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HN book recommendation: Bad Education https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Education-Debunking-Myths/dp/033524601X https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Education-Debunking-Myths/d

HN book recommendation: Bad Education https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Education-Debunking-Myths/dp/033524601X https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Education-Debunking-Myths/dp/0335... The book is split into self-contained chapters, each of which debunk a (often, still) held myth about learning and education. 'Learning styles' is one of these, but others include setting and streaming classes by ability, the effects of 'good' schools. Each chapter is by a different author summarising academically (references) but accessibly a different 'debunk' topic. UK-centric, but 'lessons' global. The main negative is the unescapable need for some of the chapter editors to air political grievances over the past, though these are mainly about sore wounds over party politics not pedagogy and easily identified. A take-away being shoddy science is used a lot to justify pre-held biases and 'common sense'.

dhimes 3y ago
This sounds like an interesting book. When I looked at the learning style research I found that most "debunking" reviews pointed to a couple of meta-studies by, for example, Pascher, that found no evidence of learning styles. As I looked deeper I saw that most studies were very limited, and mostly compared visual to verbal memory recall efficacy. There were a few that tried reading comprehension, etc, but often at an age of student where memory is not that different from comprehension in testing for it. The other thing that I found was that nobody was testing for learning styles. They determined "Learning Styles" by giving questionnaire about preferences. It seems to me you need to at least develop a possible test for learning styles before you see if there are differences in learning. I may prefer to look at pictures, but I may actually learn more from text. But I do side with Bjork in that teachers focusing on learning styles at this point is a distraction from things we know that help education. I just think more research needs to be done before we dismiss it.

dhimes 3y ago

This sounds like an interesting book. When I looked at the learning style research I found that most "debunking" reviews pointed to a couple of meta-studies by, for example, Pascher, that found no evidence of learning styles. As I looked deeper I saw that most studies were very limited, and mostly compared visual to verbal memory recall efficacy. There were a few that tried reading comprehension, etc, but often at an age of student where memory is not that different from comprehension in testing for it. The other thing that I found was that nobody was testing for learning styles. They determined "Learning Styles" by giving questionnaire about preferences. It seems to me you need to at least develop a possible test for learning styles before you see if there are differences in learning. I may prefer to look at pictures, but I may actually learn more from text. But I do side with Bjork in that teachers focusing on learning styles at this point is a distraction from things we know that help education. I just think more research needs to be done before we dismiss it.