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No such thing as learning styles, it's a myth. https://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-styles-is-one-of-the-greatest-neuroscience-myths/ https:

No such thing as learning styles, it's a myth. https://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-styles-is-one-of-the-greatest-neuroscience-myths/ https://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-styl... > So how did a false belief become so widely-held? In his paper on the subject for Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Howard-Jones argues that it’s not a result of fraud, but of “uniformed interpretations of genuine scientific facts.” The assumption behind learning myths seems to be based on the scientific fact that different regions of the cortex have different roles in visual, auditory, and sensory processing, and so students should learn differently “according to which part of their brain works better.” However, writes Howard-Jones, “the brain’s interconnectivity makes such an assumption unsound.”

waynecochran 8y ago
I always thought it was counter productive to “pigeon hole” oneself as only able to learn one way. The whole “I’m a visual learner” becomes a self-fulfilling reinforced statement. Sort of like people who say they are not a “math person”... well if you think that way you certainly won’t be.
- rwnspace 8y ago
  I find it's much more effective to think of yourself as a secret agent, superhero or a magician. When you can catch a flying plane a bit of calculus is a small hurdle, when you can cast arcane, mystical spells, struggling with the borrow-checker in Rust is just a temporary setback.
  - thesz 8y ago
    I think that "secret agent" analogy is very deep. Secret agent must monitor what he is doing and the results of his actions and make his actions either the best possible (wash a dish in a best possible way) or most compatible with ways of others (put washed dish where other think it should belong). Deliberate practice grows here naturally. And this attitude extends everywhere, not just to programming and/or washing dishes.
    - rwnspace 8y ago
      Yes, deliberate practice is my favourite topic. I find ego to be persistent, expansive and not very deliberate. Mythical or fictional identities are deliberate, perhaps through their ephemeral nature, limitless yet constrained. For me it's a way of tapping into a play/flow state and compartmentalising away stress and uncertainty. As a teenager the mythic entity was my self; as an adult I have had to turn elsewhere to find that spark (this was a very painful lesson).
      - vertexFarm 8y ago
        There's so much in this little paragraph. Thank you for sharing it.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  I wasted years of my life believing I wasn't "good at math" or whatever platitude was popular with everyone. I rediscovered math long after school and it has been a marvel. I really wish I wasn't so convinced by a faddish belief that most people can't do math. It was just an excuse to ignore, and then of course you won't know what's going on. That's not you, that's your past ignorance. It just took one person to speak up when everyone was jokingly trash-talking their own math skills. One normal-looking guy, not bookish or anything but tatted up and heavy-set with a big biker beard, broke in to the conversation and said "I actually really like math." All of a sudden I just felt so stupid and realized what I'd been doing to myself. High school me was literally a moron. At least I still had time to catch up.
  - waynecochran 8y ago
    Good! I always cringe when I hear people deprecate themselves as not being a "math person." Math and abstract thought is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Also, math is a very creative process and allows us to model the Universe we live in.
coldtea 8y ago
>No such thing as learning styles, it's a myth. Some studies go one way, other studies go the other way on the matter. Plus studies in such soft sciences are notoriously feeble, and there's also the whole replication crisis. I don't think we're ready to discard the whole idea just yet.
- Delfino 8y ago
  Teacher here, can you provide links to studies that support the existence of distinct learning styles? I've yet to find any compelling evidence so it's not that I've discarded the idea but was never presented with a case to accept the idea in the first place.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    What's commonly being debunked are particular systems for classification of individuals into learning styles, not the idea of learning styles in toto, or the idea of individuals being more inclined to/effective with a specific style. The naive way with many researches jump on the "so it's all a myth" bandwagon obscures the distinction. Here's how a meta-paper puts it: "The dominant theme was a stated need to use a diverse range of teaching methods. This is a separate issue to the use of Learning Styles and there was no suggestion in the survey that to not use Learning Styles was to advocate for all students to be taught the same way, and/or to use only one method of teaching. Neither of these approaches are advocated by the wider literature which seeks to ‘debunk’ Learning Styles, but it is clear from the abundance of comments on this theme that these two issues were related in the view of many of the participants. This is supported by the emergence of the related theme of ‘styles of learning rather than Learning Styles’; many participants had a looser definition of ‘Learning Styles’ than those introduced early in the survey. This finding leads us to urge caution and clarity in the continued ‘debunking’ of the ‘myth’ of Learning Styles. Learners obviously have preferences for how they learn. In addition, there is an obvious appeal to using a variety of teaching methods and in asking students to reflect on the ways in which they learn. However, these three concepts are unrelated to the (unsupported) idea that there is a benefit to learners from diagnosing their ‘Learning Style’ using one of the specific classifications (Coffield et al., 2004) and attempting to match teaching to those styles. However, these concepts were clearly linked in the mind of many of our participants". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5366351/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5366351/
