
The concept of “learning styles” is one of the greatest neuroscience myths - tokenadult
http://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-styles-is-one-of-the-greatest-neuroscience-myths/
======
a-priori
My wife is a science-educated high school teacher, and as part of getting her
B.Ed she had to do a literature review. She was alarmed by the lack of rigour
in education research. Almost all the studies she found in education journals
were poorly designed, the biggest flaws being:

1) A lack of control groups. In fact, she was told by her instructors that
many journals consider it an ethics violation to use a control group, the
logic being that in denying your experimental method to the control group
you're putting them at a disadvantage.

2) Overgeneralizing results. It's common to use education students (i.e,
future teachers) as experimental subjects in education research. Then the
results are interpreted as applying to all students, ignoring all the ways
that your typical education students are different from your typical high
school or elementary school student.

While there were some examples of good education research, she said that by
far the best education research she could found was actually published in
psychology journals. So it's not surprising to me that myths and even
pseudoscience will proliferate in education when the standards on research in
the field is so poor.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
> consider it an ethics violation to use a control group, the logic being that
> in denying your experimental method to the control group you're putting them
> at a disadvantage.

Oh man. Someone should tell them about double-blind clinical trials for cancer
treatment. (Those can be, and sometimes are, "stopped for efficiency", when a
midway evaluation shows the treatment is so effective that they already have a
statistically significant result. They then start giving the treatment to both
groups, I believe.)

~~~
a-priori
I know, right? When my wife mentioned this, that was the first thing I said:
there are plenty of fields where the research has life-or-death consequences
and they use control groups. Education, by comparison, is low stakes.

In medical research they have procedures and statistical techniques to detect
significant results and allow for early stoppage. There's no reason the same
techniques couldn't be applied to education research.

But you need control groups, or you don't actually know that you've made an
improvement!

------
dhimes
Sadly, he is right about there being no concrete evidence supporting learning
styles. I have been following this for quite some time, both my Egorg products
and (soon to be) Study Swami are based on the idea that students differ in how
they learn.

The interesting thing, though, is that any teacher with a decent amount of
experience (I taught physics for 15 years, both as a TA and as a community
college professor) sees that students _do_ seem to learn differently. Some
students need a clear, verbatim explanation of something. Others need to dance
around the concept first, getting a feel for it, before they able to even
parse such an explanation.

I'm not sure what it is linked to. I suspect that our 'bins' of learning
styles are too narrow, or somehow else incorrect. The obvious ones came first,
more-or-less 5 senses with each sense being aligned with a 'style' (I learn
math better by smell...</s>). The students in the studies are categorized into
different learning styles (usually) based on a survey (which, I would argue,
really amounts to learning _preferences_ rather than styles). It would be
interesting to see tests of actual learning done with different presentations
for forming the baseline assignments to a particular style.

But even then the problem is that the bins are pre-decided (verbal or visual?
global or sequential?) I think this is a little too simplistic.

So while I suspect that there is actually something to the idea of learning
differently (rather than just 'g'), for the moment, anyway, learning styles
seem to be bullshit.

~~~
Kluny
I really think it's more about repetition than anything else. If a student has
been "primed" for the topic at hand by some prior exposure, like overhearing
their parents talk about it or encountering a similar situation on a different
subject and being able to draw parallels, they'll be ready for straightforward
explanation and be able to internalize it. If it's their first exposure to the
topic, they'll need to dance around it and see it from different points of
view before things start to make sense.

For example, at age 12 I read a book that made no sense to me whatsoever. I
somehow finished it but didn't get much out of it. 12 years later at age 24, I
read Terry Pratchett's book, the Lost Continent, and gradually realized it was
the same book.

In 12 years I had gained enough background understanding of concepts such as
Evolution, Australia, Satire, and Wizards to get the jokes and the plot, so
that time the book stuck with me. Learning style had nothing to do with it -
it was me that changed.

------
abruzzi
I think the persistence of the myth is at least partly due to the fact that it
aligns well with informal observations. You have a class, and some of the
students have difficulty absorbing the material. So those students are taken
aside and taught to in different ways, which are, sometimes, successful. So,
informally, people come to believe that those students were better reached by
the alternative methods, when in reality it may have been the repetition,
extra attention, or something else that improved their scores.

~~~
mhuffman
I might be missing something here but isn't there a big difference between "we
don't have any conclusive evidence yet" and "this is a myth and is false"?

Also, I think some of the persistence of this "myth" is that people (adults)
will flat-out tell you that they may not be able to absorb certain information
without seeing some visual representation of it, whereas others will tell they
can understand more easily, for example, just from a verbal description.

