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Isn't this surprising to a huge extent? My gut tells me that it's not that people don't have different learning styles, it's instead a combination of (A) the le

by tgb 8y ago

Isn't this surprising to a huge extent? My gut tells me that it's not that people don't have different learning styles, it's instead a combination of (A) the learning styles not being as obvious as the ones studied here and (B) we aren't exploiting those learning styles effectively. Is it really plausible that all humans learn in exactly the same way? I recall the Feynman story about realizing that some people see the numbers as they count and others hear the numbers. This was tested by having people do either visual or auditory tasks while counting the seconds. People who "saw" the numbers were less consistent counting to 30 seconds when doing something visual at the same time and vice versa for those who heard. How is it plausible that these two groups of people learn to do arithmetic in the same way? How many other little differences are there between people's brains that we don't notice? Maybe we're just terrible at noticing and using the differences that exist.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
First and foremost this is just another social sciences study. Most of everybody is aware of the reproducibility crisis yet seem to fail to connect the dots to new studies - it's not going anywhere which means that science, particularly in the social and physiological sciences, is somehow deeply flawed. That said, this study confirms my own biases so I want to believe. One big reason is to consider the academic output of schools in places such as Korea and China. Learning is extremely structured and more analogous to a factory line than a school, in the US style, and their output absolutely dwarfs ours. The typical argument against this system is that mechanical teaching leads to mechanical thought, which is is supposed to support things such as the fact that China has an abysmal rate of Nobel laureates. However, something missing there is that Nobel Prizes are frequently rewarded long after something is first done when its relevance is proven or otherwise becomes more clear. For instance Stephen Hawking never received a Nobel prize, yet if we observed Hawking Radiation - he likely would have been awarded one for a theoretic hypothesis dating back to 1974. The point there is that as recently as the 1950s Chinese were starving to death by tens of millions and they had little to no academic culture to speak of. Their riveting success is a very much a new thing and so the lack of Nobel standard achievements is something that's not [yet] a reasonable indication of much.

by tgb 8y ago

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

First and foremost this is just another social sciences study. Most of everybody is aware of the reproducibility crisis yet seem to fail to connect the dots to new studies - it's not going anywhere which means that science, particularly in the social and physiological sciences, is somehow deeply flawed. That said, this study confirms my own biases so I want to believe. One big reason is to consider the academic output of schools in places such as Korea and China. Learning is extremely structured and more analogous to a factory line than a school, in the US style, and their output absolutely dwarfs ours. The typical argument against this system is that mechanical teaching leads to mechanical thought, which is is supposed to support things such as the fact that China has an abysmal rate of Nobel laureates. However, something missing there is that Nobel Prizes are frequently rewarded long after something is first done when its relevance is proven or otherwise becomes more clear. For instance Stephen Hawking never received a Nobel prize, yet if we observed Hawking Radiation - he likely would have been awarded one for a theoretic hypothesis dating back to 1974. The point there is that as recently as the 1950s Chinese were starving to death by tens of millions and they had little to no academic culture to speak of. Their riveting success is a very much a new thing and so the lack of Nobel standard achievements is something that's not [yet] a reasonable indication of much.