danharaj 8y ago
In mathematics there's always several ways to apply one's senses to understand and manipulate a concept. For example, an equation can be understood as being a string of symbols or a commutative diagram, or as a string diagram. These emphasize symbolic processing and spatial manipulation to varying degrees. It would be perverse to tell a mathematician to use only their best intuition to learn. These sort of thing lean on each other to make one another stronger. Why would it be any different for any sort of learner?
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  Not "learning", but I recall a survey of mathematicians, and their main reasoning styles broke down something like visual (80%), kinesthetic (15%), linguistic (5%) - the main point was that most mathematicians don't think with notation, it's just a way to nail down details and communicate.
custos 8y ago
I know I have horrible auditory memory, and really good visual memory; which at first gives some credibility to learning styles being a thing. But then I read this: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-auditory-memory-visual-learning-brain-research-science/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-audi... According to that article, the brain remembers visual/tactile memories equally well and better than auditory memory. So in order to prove learning styles exist, we'd need to find people who provably have better auditory memories than visual memories. I've not seen any studies or data for this, so I'd hesitate to call it a myth until I did, since on the surface the idea seems plausible. Wish the paper referenced in that article wasn't paywalled. Be curious if it's been shown that all (or a large majority) of people tested show the same result (visual/tactile > auditory).
jdietrich 8y ago
Quite understandably, there's a lot of wishful thinking in education. Most teachers have good intentions and want to see their students succeed, so they struggle with the reality that a lot of students just aren't academically inclined and really struggle with the basics of the curriculum. It would be nice to think that everyone is a genius; the "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" theories offer the very appealing notion that everyone is gifted deep down and a teacher just needs to find the appropriate tools to unlock that inner brilliance. Unfortunately, this wishful thinking can lead to an inadvertent cruelty of unrealistic expectations. Through no fault of their own, some people just aren't very intelligent and have no real chance of excelling academically. We encourage those people to go to college, without considering whether they have any real chance of graduating. We lumber them with a few semesters worth of student debt for no good reason. We offer them no good alternatives in terms of vocational training or apprenticeships. We don't provide them with the educational, social and emotional support they need to make the most of their potential and find a path towards a fulfilling life. The flip side of "anyone can succeed if they really set their mind to it" is the rather callous "if you didn't succeed, it's only because you didn't try hard enough".
vertexFarm 8y ago
It's really weird how people desire to classify their personalities. I suppose it's a human instinct to classify and organize all information. Same with Meyers-Briggs personality types, which are accepted as truth by so many that some companies use the test with new hires. It's about as scientific as a horoscope. All the personality traits described are tuned to that magical level of vagueness--vague enough to describe literally anyone from time to time, as we are all many different people as time goes on, but specific enough to seem eerily accurate. We want to believe things like this. Same with "learning styles." It's a convergence of cognitive bias. We want to classify, name, and organize everything--especially when it pertains to ourselves. We want to be unique and know ourselves. It has an added bonus of being an excuse for our failings as well. I think most people don't know what science really is, but they think they know how it sounds. So people easily believe and even self-diagnose themselves with pseudoscientific phenomena like this. It's so important to be able to look for predictions that are being made and then confirmed or disproven, and the rigor of an experiment to prove it's not just wishful thinking or bias. If you decide you have a different learning style because [brain words], then do an amateur experiment to try to assess how it has affected you, it's really hard to actually nail down what's happening. You might simply be focusing harder because of the novelty of the situation. You only have a single subject for your experiment, and the subject is also the observer. Terrible setup. But most laypeople will believe that seeing is believing, and that they have proven something to themselves beyond doubt. Thus pseudoscience spreads.