~~~
dhimes
Thus far, falsifiable hypotheses test to "false." Perhaps we are not framing
the problem properly.

Here's a quick assessment: When somebody gets directions from Google maps, do
they prefer the written, listed directions, or the map (in the happy
circumstance where both conveyed the same information)? Some people prefer the
lists; some the maps. So we might think of the former as verbal learners and
the latter as visual.

The problem is, in the context of learning, both (self-described) verbal and
visual learners seem to learn better visually.

~~~
vorg
> both (self-described) verbal and visual learners seem to learn better
> visually

Though I'm guessing verbal learners and visual learners both learn better when
doing a task utilizing both visual and verbal senses, than they would doing
either a visual only or a verbal only task. The verbal-visual distinction
could be a distinction between 60% verbal / 40% visual on the one hand and 40%
verbal / 60% visual on the other. I'd also guess that if students are forced
to make some body movements (kinesthetic learning) at the same time as
speaking/listening (verbal) and watching/diagramming (visual), retention of
material is even greater for virtually all of them.

------
dopamean
My mother taught high school for 23 years and I went to a private school with
a unique curriculum and philosophy around education. I then went and taught
and a coding bootcamp for a little while. In all my experience in education -
as a student, teacher, and son - I have repeatedly heard about different
learning styles but have yet to see any evidence of them in the wild. It
always felt like pseudoscience or BS theories.

The things I heard were often difficult to argue with as well. One thing that
often made me feel like it was BS was that I never heard a learning style that
fit with how I learned and I don't believe I'm special.

~~~
vorg
Many people majoring in a second language learn better aurally/orally, whereas
those at a coding bootcamp perhaps learn better visually. Perhaps the obvious
existence of these two primary learning styles has been expanded on and
exaggerated so much that it has now become largely bogus, e.g. those explained
on Wikipedia's learning_styles page.

~~~
jacalata
How are those obvious? I majored in French and am a programmer and haven't
come across this stereotype before.

~~~
vorg
It's obvious to me based on my own experiences. Of course I'm talking about a
"French as a Foreign/Second Language" major, not "French" like they teach in
American high schools. And I'm talking about Computer Science or Software
Engineering majors, not self-taught webpage developers. The rough visual-
verbal spectrum for learners is obvious for me, and when teaching, we need
activities that utilize both the visual and verbal faculties. I'm surprised
you haven't encountered this continuum.

------
VikingCoder
Physical Education will now consist solely of sit-ups.

Trying to get kids to perform physical exertion with Baseball, Basketball,
Football, Soccer, Swimming, has proven to not improve their standardized
scantron test scores.

My snarky point is that when science finally determines how we can best
measure the success of a child, we'll have a way to objectively measure given
techniques. Until then, we're researching in a flawed framework. Creating a
student-teacher bond, making students feel valued, making parents feel like
their kids are getting something out of their tax dollars, long-term impacts
on students, student eagerness to engage in a lesson... I question whether
neuroscience has explored these aspects. Let alone teacher job satisfaction.

Cripes, we're seeing all kinds of proof that we're beating creativity out of
students. I can guarantee that mixing up how lessons are taught has a positive
impact on student creativity. Does each student have their preferred learning
style? I can't say that. But I strongly suspect that teaching lessons in
varied styles has a positive impact.

Relevant: [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3978](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3978)

~~~
Dylan16807
>Does each student have their preferred learning style? I can't say that. But
I strongly suspect that teaching lessons in varied styles has a positive
impact.

You seem to be implying that belief in learning styles would lead to more
varied lessons. But couldn't it do the opposite, trying to sort students and
feed each group the same type of lesson as much as possible?

~~~
VikingCoder
No, I think there's something there in Learning Styles, which may be as simple
as Varied Learning Technique.

Going from Varied Learning Technique all the way to Learning Styles may do
harm. I can't say.

------
acbart
4/5 of my way through a doctorate in CS Education, and I must admit that I
cringe whenever I see Hacker News and r/programming discuss education. We have
very intelligent people who have almost no formal educational knowledge making
anecdotal claims, often trying to draw on their own atypical experiences.
There are so many things that I feel I need to convey and correct in these
threads, but I don't think there's time or energy available to do so.

Learning Styles is mostly considered snake oil. Of course different students
learn differently. Assessment is hard. Instructional Design. There's so much
material out there, I wish people would learn more before asserting and
speculating.

I suppose I should just be pleased that people are interested. But I hope many
posters will be encouraged to look further into this subject and develop
expertise as they develop their opinions.

