6 ms·

Why the Learning Styles myth spreads

32 points by henry_pulver 4y ago

bitwize 4y ago
Because the predominant ideas of pedagogy consist of what education academics would like to believe is true, rather than what is actually true; and displacing these ideas is difficult because the teachers' unions in the USA are powerful. Another example: the school system in Oakland, CA, in 2015 abandoned its phonics-based approach to reading instruction, which was actually helping kids learn to read and get good scores in reading. The reason was because the teachers felt the curriculum was "colonizing" and they didn't have enough agency to determine how to introduce reading to kids. The fact that phonics has proven to be a good basis for instruction in mapping written words to sounds, even in a phonetically bizarre language like English, and everything else including "whole word" instruction and whatever learning-by-osmosis method the Oakland district ended up adopting, has produced poorer results, was irrelevant to the school board who made this decision. Which is to me unconscionable: when it comes to education I favor whatever gets kids to learn. Especially in a place like Oakland; if you've ever been there, you'll know those kids need good education. But that's how it goes when egos, entrenched bureaucracies, and the wishful thinking of powerful people are on the line. In an unrelated field, it also resembles the fixation the biochem community had on beta-amyloid proteins in Alzheimer's. It was an enticing theory because it seemed so simple: clear away the plaques and the brain would heal -- no more Alzheimer's! Of course it didn't work that way in reality, but it worked so well in mouse models, leading to more intense wishcasting by other researchers and on it goes.
- phillipsmg 4y ago
  Definitely agree with the part about education and getting kids to learn! Not sure about the comparison with beta-amyloid though. There are good reasons to think it is involved with Alzheimer's - genetics, histology, etc. And I don't think many researchers thought that would be the problem solved. It was just a very logical target in tackling a very challenging disease (like all neurodegenerative diseases, basically none of which are cured).
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > displacing these ideas is difficult because the teachers' unions in the USA are powerful I can pinpoint over 10 dumb decisions taken by my corporate, as a result of office politics and jockeying for various positions. There are many myths corporate britain believes, from forcing develipers back in the office to improve productivity despite having concrete evidence that it doesn't, to hiring 'agile practitioners', etc. No union required for dumb decisions
  - phillipsmg 4y ago
    No union required for dumb decisions. But in this case, it does seem it may contribute
  - bitwize 4y ago
    It wasn't a "unions bad" rant, more a "these unions in this country are dysfunctional" rant. And teachers' unions in the USA are unions of government workers, not corporate.
- tokinonagare 4y ago
  > Because the predominant ideas of pedagogy consist of what education academics would like to believe is true This, times 10. I worked in a lab on education-related subject at a top university and it was wishful thinking all the way down: from Ministry bullshit like "education 5.0" and grants to whatever buzzword heavy proposal was thrown, to researchers ignoring obvious flaws in their dumb but cool things that are set to fail from the start, to arranging the reality of collected data (from weak protocol) and their interpretation, etc. It was full of people trying to make a name for themselves but very few solid research. Most of the papers were flawed, irrelevant or kinda stretched reality.
- baobabKoodaa 4y ago
  You phrase it like the teachers prioritized their own comfort ("agency") over children's learning. That's not the case. I'm sure the teachers felt that their methods - or "agency to choose methods that work for them" - were beneficial to learning. I'm sure they felt that the heavyhanded top-down micromanagement was hindering learning. Were they wrong? Yes, probably, I don't know, I guess. I'm just saying they weren't motivated by selfish reasons.
- gshubert17 4y ago
  The Oakland example was one cited in Time magazine recently. One of the teachers who earlier advocated eliminating phonics was described as now "heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics." The article includes quite a bit of history about reading instruction, insights from neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene [1], a reference to a 2000 report from the National Reading Panel [2], and reports by education reporter Emily Hanford on why the science of reading has not been rapidly adopted [3]. [0] https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/ https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670021105 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670021105 [2] https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/p... [3] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/10/23/hanfordandreading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/10/23/hanfordandread...
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    If your argument for doing something starts with this: > The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says. Then it's a bad sign. I'm glad they don't let us get past the second paragraph before turning it into a culture war. The Minority View in the 2000 report seems a bit less 'culture war' and more thoughtful: > In the end, the work of the NRP is not of poor quality; it is just unbalanced and, to some extent, irrelevant. But because of these deficiencies, bad things will happen. Summaries of, and sound bites about, the Panel’s findings will be used to make policy decisions at the national, state, and local levels. Topics that were never investigated will be misconstrued as failed practices. Unanswered questions will be assumed to have been answered negatively. Unfortunately, most policymakers and ordinary citizens will not read the full reviews. They will not see the Panel’s explanations about why so few topics were investigated or its judgments that the results of research on some of the topics are inconclusive. They will not hear the Panel’s calls for more and more fine-tuned research. Ironically, the report that Congress intended to be a boon to the teaching of reading will turn out to be a further detriment. > As an educator with more than 40 years of experience and as the only member of the NRP who has lived a career in elementary schools, I call upon Congress to recognize that the Panel’s majority report does not respond to its charge nor meet the needs of America’s schools. In spite of the Panel’s diligent efforts and its valuable findings on a select number of instructional practices, we still cannot answer the first and most central question of the charge: “What is known about the basic processes by which children learn to read.” We still do not know what types of instruction are suitable for different ages and populations of children. We still do not know the relative effectiveness of the three models of reading as bases for instruction. We do not even know whether the existing body of research can answer those questions. Therefore, I ask Congress not to take actions that will promote one philosophical view of reading or constrain future research in the field on the basis of the Panel’s limited and narrow set of findings