waynecochran 8y ago

I always thought it was counter productive to “pigeon hole” oneself as only able to learn one way. The whole “I’m a visual learner” becomes a self-fulfilling reinforced statement. Sort of like people who say they are not a “math person”... well if you think that way you certainly won’t be.

rwnspace 8y ago
I find it's much more effective to think of yourself as a secret agent, superhero or a magician. When you can catch a flying plane a bit of calculus is a small hurdle, when you can cast arcane, mystical spells, struggling with the borrow-checker in Rust is just a temporary setback.
- thesz 8y ago
  I think that "secret agent" analogy is very deep. Secret agent must monitor what he is doing and the results of his actions and make his actions either the best possible (wash a dish in a best possible way) or most compatible with ways of others (put washed dish where other think it should belong). Deliberate practice grows here naturally. And this attitude extends everywhere, not just to programming and/or washing dishes.
  - rwnspace 8y ago
    Yes, deliberate practice is my favourite topic. I find ego to be persistent, expansive and not very deliberate. Mythical or fictional identities are deliberate, perhaps through their ephemeral nature, limitless yet constrained. For me it's a way of tapping into a play/flow state and compartmentalising away stress and uncertainty. As a teenager the mythic entity was my self; as an adult I have had to turn elsewhere to find that spark (this was a very painful lesson).
    - vertexFarm 8y ago
      There's so much in this little paragraph. Thank you for sharing it.
vertexFarm 8y ago
I wasted years of my life believing I wasn't "good at math" or whatever platitude was popular with everyone. I rediscovered math long after school and it has been a marvel. I really wish I wasn't so convinced by a faddish belief that most people can't do math. It was just an excuse to ignore, and then of course you won't know what's going on. That's not you, that's your past ignorance. It just took one person to speak up when everyone was jokingly trash-talking their own math skills. One normal-looking guy, not bookish or anything but tatted up and heavy-set with a big biker beard, broke in to the conversation and said "I actually really like math." All of a sudden I just felt so stupid and realized what I'd been doing to myself. High school me was literally a moron. At least I still had time to catch up.
- waynecochran 8y ago
  Good! I always cringe when I hear people deprecate themselves as not being a "math person." Math and abstract thought is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Also, math is a very creative process and allows us to model the Universe we live in.

coldtea 8y ago

>No such thing as learning styles, it's a myth. Some studies go one way, other studies go the other way on the matter. Plus studies in such soft sciences are notoriously feeble, and there's also the whole replication crisis. I don't think we're ready to discard the whole idea just yet.

Delfino 8y ago
Teacher here, can you provide links to studies that support the existence of distinct learning styles? I've yet to find any compelling evidence so it's not that I've discarded the idea but was never presented with a case to accept the idea in the first place.
- coldtea 8y ago
  What's commonly being debunked are particular systems for classification of individuals into learning styles, not the idea of learning styles in toto, or the idea of individuals being more inclined to/effective with a specific style. The naive way with many researches jump on the "so it's all a myth" bandwagon obscures the distinction. Here's how a meta-paper puts it: "The dominant theme was a stated need to use a diverse range of teaching methods. This is a separate issue to the use of Learning Styles and there was no suggestion in the survey that to not use Learning Styles was to advocate for all students to be taught the same way, and/or to use only one method of teaching. Neither of these approaches are advocated by the wider literature which seeks to ‘debunk’ Learning Styles, but it is clear from the abundance of comments on this theme that these two issues were related in the view of many of the participants. This is supported by the emergence of the related theme of ‘styles of learning rather than Learning Styles’; many participants had a looser definition of ‘Learning Styles’ than those introduced early in the survey. This finding leads us to urge caution and clarity in the continued ‘debunking’ of the ‘myth’ of Learning Styles. Learners obviously have preferences for how they learn. In addition, there is an obvious appeal to using a variety of teaching methods and in asking students to reflect on the ways in which they learn. However, these three concepts are unrelated to the (unsupported) idea that there is a benefit to learners from diagnosing their ‘Learning Style’ using one of the specific classifications (Coffield et al., 2004) and attempting to match teaching to those styles. However, these concepts were clearly linked in the mind of many of our participants". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5366351/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5366351/