Here's one potential resource:
[http://www.learningandteaching.info/](http://www.learningandteaching.info/)

------
zepto
"Low-cost and easily implemented classroom approaches can certainly cultivate
wishfulness amongst educators, especially if they are fun and therefore likely
to be well received by students."

Sounds like the Hawthorne effect at work. However this shouldn't be taken as a
dismissal. Anything that makes learning or work less rote and more fun will
improve motivation and thus improve outcomes.

------
jrcii
Here's the original paper
[https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf)

------
jasonpbecker
The best evidence suggests that presenting information multiple times,
multiple different ways benefits everyone because it creates a richer set of
connections to those ideas and concepts.

It's not the case that one person learns through sights, another sounds, and
yet another through movement (roll eyes)-- instead it's the case that doing
things multiple ways and multiple times is better for memory.

~~~
danieltillett
A corollary for this is learning the same information in the same manner, but
in a different location. Study in your bedroom, on the train, at the library,
under a tree in a park, while walking the dog, at the beach at dawn, etc. This
removes environmental cues out of the learned material and makes recall much
more effective.

~~~
vectorjohn
Interesting idea.

A thought I had: what if you studied some topic while always listening to the
same song on repeat. Could you improve recall by humming the song (or better,
playing it)? I would think a study about this has already been done.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes. Actually one of the most effective ways would be to study in the same
room that you will later be tested in. Basically information is never learned
independent of the location and the location bleeds into your memory of the
abstract concept. When you think about how memory evolved this makes perfect
sense - you want to remember how to fish for example, but also where and when
to fish.

The same thing apply to things like addiction where location plays a very
strong role in reinforcing the addictive behaviour. One of the ways of helping
to overcome addiction is to change your location so the environmental cues are
removed.

------
stared
Could anyone link to the "learning styles" claim?

If it is about as coarse categories as "visual" vs "verbal", then debunking
does not sound strange (but I guess mostly because not many people are very
polarized wrt this axis).

But in general - well, almost each single person has her/his tastes (senses
involved, brevity/verbosity, level of challenge, level of feedback, amount of
social interaction, amount of noise, etc, etc). So, I would rather guess than
psychological research are flawed (too few categories, misaligned categories,
binning, self-reported data, etc) than anything else.

(I do have both experience with teaching and with doing research-level
psychology.)

~~~
analog31
I can't link to it, but I've heard it cited in at least two training sessions
that I've been in. The first was when I was hired to be an adjunct teacher at
a Big Ten university. One of the presentations was about the different styles
of learning.

Another was in some kind of corporate management training that I took, where
we were also told about the Kubler-Ross stages.

These ideas take on a life of their own outside of the research community.
From what I can tell, the effect is a fragmented and disorganized approach to
teaching, for example, that's evident in the typical elementary school
curriculum.

On an amusing note, there's an inside joke in my family, that "children have
different ways of learning" is a euphemism for when somebody just did
something really dumb.

------
realitygrill
Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist, convinced me of this:

[http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-
faq.html](http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html)

------
dsmithatx
My ex-boss used to have me spend hours of doing Powerpoint because he claimed
to be a "visual learner". I always theorized that this sounded like a load of
BS. My theory was that he was just too lazy or ADD to actually sit down and
read and comprehend things.

I learn things looking at graphs. I learn things by reading but, it just takes
more focus. I never believed in this theory of learning. There are just
sometimes better ways to convey different information.

Some people are idiots and some people have enough passion or care enough to
put more effort in.

~~~
tokenadult
_My ex-boss used to have me spend hours of doing Powerpoint because he claimed
to be a "visual learner". I always theorized that this sounded like a load of
BS. My theory was that he was just too lazy or ADD to actually sit down and
read and comprehend things._

If you haven't seen Edward Tufte's writings about PowerPoint[1] yet, you
should. A funny take on what's wrong with PowerPoint is Peter Norvig's online
essay about the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address.[2]

[1]
[https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint](https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint)

[https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=...](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0001yB)

[https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=...](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0002PP)

[2] [http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/](http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/)

------
jff
If only there were some way to evaluate whether or not students were learning
things better with one style of teaching or another... some sort of
evaluation, a test if you will, a standardized way to judge what's been
learned. Then maybe we'd get some more rigor in education!

On another note, everyone I knew in high school who really bought into
"learning styles" were the kids who didn't like such-and-such class and wanted
to whine.

------
MarcScott
I had so many of these techniques thrown at me when I was teaching that I've
lost count.

I've sat in countless training sessions being taught about Six Thinking Hats,
the three learning styles, the seven learning styles, the thirteen learning
styles, left-right brain thinking, the learning pit, mindfulness, and growth
mindsets.

