer for understanding architectures visually, where I notice a lot of people don't need to draw things out, or it doesn't help them (or aren't as interested in those things?) It's useful to present things in different ways and mix things up -- not that you have to repeat everything 4 different ways. That was what Felder was trying to get across. (A simple example might be it is good to present a diagram next to a paragraph describing a concept.)
- dhimes 11y ago
  Felder's model is my go-to model, also. As opposed to the input methods classification of learning styles, he focuses on the mental-processing aspect (for example, reading and listening are in the same category of "verbal," as opposed to being separated into "verbal" and "auditory"). I'm not formally trained in education, but physics. As such I have to allow for the possibility that his ideas resonate with me partly because he speaks my language. Nevertheless, the evidence is scanty.
analog31 11y ago
Could this mean... no more dioramas in math class?
melted 11y ago
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
- srdev 11y ago
  In scientific discussion, absence of evidence means that we accept the null hypothesis until such time that evidence is found.
  - melted 11y ago
    That's actually up for philosophical debate. For instance, if I were to tell you there might be a fly in your house somewhere, you wouldn't consider it unlikely even in the absence of evidence, whereas if I said there was a kangaroo, it would be quite agreeable to accept the null hypothesis because the alternative is very unlikely. IOW, if we accepted absence of evidence as evidence of absence, there'd be no scientific research. Just because most research thus far has been crappy doesn't mean learning styles are bullshit. It intuitively seems, at least, that some people are more visual than others, and some are more capable of abstract thought than others, etc.
- deciplex 11y ago
  Yes, it is.
realitygrill 11y ago
Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist, convinced me of this: http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html
joaomsa 11y ago
I really liked the comment on the linked nymag article. > Alan Turing demonstrated (discovered?) that information processing (computation) is necessarily universal. That is, no matter the physical configuration of the computational medium—DNA, brain, software, etc.—the underlying principles of its operation must be identical. This, it turns out, follows from the laws of physics; if it were not the case, sentient life could not have evolved from inorganic materials and processes. The implications a inordinately far-ranging, but one of them surely is that all learning must ultimately conform to the basic laws of information processing. In the end, to "know" something amounts to the same thing for everybody. Physical skills are an obvious example: no matter what "style" we think we discern, throwing a ball works only one way, and there is only one way to learn how to do it (practice). The same goes for reading and, yes, math. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/one-reason-the-learning-styles-myth-persists.html?mid=facebook_nymag http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/one-reason-the-learning...
acbart 11y ago
4/5 of my way through a doctorate in CS Education, and I must admit that I cringe whenever I see Hacker News and r/programming discuss education. We have very intelligent people who have almost no formal educational knowledge making anecdotal claims, often trying to draw on their own atypical experiences. There are so many things that I feel I need to convey and correct in these threads, but I don't think there's time or energy available to do so. Learning Styles is mostly considered snake oil. Of course different students learn differently. Assessment is hard. Instructional Design. There's so much material out there, I wish people would learn more before asserting and speculating. I suppose I should just be pleased that people are interested. But I hope many posters will be encouraged to look further into this subject and develop expertise as they develop their opinions. Here's one potential resource: http://www.learningandteaching.info/ http://www.learningandteaching.info/
jff 11y ago
If only there were some way to evaluate whether or not students were learning things better with one style of teaching or another... some sort of evaluation, a test if you will, a standardized way to judge what's been learned. Then maybe we'd get some more rigor in education! On another note, everyone I knew in high school who really bought into "learning styles" were the kids who didn't like such-and-such class and wanted to whine.
MarcScott 11y ago
I had so many of these techniques thrown at me when I was teaching that I've lost count. I've sat in countless training sessions being taught about Six Thinking Hats, the three learning styles, the seven learning styles, the thirteen learning styles, left-right brain thinking, the learning pit, mindfulness, and growth mindsets. Such a waste of time and energy that could have been used to prepare resources and assess work.
kriro 11y ago
Without any scientific backing I'd argue most forms of learning are social activities in some sense and as such catering to the introvert/extrovert "divide" might be a useful approach. The very naive version would be letting some people read about a topic and write a summary and some others discuss the topic etc.