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
The report they cite isn't even sure that the myth exists: > From a pragmatic perspective, the concerning implications of these results are moderated by a number of methodological aspects of the reported studies. Most used convenience sampling with small samples and did not report critical measures of study quality. It was unclear whether participants fully understood that they were specifically being asked about the matching of instruction to Learning Styles, or whether the questions asked could be interpreted as referring to a broader interpretation of the theory. These findings suggest that the concern expressed about belief in Learning Styles may not be fully supported by current evidence, and highlight the need to undertake further research on the objective use of matching instruction to specific Learning Styles. So, they may just be talking past each other. Is it possible to express ideas with both words and visuals? Is doing both a good idea? Does a person always learn every idea best by only being taught with a specific style? edit: the lady they link to as calling the debunkers racist seems to have a good grasp of things to me: > The debunkers' core claim is based on what's known as the meshing (or matching) hypothesis –– the idea that if learning styles exist, experiments should show that students will always learn better if taught in their preferred style. But in defining learning styles (a theory about the brain) as equivalent to the matching hypothesis (a theory about instruction) the debunkers have created a straw man. As Kozhevnikov points out, "the fact that a simple version of the matching hypothesis – which rests on the assumption that a given person can be characterized by a single type of style, independent of the task –– has not been supported does not imply that the concept of cognitive style itself is invalid."
- phillipsmg 4y ago
  This just seems like redefining the claim. If the meshing hypothesis isn't true, doesn't that make the theory pointless? The way this gets used in schools is almost always with respect to the meshing hypothesis
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    https://blog.delta-academy.xyz/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsuper-static-assets.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fa042f718-04a1-4258-ab12-50853bc1914c%2Fimages%2Fc7d105fe-ce48-4007-83f4-7c527259e8d5.png&w=1200&q=80 https://blog.delta-academy.xyz/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2... These don't seem matching specific to me. Seems like the disclaimer at the top is itself unscientific. It's just a list of study tips, arranged in sections.
knaik94 4y ago
There's a simpler but less comfortable explanation, students even more than teachers try to find meaning for why they can't understand things as easily as their peers. Learning styles is an easy explanation that is just unscientific enough to not be easily testable but still seems plausible as a reason for why a student might not do well well while their peers do. Learning is complicated and involved and it's hard to show students that learning is a marathon not a sprint. I wish they stopped teaching this myth completely because it gives rise to this inherent sexism and binary view when comparing creative and logical thinking. There's no right-hand dominant or left-hand dominant brain. I don't know if it's changed in more recent generations but I was taught that girls are more creative and boys are more logical and that's why more boys go into math and sciences. That kind of thinking is the root of the current gender imbalances among stem and engineering fields. In most ways they are orthogonal. https://www.thersa.org/blog/2018/09/creativity-and-logic-avoid-dangerous-stereotypes https://www.thersa.org/blog/2018/09/creativity-and-logic-avo... People in general like labels and categories.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  I don’t think you can claim that it entirely accounts for gender differences in academic and occupational specialization. That’s also just unscientific enough to be convincing as well. The truth is we really don’t know. I do agree with the general point of your comment, on how this can significantly account for individuals decisions and self-understanding.
  - knaik94 4y ago
    I agree with you, it doesn't account for the the imbalance entirely. I said it's the root of it, as in this creates the stereotypes from such a young age. I think it's a fair assessment based on the stories I hear from my friends and the kids I tutor about what made girls choose certain areas of focus compared to boys. It was even more enlightening hearing about my women friends who ended up not completing a major in stem and especially CS to graduation. I have to admit it's not a hard quantifiably scientific. I still choose to believe it. It's not going to be one little thing that will fix gender imbalances, but in my opinion, these kind of practical changes is where you see longer term positive consequences. I have a brilliant friend, finished a doctorate, nurse practitioner. We talk about our journeys and she still talks about feeling somewhat insecure that her "brain isn't made for math" and I always call her out, she finished some of the most rigorous years of schooling in healthcare and she still doesn't believe she would be good at math. I don't think she has to do math unless she happens to find interest in it, she doesn't have anything left to prove to herself or anyone else. I just feel frustrated as an educator by how rigid that kind of thinking is and how long it follows students through their life.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
In psychology, I am actually coming to the conclusion that experience is better than a study. I have seen so many counter-intuitive studies that have later had huge methodological issues. In addition, a lot of studies have small sample sizes, or unrealistic tasks that come from the Procrustean process of forcing a question into something you can run a study on. With regards to learning styles, I have been around enough students and been around enough teachers to think that there actually might be something to it. That different people might learn better with different modalities.
