Why the Learning Styles myth spreads

32 点作者 henry_pulver将近 3 年前

8 条评论

knaik94将近 3 年前

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.<a href="https://www.thersa.org/blog/2018/09/creativity-and-logic-avoid-dangerous-stereotypes" rel="nofollow">https://www.thersa.org/blog/2018/09/creativity-and-logic-avo...</a>People in general like labels and categories.

评论 #32517175 未加载

iainctduncan将近 3 年前

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.

JohnFen将近 3 年前

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.

评论 #32515963 未加载

评论 #32517184 未加载

评论 #32518205 未加载

ZeroGravitas将近 3 年前

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."

评论 #32515248 未加载

评论 #32514956 未加载

评论 #32515240 未加载

omniglottal将近 3 年前

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.

评论 #32515871 未加载

评论 #32530867 未加载

RcouF1uZ4gsC将近 3 年前

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.

评论 #32518062 未加载

评论 #32515309 未加载

评论 #32515413 未加载

jbuhbjlnjbn将近 3 年前

>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.

bitwize将近 3 年前

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.