116 points by tokenadult 11y ago

Sadly, he is right about there being no concrete evidence supporting learning styles. I have been following this for quite some time, both my Egorg products and (soon to be) Study Swami are based on the idea that students differ in how they learn. The interesting thing, though, is that any teacher with a decent amount of experience (I taught physics for 15 years, both as a TA and as a community college professor) sees that students do seem to learn differently. Some students need a clear, verbatim explanation of something. Others need to dance around the concept first, getting a feel for it, before they able to even parse such an explanation. I'm not sure what it is linked to. I suspect that our 'bins' of learning styles are too narrow, or somehow else incorrect. The obvious ones came first, more-or-less 5 senses with each sense being aligned with a 'style' (I learn math better by smell...</s>). The students in the studies are categorized into different learning styles (usually) based on a survey (which, I would argue, really amounts to learning preferences rather than styles). It would be interesting to see tests of actual learning done with different presentations for forming the baseline assignments to a particular style. But even then the problem is that the bins are pre-decided (verbal or visual? global or sequential?) I think this is a little too simplistic. So while I suspect that there is actually something to the idea of learning differently (rather than just 'g'), for the moment, anyway, learning styles seem to be bullshit.

pumblechook 11y ago
Perhaps it has to do with someone's dominant behavior style? Someone who is naturally gregarious probably doesn't enjoy sitting still for an hour during a lecture, just like someone who is naturally analytical might not enjoy a lot of group work. If each person's brain learns the same way, but the effort required to cope with the format of delivery is different, it could lead to differences in the amount learned.
devindotcom 11y ago
Yeah, we have to be careful not to take this debunking too far. It seems pretty clear that the formalized definition of 'learning styles' as codified in various teaching manuals and classroom planning tools is bogus. But students do learn differently, and likely can be grouped into different general styles for which different approaches may be more or less effective (how effective they would be compared to, for example, just having smaller class sizes or more resources is another question). The bathwater's bad, but hang onto that baby.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Kluny 11y ago
I really think it's more about repetition than anything else. If a student has been "primed" for the topic at hand by some prior exposure, like overhearing their parents talk about it or encountering a similar situation on a different subject and being able to draw parallels, they'll be ready for straightforward explanation and be able to internalize it. If it's their first exposure to the topic, they'll need to dance around it and see it from different points of view before things start to make sense. For example, at age 12 I read a book that made no sense to me whatsoever. I somehow finished it but didn't get much out of it. 12 years later at age 24, I read Terry Pratchett's book, the Lost Continent, and gradually realized it was the same book. In 12 years I had gained enough background understanding of concepts such as Evolution, Australia, Satire, and Wizards to get the jokes and the plot, so that time the book stuck with me. Learning style had nothing to do with it - it was me that changed.
Nadya 11y ago
>Some students need a clear, verbatim explanation of something. Others need to dance around the concept first, getting a feel for it, before they able to even parse such an explanation. Different experiences. Memories thrive when connected with other memories and most everyone will have different memories. So it stands to reason different ways of providing the same information will have different results based on each individual's lived experiences. If I can relate an unknown X to a known Y - or even an unknown X to an unknown Y - I always learn better than if I learned about an unknown X that I'm not able to relate with. Mnemonics play a large role in things - unfortunately I can't find any studies offhand to that prove mnemonics actually help.

zepto 11y ago

"Low-cost and easily implemented classroom approaches can certainly cultivate wishfulness amongst educators, especially if they are fun and therefore likely to be well received by students." Sounds like the Hawthorne effect at work. However this shouldn't be taken as a dismissal. Anything that makes learning or work less rote and more fun will improve motivation and thus improve outcomes.