- knaik94 4y ago
  I would argue that it's the subject that should have an associated optimal way of being taught. For the same reason you don't teach a sport by reading the rule book on day 1, you don't build a strong foundation in math without going through the fundamental proofs. Taking physics taught me that intuition is not very reliable.
- jollybean 4y ago
  I think that's what homework is for. I used to always skip homework because I thought I understood the subject. But you learn a lot from 'doing' esp. all the weird corner cases. It makes you think about it in an applied way. I used to like the kids who did well despite not doing homework, now I like the kids that do their homework.
- Someone 4y ago
  > I am actually coming to the conclusion that experience is better than a study. I have seen so many counter-intuitive studies that have later had huge methodological issues. In addition, a lot of studies have small sample sizes I don’t think those are strong arguments for claiming experience is better than a study. Methodology-wise, experience doesn’t pose a hypothesis first and then tests it, and doesn’t statistically evaluate conclusions. That leads to the risk that conclusions get drawn on a few outliers or more ‘visible’ students. Sample size wise, decades of teaching or large classes will have more subjects, but they’ll be more diverse, too, and their attributes aren’t tracked well. On the plus side, experience doesn’t feel the “publish or perish” pressure. That significantly decreases the risk one starts shouting around conclusions that aren’t fully supported by the evidence.
JohnFen 4y ago
But there are unquestionably differences. For instance, I find it just about impossible to learn auditorily. Audio books are essentially worthless, lectures equally so, etc. I learn best through reading. Now, it may be true that's because I grew up mostly learning by reading -- it may be a trained difference, not an inherent one -- but it's unquestionably a difference.
- knaik94 4y ago
  I think that might come to more fundamental differences such as your personal strength or weakness with working memory. You might be better adapted to conceptualizing words while reading rather than translating what you hear into ideas. But at the end of the day it's a skill, not a inherent weakness that you can't work past. People believing their learning style is static and teachers treating learning styles as static is the actual issue. As a basic example, if you are not familiar with how to read music, it would be hard to learn and build on music theory and harmonies. That doesn't make you an auditory learner, it just means you know how it's being taught. Abstracting the musical notes into colors or frequency isn't going to make it easier to learn just because you consider yourself a "visual" learner. Certain concepts may seem clearer and patterns could be more easily identifiable, but in practice it wouldn't be easier.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I think we're largely in agreement here. > not a inherent weakness that you can't work past. Perhaps this is the real problem. Taking for the sake of argument that there are different inherent learning styles, perhaps the issue is that some believe that means you can't work past them. It seems much more likely that you can, with training and practice. We learn to overcome all sorts of other unique limitations, after all. And there is some reason to believe that there are different inherent learning styles. There are many different sorts of "intelligence", after all, which implies that not everyone's brain processes information in the same way. Personally, I don't know enough about this subject to have an opinion either way, but it's very interesting to ponder.
    - 4y ago
omniglottal 4y ago
The phrase you're better off using is "educated hypothesis based on enormous swaths of subjective data". Calling this a "myth" without proposing a more rigorous methodology to test for it is simply casting FUD, far worse than what you're battling against.
- knaik94 4y ago
  A hypothesis you can test, this you can't.
- namaria 4y ago
  If you don't realize that the very concept of 'FUD' boils down to the suppression of questions about cult-like behaviors, you really shouldn't be lecturing anyone on scientific validity.
aaron695 4y ago
jbuhbjlnjbn 4y ago
>Despite this, a 2020 survey found that 90% of educators believe that we each have a ‘learning style’ . This finding was met with much derision by education researchers. How has a theory with little evidence become and stayed so pervasive? If you replace 'learning style' with 'preferred learning style', which I think is more accurate, the whole discussion becomes moot.
iainctduncan 4y ago
I have been learning and teaching hard things for my whole adult life (music, juggling, various kinds of performing mostly, but also self taught comp sci). My personal conclusion, from personal observation and a lot of talking with people who have taught very high level musicians for decades, is that Learning Styles is an excuse for people to skip the kind of work that is hardest for them, and in doing so, sabotages progress. If you really want to get good at something that is hard for you, you should work on it in the way that is least comfortable for you more than what is comfortable. Also, I've noticed I never hear "this is my learning style" from people who really know how to teach themselves and I frequently hear it from people who really just don't want to work. I spent decades playing jazz using mostly what I would now call compensatory techniques because ear training is so much harder for me than theory and harmony. I only became a really good player when I spent a VERY long time learning in the least comfortable and most humbling way for me. The biggest issue is that most of the time learner is not qualified to determine which style works best for them, and confuses what feels best for what works best. Someone who has taught hundreds of people for many years knows what works (like my university teaching musician friends). And they never talk about learning styles. That said, there definitely are people who are much better at the sub-skill exercised by a certain modality. But this is not a proxy for progress. My example, I could learn chord progression arithmetic very easily. So I would be seen as someone who learns music mathematically. But that's wrong, that's just what I happen to be good at, not how I learn. Focusing on it for many years was exactly the opposite of what would have given me maximum progress. It's not just a myth, it's a trap.