danharaj 8y ago

In mathematics there's always several ways to apply one's senses to understand and manipulate a concept. For example, an equation can be understood as being a string of symbols or a commutative diagram, or as a string diagram. These emphasize symbolic processing and spatial manipulation to varying degrees. It would be perverse to tell a mathematician to use only their best intuition to learn. These sort of thing lean on each other to make one another stronger. Why would it be any different for any sort of learner?

hyperpallium 8y ago
Not "learning", but I recall a survey of mathematicians, and their main reasoning styles broke down something like visual (80%), kinesthetic (15%), linguistic (5%) - the main point was that most mathematicians don't think with notation, it's just a way to nail down details and communicate.

custos 8y ago

I know I have horrible auditory memory, and really good visual memory; which at first gives some credibility to learning styles being a thing. But then I read this: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-auditory-memory-visual-learning-brain-research-science/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-audi... According to that article, the brain remembers visual/tactile memories equally well and better than auditory memory. So in order to prove learning styles exist, we'd need to find people who provably have better auditory memories than visual memories. I've not seen any studies or data for this, so I'd hesitate to call it a myth until I did, since on the surface the idea seems plausible. Wish the paper referenced in that article wasn't paywalled. Be curious if it's been shown that all (or a large majority) of people tested show the same result (visual/tactile > auditory).

jdietrich 8y ago

Quite understandably, there's a lot of wishful thinking in education. Most teachers have good intentions and want to see their students succeed, so they struggle with the reality that a lot of students just aren't academically inclined and really struggle with the basics of the curriculum. It would be nice to think that everyone is a genius; the "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" theories offer the very appealing notion that everyone is gifted deep down and a teacher just needs to find the appropriate tools to unlock that inner brilliance. Unfortunately, this wishful thinking can lead to an inadvertent cruelty of unrealistic expectations. Through no fault of their own, some people just aren't very intelligent and have no real chance of excelling academically. We encourage those people to go to college, without considering whether they have any real chance of graduating. We lumber them with a few semesters worth of student debt for no good reason. We offer them no good alternatives in terms of vocational training or apprenticeships. We don't provide them with the educational, social and emotional support they need to make the most of their potential and find a path towards a fulfilling life. The flip side of "anyone can succeed if they really set their mind to it" is the rather callous "if you didn't succeed, it's only because you didn't try hard enough".

vertexFarm 8y ago

It's really weird how people desire to classify their personalities. I suppose it's a human instinct to classify and organize all information. Same with Meyers-Briggs personality types, which are accepted as truth by so many that some companies use the test with new hires. It's about as scientific as a horoscope. All the personality traits described are tuned to that magical level of vagueness--vague enough to describe literally anyone from time to time, as we are all many different people as time goes on, but specific enough to seem eerily accurate. We want to believe things like this. Same with "learning styles." It's a convergence of cognitive bias. We want to classify, name, and organize everything--especially when it pertains to ourselves. We want to be unique and know ourselves. It has an added bonus of being an excuse for our failings as well. I think most people don't know what science really is, but they think they know how it sounds. So people easily believe and even self-diagnose themselves with pseudoscientific phenomena like this. It's so important to be able to look for predictions that are being made and then confirmed or disproven, and the rigor of an experiment to prove it's not just wishful thinking or bias. If you decide you have a different learning style because [brain words], then do an amateur experiment to try to assess how it has affected you, it's really hard to actually nail down what's happening. You might simply be focusing harder because of the novelty of the situation. You only have a single subject for your experiment, and the subject is also the observer. Terrible setup. But most laypeople will believe that seeing is believing, and that they have proven something to themselves beyond doubt. Thus pseudoscience spreads.