jrcii 11y ago

Here's the original paper https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....

dopamean 11y ago

My mother taught high school for 23 years and I went to a private school with a unique curriculum and philosophy around education. I then went and taught and a coding bootcamp for a little while. In all my experience in education - as a student, teacher, and son - I have repeatedly heard about different learning styles but have yet to see any evidence of them in the wild. It always felt like pseudoscience or BS theories. The things I heard were often difficult to argue with as well. One thing that often made me feel like it was BS was that I never heard a learning style that fit with how I learned and I don't believe I'm special.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Maybe self-selection going on?
vorg 11y ago
Many people majoring in a second language learn better aurally/orally, whereas those at a coding bootcamp perhaps learn better visually. Perhaps the obvious existence of these two primary learning styles has been expanded on and exaggerated so much that it has now become largely bogus, e.g. those explained on Wikipedia's learning_styles page.
- jacalata 11y ago
  How are those obvious? I majored in French and am a programmer and haven't come across this stereotype before.
  - vorg 11y ago
    It's obvious to me based on my own experiences. Of course I'm talking about a "French as a Foreign/Second Language" major, not "French" like they teach in American high schools. And I'm talking about Computer Science or Software Engineering majors, not self-taught webpage developers. The rough visual-verbal spectrum for learners is obvious for me, and when teaching, we need activities that utilize both the visual and verbal faculties. I'm surprised you haven't encountered this continuum.

jasonpbecker 11y ago

The best evidence suggests that presenting information multiple times, multiple different ways benefits everyone because it creates a richer set of connections to those ideas and concepts. It's not the case that one person learns through sights, another sounds, and yet another through movement (roll eyes)-- instead it's the case that doing things multiple ways and multiple times is better for memory.

danieltillett 11y ago
A corollary for this is learning the same information in the same manner, but in a different location. Study in your bedroom, on the train, at the library, under a tree in a park, while walking the dog, at the beach at dawn, etc. This removes environmental cues out of the learned material and makes recall much more effective.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  Interesting idea. A thought I had: what if you studied some topic while always listening to the same song on repeat. Could you improve recall by humming the song (or better, playing it)? I would think a study about this has already been done.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Yes. Actually one of the most effective ways would be to study in the same room that you will later be tested in. Basically information is never learned independent of the location and the location bleeds into your memory of the abstract concept. When you think about how memory evolved this makes perfect sense - you want to remember how to fish for example, but also where and when to fish. The same thing apply to things like addiction where location plays a very strong role in reinforcing the addictive behaviour. One of the ways of helping to overcome addiction is to change your location so the environmental cues are removed.

paulpauper 11y ago

writing, repetition, and reminding seem helpful.

dsmithatx 11y ago

My ex-boss used to have me spend hours of doing Powerpoint because he claimed to be a "visual learner". I always theorized that this sounded like a load of BS. My theory was that he was just too lazy or ADD to actually sit down and read and comprehend things. I learn things looking at graphs. I learn things by reading but, it just takes more focus. I never believed in this theory of learning. There are just sometimes better ways to convey different information. Some people are idiots and some people have enough passion or care enough to put more effort in.

tokenadult 11y ago
My ex-boss used to have me spend hours of doing Powerpoint because he claimed to be a "visual learner". I always theorized that this sounded like a load of BS. My theory was that he was just too lazy or ADD to actually sit down and read and comprehend things. If you haven't seen Edward Tufte's writings about PowerPoint[1] yet, you should. A funny take on what's wrong with PowerPoint is Peter Norvig's online essay about the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address.[2] [1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002PP https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... [2] http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
peteretep 11y ago
I am also a visual learner, and I find it (really) hard to learn from prose. I virtually flunked high school, and then (through a fairly convoluted process) ended up very literally top of my class in a masters at a top 5 university; the masters allowed me to learn my own way. It is possible I'm an idiot, lack passion, and am lazy, but my academic references don't support that theory.