32 points by henry_pulver 4y ago

Because the predominant ideas of pedagogy consist of what education academics would like to believe is true, rather than what is actually true; and displacing these ideas is difficult because the teachers' unions in the USA are powerful. Another example: the school system in Oakland, CA, in 2015 abandoned its phonics-based approach to reading instruction, which was actually helping kids learn to read and get good scores in reading. The reason was because the teachers felt the curriculum was "colonizing" and they didn't have enough agency to determine how to introduce reading to kids. The fact that phonics has proven to be a good basis for instruction in mapping written words to sounds, even in a phonetically bizarre language like English, and everything else including "whole word" instruction and whatever learning-by-osmosis method the Oakland district ended up adopting, has produced poorer results, was irrelevant to the school board who made this decision. Which is to me unconscionable: when it comes to education I favor whatever gets kids to learn. Especially in a place like Oakland; if you've ever been there, you'll know those kids need good education. But that's how it goes when egos, entrenched bureaucracies, and the wishful thinking of powerful people are on the line. In an unrelated field, it also resembles the fixation the biochem community had on beta-amyloid proteins in Alzheimer's. It was an enticing theory because it seemed so simple: clear away the plaques and the brain would heal -- no more Alzheimer's! Of course it didn't work that way in reality, but it worked so well in mouse models, leading to more intense wishcasting by other researchers and on it goes.