Such a waste of time and energy that could have been used to prepare resources
and assess work.

------
kriro
Without any scientific backing I'd argue most forms of learning are social
activities in some sense and as such catering to the introvert/extrovert
"divide" might be a useful approach. The very naive version would be letting
some people read about a topic and write a summary and some others discuss the
topic etc.

------
joaomsa
I really liked the comment on the linked nymag article.

> Alan Turing demonstrated (discovered?) that information processing
> (computation) is necessarily universal. That is, no matter the physical
> configuration of the computational medium—DNA, brain, software, etc.—the
> underlying principles of its operation must be identical. This, it turns
> out, follows from the laws of physics; if it were not the case, sentient
> life could not have evolved from inorganic materials and processes. The
> implications a inordinately far-ranging, but one of them surely is that all
> learning must ultimately conform to the basic laws of information
> processing. In the end, to "know" something amounts to the same thing for
> everybody. Physical skills are an obvious example: no matter what "style" we
> think we discern, throwing a ball works only one way, and there is only one
> way to learn how to do it (practice). The same goes for reading and, yes,
> math.

[http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/one-reason-the-
learning...](http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/one-reason-the-learning-
styles-myth-persists.html?mid=facebook_nymag)

------
progressive_dad
Most education research is about how to evaluate TEACHERS not children.

If you want to help children then you're better off starting here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U)

------
mpdehaan2
I'd disagree on the myth part. I would probably agree with it being likely
there isn't a lot of data.

Much of the learning styles stuff was put forth by Felder at NCSU Engineering
(my alma mater). Is there a double-blind study? IDK, but it's interesting, and
it resonated.

In the informal quiz in my intro to engineering class (Dr. Richard Porter's,
not Felder's), it was interesting to see how preferred learning styles (from
his quiz) lined up with majors. In short, mostly it was that a large number of
people had visual vs written preferences, but the one thing different for C.S.
students were they almost always learned globally (i.e. almost random access,
not really understanding the whole, and things then popping into place as
connections build up between ideas) whereas other majors preferred seeing
things step by step always building on one another.

It resonated with me in general because I'm generally lost with something
until I accumulate a lot of random concepts enough to get it.

[http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Pap...](http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Education_Papers-
Chronological.html)

I think it's great people are trying to pay attention to way s people learn
and how to present information.

This hit home really hard when doing docs for ansible - and I _tried_ to
present things in multiple ways (different ways of indexing, presenting big
picture versus building things up, and vice versa) and in writing technical
documentation and seeing bugs on understanding (and twitter complaints) on
tech docs it is clear people DO learn very different on the sequential vs
global axis.

I also really DO need diagrams, as large volumes of words get my lost, but
strangely I produce large volumes of words and seldom any diagrams. I'm also
strange in that if I take notes, I almost never read them myself, so this is
perhaps why I'm so bad about learning from written text and always want to
jump into code snippets. (Novels, sure, they are great). I also usually need a
whiteboard as a buffer for understanding architectures visually, where I
notice a lot of people don't need to draw things out, or it doesn't help them
(or aren't as interested in those things?)

It's useful to present things in different ways and mix things up -- not that
you have to repeat everything 4 different ways. That was what Felder was
trying to get across.

(A simple example might be it is good to present a diagram next to a paragraph
describing a concept.)

~~~
dhimes
Felder's model is my go-to model, also. As opposed to the input methods
classification of learning styles, he focuses on the mental-processing aspect
(for example, reading and listening are in the same category of "verbal," as
opposed to being separated into "verbal" and "auditory").

I'm not formally trained in education, but physics. As such I have to allow
for the possibility that his ideas resonate with me partly because he speaks
my language.

Nevertheless, the evidence is scanty.

------
analog31
Could this mean... no more dioramas in math class?

------
paulpauper
writing, repetition, and reminding seem helpful.

------
melted
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

~~~
srdev
In scientific discussion, absence of evidence means that we accept the null
hypothesis until such time that evidence is found.

~~~
melted
That's actually up for philosophical debate. For instance, if I were to tell
you there might be a fly in your house somewhere, you wouldn't consider it
unlikely even in the absence of evidence, whereas if I said there was a
kangaroo, it would be quite agreeable to accept the null hypothesis because
the alternative is very unlikely.

IOW, if we accepted absence of evidence as evidence of absence, there'd be no
scientific research. Just because most research thus far has been crappy
doesn't mean learning styles are bullshit. It intuitively seems, at least,
that some people are more visual than others, and some are more capable of
abstract thought than others, etc.