VikingCoder 11y ago

Physical Education will now consist solely of sit-ups. Trying to get kids to perform physical exertion with Baseball, Basketball, Football, Soccer, Swimming, has proven to not improve their standardized scantron test scores. My snarky point is that when science finally determines how we can best measure the success of a child, we'll have a way to objectively measure given techniques. Until then, we're researching in a flawed framework. Creating a student-teacher bond, making students feel valued, making parents feel like their kids are getting something out of their tax dollars, long-term impacts on students, student eagerness to engage in a lesson... I question whether neuroscience has explored these aspects. Let alone teacher job satisfaction. Cripes, we're seeing all kinds of proof that we're beating creativity out of students. I can guarantee that mixing up how lessons are taught has a positive impact on student creativity. Does each student have their preferred learning style? I can't say that. But I strongly suspect that teaching lessons in varied styles has a positive impact. Relevant: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3978 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3978

Dylan16807 11y ago
>Does each student have their preferred learning style? I can't say that. But I strongly suspect that teaching lessons in varied styles has a positive impact. You seem to be implying that belief in learning styles would lead to more varied lessons. But couldn't it do the opposite, trying to sort students and feed each group the same type of lesson as much as possible?
- VikingCoder 11y ago
  No, I think there's something there in Learning Styles, which may be as simple as Varied Learning Technique. Going from Varied Learning Technique all the way to Learning Styles may do harm. I can't say.

abruzzi 11y ago

I think the persistence of the myth is at least partly due to the fact that it aligns well with informal observations. You have a class, and some of the students have difficulty absorbing the material. So those students are taken aside and taught to in different ways, which are, sometimes, successful. So, informally, people come to believe that those students were better reached by the alternative methods, when in reality it may have been the repetition, extra attention, or something else that improved their scores.

mhuffman 11y ago
I might be missing something here but isn't there a big difference between "we don't have any conclusive evidence yet" and "this is a myth and is false"? Also, I think some of the persistence of this "myth" is that people (adults) will flat-out tell you that they may not be able to absorb certain information without seeing some visual representation of it, whereas others will tell they can understand more easily, for example, just from a verbal description.
- dhimes 11y ago
  Thus far, falsifiable hypotheses test to "false." Perhaps we are not framing the problem properly. Here's a quick assessment: When somebody gets directions from Google maps, do they prefer the written, listed directions, or the map (in the happy circumstance where both conveyed the same information)? Some people prefer the lists; some the maps. So we might think of the former as verbal learners and the latter as visual. The problem is, in the context of learning, both (self-described) verbal and visual learners seem to learn better visually.
  - vorg 11y ago
    > both (self-described) verbal and visual learners seem to learn better visually Though I'm guessing verbal learners and visual learners both learn better when doing a task utilizing both visual and verbal senses, than they would doing either a visual only or a verbal only task. The verbal-visual distinction could be a distinction between 60% verbal / 40% visual on the one hand and 40% verbal / 60% visual on the other. I'd also guess that if students are forced to make some body movements (kinesthetic learning) at the same time as speaking/listening (verbal) and watching/diagramming (visual), retention of material is even greater for virtually all of them.

a-priori 11y ago

My wife is a science-educated high school teacher, and as part of getting her B.Ed she had to do a literature review. She was alarmed by the lack of rigour in education research. Almost all the studies she found in education journals were poorly designed, the biggest flaws being: 1) A lack of control groups. In fact, she was told by her instructors that many journals consider it an ethics violation to use a control group, the logic being that in denying your experimental method to the control group you're putting them at a disadvantage. 2) Overgeneralizing results. It's common to use education students (i.e, future teachers) as experimental subjects in education research. Then the results are interpreted as applying to all students, ignoring all the ways that your typical education students are different from your typical high school or elementary school student. While there were some examples of good education research, she said that by far the best education research she could found was actually published in psychology journals. So it's not surprising to me that myths and even pseudoscience will proliferate in education when the standards on research in the field is so poor.