phillipsmg 4y ago
Definitely agree with the part about education and getting kids to learn! Not sure about the comparison with beta-amyloid though. There are good reasons to think it is involved with Alzheimer's - genetics, histology, etc. And I don't think many researchers thought that would be the problem solved. It was just a very logical target in tackling a very challenging disease (like all neurodegenerative diseases, basically none of which are cured).
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> displacing these ideas is difficult because the teachers' unions in the USA are powerful I can pinpoint over 10 dumb decisions taken by my corporate, as a result of office politics and jockeying for various positions. There are many myths corporate britain believes, from forcing develipers back in the office to improve productivity despite having concrete evidence that it doesn't, to hiring 'agile practitioners', etc. No union required for dumb decisions
- phillipsmg 4y ago
  No union required for dumb decisions. But in this case, it does seem it may contribute
- bitwize 4y ago
  It wasn't a "unions bad" rant, more a "these unions in this country are dysfunctional" rant. And teachers' unions in the USA are unions of government workers, not corporate.
tokinonagare 4y ago
> Because the predominant ideas of pedagogy consist of what education academics would like to believe is true This, times 10. I worked in a lab on education-related subject at a top university and it was wishful thinking all the way down: from Ministry bullshit like "education 5.0" and grants to whatever buzzword heavy proposal was thrown, to researchers ignoring obvious flaws in their dumb but cool things that are set to fail from the start, to arranging the reality of collected data (from weak protocol) and their interpretation, etc. It was full of people trying to make a name for themselves but very few solid research. Most of the papers were flawed, irrelevant or kinda stretched reality.
baobabKoodaa 4y ago
You phrase it like the teachers prioritized their own comfort ("agency") over children's learning. That's not the case. I'm sure the teachers felt that their methods - or "agency to choose methods that work for them" - were beneficial to learning. I'm sure they felt that the heavyhanded top-down micromanagement was hindering learning. Were they wrong? Yes, probably, I don't know, I guess. I'm just saying they weren't motivated by selfish reasons.
gshubert17 4y ago
The Oakland example was one cited in Time magazine recently. One of the teachers who earlier advocated eliminating phonics was described as now "heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics." The article includes quite a bit of history about reading instruction, insights from neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene [1], a reference to a 2000 report from the National Reading Panel [2], and reports by education reporter Emily Hanford on why the science of reading has not been rapidly adopted [3]. [0] https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/ https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670021105 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670021105 [2] https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/p... [3] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/10/23/hanfordandreading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/10/23/hanfordandread...
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  If your argument for doing something starts with this: > The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says. Then it's a bad sign. I'm glad they don't let us get past the second paragraph before turning it into a culture war. The Minority View in the 2000 report seems a bit less 'culture war' and more thoughtful: > In the end, the work of the NRP is not of poor quality; it is just unbalanced and, to some extent, irrelevant. But because of these deficiencies, bad things will happen. Summaries of, and sound bites about, the Panel’s findings will be used to make policy decisions at the national, state, and local levels. Topics that were never investigated will be misconstrued as failed practices. Unanswered questions will be assumed to have been answered negatively. Unfortunately, most policymakers and ordinary citizens will not read the full reviews. They will not see the Panel’s explanations about why so few topics were investigated or its judgments that the results of research on some of the topics are inconclusive. They will not hear the Panel’s calls for more and more fine-tuned research. Ironically, the report that Congress intended to be a boon to the teaching of reading will turn out to be a further detriment. > As an educator with more than 40 years of experience and as the only member of the NRP who has lived a career in elementary schools, I call upon Congress to recognize that the Panel’s majority report does not respond to its charge nor meet the needs of America’s schools. In spite of the Panel’s diligent efforts and its valuable findings on a select number of instructional practices, we still cannot answer the first and most central question of the charge: “What is known about the basic processes by which children learn to read.” We still do not know what types of instruction are suitable for different ages and populations of children. We still do not know the relative effectiveness of the three models of reading as bases for instruction. We do not even know whether the existing body of research can answer those questions. Therefore, I ask Congress not to take actions that will promote one philosophical view of reading or constrain future research in the field on the basis of the Panel’s limited and narrow set of findings

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

The report they cite isn't even sure that the myth exists: > From a pragmatic perspective, the concerning implications of these results are moderated by a number of methodological aspects of the reported studies. Most used convenience sampling with small samples and did not report critical measures of study quality. It was unclear whether participants fully understood that they were specifically being asked about the matching of instruction to Learning Styles, or whether the questions asked could be interpreted as referring to a broader interpretation of the theory. These findings suggest that the concern expressed about belief in Learning Styles may not be fully supported by current evidence, and highlight the need to undertake further research on the objective use of matching instruction to specific Learning Styles. So, they may just be talking past each other. Is it possible to express ideas with both words and visuals? Is doing both a good idea? Does a person always learn every idea best by only being taught with a specific style? edit: the lady they link to as calling the debunkers racist seems to have a good grasp of things to me: > The debunkers' core claim is based on what's known as the meshing (or matching) hypothesis –– the idea that if learning styles exist, experiments should show that students will always learn better if taught in their preferred style. But in defining learning styles (a theory about the brain) as equivalent to the matching hypothesis (a theory about instruction) the debunkers have created a straw man. As Kozhevnikov points out, "the fact that a simple version of the matching hypothesis – which rests on the assumption that a given person can be characterized by a single type of style, independent of the task –– has not been supported does not imply that the concept of cognitive style itself is invalid."

phillipsmg 4y ago
This just seems like redefining the claim. If the meshing hypothesis isn't true, doesn't that make the theory pointless? The way this gets used in schools is almost always with respect to the meshing hypothesis
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  https://blog.delta-academy.xyz/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsuper-static-assets.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fa042f718-04a1-4258-ab12-50853bc1914c%2Fimages%2Fc7d105fe-ce48-4007-83f4-7c527259e8d5.png&w=1200&q=80 https://blog.delta-academy.xyz/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2... These don't seem matching specific to me. Seems like the disclaimer at the top is itself unscientific. It's just a list of study tips, arranged in sections.

knaik94 4y ago

There's a simpler but less comfortable explanation, students even more than teachers try to find meaning for why they can't understand things as easily as their peers. Learning styles is an easy explanation that is just unscientific enough to not be easily testable but still seems plausible as a reason for why a student might not do well well while their peers do. Learning is complicated and involved and it's hard to show students that learning is a marathon not a sprint. I wish they stopped teaching this myth completely because it gives rise to this inherent sexism and binary view when comparing creative and logical thinking. There's no right-hand dominant or left-hand dominant brain. I don't know if it's changed in more recent generations but I was taught that girls are more creative and boys are more logical and that's why more boys go into math and sciences. That kind of thinking is the root of the current gender imbalances among stem and engineering fields. In most ways they are orthogonal. https://www.thersa.org/blog/2018/09/creativity-and-logic-avoid-dangerous-stereotypes https://www.thersa.org/blog/2018/09/creativity-and-logic-avo... People in general like labels and categories.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago
I don’t think you can claim that it entirely accounts for gender differences in academic and occupational specialization. That’s also just unscientific enough to be convincing as well. The truth is we really don’t know. I do agree with the general point of your comment, on how this can significantly account for individuals decisions and self-understanding.
- knaik94 4y ago
  I agree with you, it doesn't account for the the imbalance entirely. I said it's the root of it, as in this creates the stereotypes from such a young age. I think it's a fair assessment based on the stories I hear from my friends and the kids I tutor about what made girls choose certain areas of focus compared to boys. It was even more enlightening hearing about my women friends who ended up not completing a major in stem and especially CS to graduation. I have to admit it's not a hard quantifiably scientific. I still choose to believe it. It's not going to be one little thing that will fix gender imbalances, but in my opinion, these kind of practical changes is where you see longer term positive consequences. I have a brilliant friend, finished a doctorate, nurse practitioner. We talk about our journeys and she still talks about feeling somewhat insecure that her "brain isn't made for math" and I always call her out, she finished some of the most rigorous years of schooling in healthcare and she still doesn't believe she would be good at math. I don't think she has to do math unless she happens to find interest in it, she doesn't have anything left to prove to herself or anyone else. I just feel frustrated as an educator by how rigid that kind of thinking is and how long it follows students through their life.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

In psychology, I am actually coming to the conclusion that experience is better than a study. I have seen so many counter-intuitive studies that have later had huge methodological issues. In addition, a lot of studies have small sample sizes, or unrealistic tasks that come from the Procrustean process of forcing a question into something you can run a study on. With regards to learning styles, I have been around enough students and been around enough teachers to think that there actually might be something to it. That different people might learn better with different modalities.

knaik94 4y ago
I would argue that it's the subject that should have an associated optimal way of being taught. For the same reason you don't teach a sport by reading the rule book on day 1, you don't build a strong foundation in math without going through the fundamental proofs. Taking physics taught me that intuition is not very reliable.
jollybean 4y ago
I think that's what homework is for. I used to always skip homework because I thought I understood the subject. But you learn a lot from 'doing' esp. all the weird corner cases. It makes you think about it in an applied way. I used to like the kids who did well despite not doing homework, now I like the kids that do their homework.
Someone 4y ago
> I am actually coming to the conclusion that experience is better than a study. I have seen so many counter-intuitive studies that have later had huge methodological issues. In addition, a lot of studies have small sample sizes I don’t think those are strong arguments for claiming experience is better than a study. Methodology-wise, experience doesn’t pose a hypothesis first and then tests it, and doesn’t statistically evaluate conclusions. That leads to the risk that conclusions get drawn on a few outliers or more ‘visible’ students. Sample size wise, decades of teaching or large classes will have more subjects, but they’ll be more diverse, too, and their attributes aren’t tracked well. On the plus side, experience doesn’t feel the “publish or perish” pressure. That significantly decreases the risk one starts shouting around conclusions that aren’t fully supported by the evidence.