semi-extrinsic 11y ago
> consider it an ethics violation to use a control group, the logic being that in denying your experimental method to the control group you're putting them at a disadvantage. Oh man. Someone should tell them about double-blind clinical trials for cancer treatment. (Those can be, and sometimes are, "stopped for efficiency", when a midway evaluation shows the treatment is so effective that they already have a statistically significant result. They then start giving the treatment to both groups, I believe.)
- a-priori 11y ago
  I know, right? When my wife mentioned this, that was the first thing I said: there are plenty of fields where the research has life-or-death consequences and they use control groups. Education, by comparison, is low stakes. In medical research they have procedures and statistical techniques to detect significant results and allow for early stoppage. There's no reason the same techniques couldn't be applied to education research. But you need control groups, or you don't actually know that you've made an improvement!

progressive_dad 11y ago

Most education research is about how to evaluate TEACHERS not children. If you want to help children then you're better off starting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

stared 11y ago

Could anyone link to the "learning styles" claim? If it is about as coarse categories as "visual" vs "verbal", then debunking does not sound strange (but I guess mostly because not many people are very polarized wrt this axis). But in general - well, almost each single person has her/his tastes (senses involved, brevity/verbosity, level of challenge, level of feedback, amount of social interaction, amount of noise, etc, etc). So, I would rather guess than psychological research are flawed (too few categories, misaligned categories, binning, self-reported data, etc) than anything else. (I do have both experience with teaching and with doing research-level psychology.)

analog31 11y ago
I can't link to it, but I've heard it cited in at least two training sessions that I've been in. The first was when I was hired to be an adjunct teacher at a Big Ten university. One of the presentations was about the different styles of learning. Another was in some kind of corporate management training that I took, where we were also told about the Kubler-Ross stages. These ideas take on a life of their own outside of the research community. From what I can tell, the effect is a fragmented and disorganized approach to teaching, for example, that's evident in the typical elementary school curriculum. On an amusing note, there's an inside joke in my family, that "children have different ways of learning" is a euphemism for when somebody just did something really dumb.

mpdehaan2 11y ago

I'd disagree on the myth part. I would probably agree with it being likely there isn't a lot of data. Much of the learning styles stuff was put forth by Felder at NCSU Engineering (my alma mater). Is there a double-blind study? IDK, but it's interesting, and it resonated. In the informal quiz in my intro to engineering class (Dr. Richard Porter's, not Felder's), it was interesting to see how preferred learning styles (from his quiz) lined up with majors. In short, mostly it was that a large number of people had visual vs written preferences, but the one thing different for C.S. students were they almost always learned globally (i.e. almost random access, not really understanding the whole, and things then popping into place as connections build up between ideas) whereas other majors preferred seeing things step by step always building on one another. It resonated with me in general because I'm generally lost with something until I accumulate a lot of random concepts enough to get it. http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Education_Papers-Chronological.html http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Pap... I think it's great people are trying to pay attention to way s people learn and how to present information. This hit home really hard when doing docs for ansible - and I tried to present things in multiple ways (different ways of indexing, presenting big picture versus building things up, and vice versa) and in writing technical documentation and seeing bugs on understanding (and twitter complaints) on tech docs it is clear people DO learn very different on the sequential vs global axis. I also really DO need diagrams, as large volumes of words get my lost, but strangely I produce large volumes of words and seldom any diagrams. I'm also strange in that if I take notes, I almost never read them myself, so this is perhaps why I'm so bad about learning from written text and always want to jump into code snippets. (Novels, sure, they are great). I also usually need a whiteboard as a buffer for understanding architectures visually, where I notice a lot of people don't need to draw things out, or it doesn't help them (or aren't as interested in those things?) It's useful to present things in different ways and mix things up -- not that you have to repeat everything 4 different ways. That was what Felder was trying to get across. (A simple example might be it is good to present a diagram next to a paragraph describing a concept.)

dhimes 11y ago
Felder's model is my go-to model, also. As opposed to the input methods classification of learning styles, he focuses on the mental-processing aspect (for example, reading and listening are in the same category of "verbal," as opposed to being separated into "verbal" and "auditory"). I'm not formally trained in education, but physics. As such I have to allow for the possibility that his ideas resonate with me partly because he speaks my language. Nevertheless, the evidence is scanty.

analog31 11y ago

Could this mean... no more dioramas in math class?

melted 11y ago

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

srdev 11y ago
In scientific discussion, absence of evidence means that we accept the null hypothesis until such time that evidence is found.
- melted 11y ago
  That's actually up for philosophical debate. For instance, if I were to tell you there might be a fly in your house somewhere, you wouldn't consider it unlikely even in the absence of evidence, whereas if I said there was a kangaroo, it would be quite agreeable to accept the null hypothesis because the alternative is very unlikely. IOW, if we accepted absence of evidence as evidence of absence, there'd be no scientific research. Just because most research thus far has been crappy doesn't mean learning styles are bullshit. It intuitively seems, at least, that some people are more visual than others, and some are more capable of abstract thought than others, etc.
deciplex 11y ago
Yes, it is.

realitygrill 11y ago

Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist, convinced me of this: http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html

joaomsa 11y ago

I really liked the comment on the linked nymag article. > Alan Turing demonstrated (discovered?) that information processing (computation) is necessarily universal. That is, no matter the physical configuration of the computational medium—DNA, brain, software, etc.—the underlying principles of its operation must be identical. This, it turns out, follows from the laws of physics; if it were not the case, sentient life could not have evolved from inorganic materials and processes. The implications a inordinately far-ranging, but one of them surely is that all learning must ultimately conform to the basic laws of information processing. In the end, to "know" something amounts to the same thing for everybody. Physical skills are an obvious example: no matter what "style" we think we discern, throwing a ball works only one way, and there is only one way to learn how to do it (practice). The same goes for reading and, yes, math. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/one-reason-the-learning-styles-myth-persists.html?mid=facebook_nymag http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/one-reason-the-learning...

acbart 11y ago

4/5 of my way through a doctorate in CS Education, and I must admit that I cringe whenever I see Hacker News and r/programming discuss education. We have very intelligent people who have almost no formal educational knowledge making anecdotal claims, often trying to draw on their own atypical experiences. There are so many things that I feel I need to convey and correct in these threads, but I don't think there's time or energy available to do so. Learning Styles is mostly considered snake oil. Of course different students learn differently. Assessment is hard. Instructional Design. There's so much material out there, I wish people would learn more before asserting and speculating. I suppose I should just be pleased that people are interested. But I hope many posters will be encouraged to look further into this subject and develop expertise as they develop their opinions. Here's one potential resource: http://www.learningandteaching.info/ http://www.learningandteaching.info/

jff 11y ago

If only there were some way to evaluate whether or not students were learning things better with one style of teaching or another... some sort of evaluation, a test if you will, a standardized way to judge what's been learned. Then maybe we'd get some more rigor in education! On another note, everyone I knew in high school who really bought into "learning styles" were the kids who didn't like such-and-such class and wanted to whine.

MarcScott 11y ago

I had so many of these techniques thrown at me when I was teaching that I've lost count. I've sat in countless training sessions being taught about Six Thinking Hats, the three learning styles, the seven learning styles, the thirteen learning styles, left-right brain thinking, the learning pit, mindfulness, and growth mindsets. Such a waste of time and energy that could have been used to prepare resources and assess work.

kriro 11y ago

Without any scientific backing I'd argue most forms of learning are social activities in some sense and as such catering to the introvert/extrovert "divide" might be a useful approach. The very naive version would be letting some people read about a topic and write a summary and some others discuss the topic etc.