JohnFen 4y ago

But there are unquestionably differences. For instance, I find it just about impossible to learn auditorily. Audio books are essentially worthless, lectures equally so, etc. I learn best through reading. Now, it may be true that's because I grew up mostly learning by reading -- it may be a trained difference, not an inherent one -- but it's unquestionably a difference.

knaik94 4y ago
I think that might come to more fundamental differences such as your personal strength or weakness with working memory. You might be better adapted to conceptualizing words while reading rather than translating what you hear into ideas. But at the end of the day it's a skill, not a inherent weakness that you can't work past. People believing their learning style is static and teachers treating learning styles as static is the actual issue. As a basic example, if you are not familiar with how to read music, it would be hard to learn and build on music theory and harmonies. That doesn't make you an auditory learner, it just means you know how it's being taught. Abstracting the musical notes into colors or frequency isn't going to make it easier to learn just because you consider yourself a "visual" learner. Certain concepts may seem clearer and patterns could be more easily identifiable, but in practice it wouldn't be easier.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I think we're largely in agreement here. > not a inherent weakness that you can't work past. Perhaps this is the real problem. Taking for the sake of argument that there are different inherent learning styles, perhaps the issue is that some believe that means you can't work past them. It seems much more likely that you can, with training and practice. We learn to overcome all sorts of other unique limitations, after all. And there is some reason to believe that there are different inherent learning styles. There are many different sorts of "intelligence", after all, which implies that not everyone's brain processes information in the same way. Personally, I don't know enough about this subject to have an opinion either way, but it's very interesting to ponder.
  - 4y ago

omniglottal 4y ago

The phrase you're better off using is "educated hypothesis based on enormous swaths of subjective data". Calling this a "myth" without proposing a more rigorous methodology to test for it is simply casting FUD, far worse than what you're battling against.

knaik94 4y ago
A hypothesis you can test, this you can't.
namaria 4y ago
If you don't realize that the very concept of 'FUD' boils down to the suppression of questions about cult-like behaviors, you really shouldn't be lecturing anyone on scientific validity.

aaron695 4y ago

jbuhbjlnjbn 4y ago

>Despite this, a 2020 survey found that 90% of educators believe that we each have a ‘learning style’ . This finding was met with much derision by education researchers. How has a theory with little evidence become and stayed so pervasive? If you replace 'learning style' with 'preferred learning style', which I think is more accurate, the whole discussion becomes moot.

iainctduncan 4y ago

I have been learning and teaching hard things for my whole adult life (music, juggling, various kinds of performing mostly, but also self taught comp sci). My personal conclusion, from personal observation and a lot of talking with people who have taught very high level musicians for decades, is that Learning Styles is an excuse for people to skip the kind of work that is hardest for them, and in doing so, sabotages progress. If you really want to get good at something that is hard for you, you should work on it in the way that is least comfortable for you more than what is comfortable. Also, I've noticed I never hear "this is my learning style" from people who really know how to teach themselves and I frequently hear it from people who really just don't want to work. I spent decades playing jazz using mostly what I would now call compensatory techniques because ear training is so much harder for me than theory and harmony. I only became a really good player when I spent a VERY long time learning in the least comfortable and most humbling way for me. The biggest issue is that most of the time learner is not qualified to determine which style works best for them, and confuses what feels best for what works best. Someone who has taught hundreds of people for many years knows what works (like my university teaching musician friends). And they never talk about learning styles. That said, there definitely are people who are much better at the sub-skill exercised by a certain modality. But this is not a proxy for progress. My example, I could learn chord progression arithmetic very easily. So I would be seen as someone who learns music mathematically. But that's wrong, that's just what I happen to be good at, not how I learn. Focusing on it for many years was exactly the opposite of what would have given me maximum progress. It's not just a myth, it's a trap.