
The Myth of 'Learning Styles' - Jtsummers
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth-of-learning-styles/557687/?single_page=true
======
turingcompeteme
My SO teaches elementary math, and we've had a few discussions about this.

When teaching a new concept, say the area of a parallelogram, she will present
the concept in multiple different ways:

\- Give printouts of parallelograms on graph paper, so the students can count
the number of squares in a parallelogram. Also give them scissors and see what
happens.

\- Give students two triangles and a square (which they know how to get the
areas of already), as well as some tape.

\- Simply give students the length of the base, height, and the area of
multiple parallelograms.

The interesting thing is that there will be a somewhat equal split among which
way makes the concept click for the students. Some will instantly start
counting squares on graph paper and figure it out. Some will tape the
different shapes together and go from there. Others will play with the base
and height numbers and arrive at a formula.

So while "learning styles" may be a misnomer, I do believe that presenting one
topic in a variety of ways is beneficial.

~~~
mattferderer
I strongly agree in presenting a topic in a variety of ways since being able
to relate new information to information already known is a major key to
learning new concepts. The more ways a topic is presented, the better chance a
person's brain can relate it to something already known.

I have a strong assumption that when many people hear "learning styles", they
assume it to this instead of auditory vs visual.

~~~
dmix
> I have a strong assumption that when many people hear "learning styles",
> they assume it to this instead of auditory vs visual.

Or the assume each individual only benefits from one in all situations (being
half awake, interested in the subject, etc, etc). Which is a ridiculous
assumption once you really think about it.

~~~
jldugger
And yet I've have teachers growing up who gave classes workshops to help them
identify their learning style, as if it was as inherent as a pokemon type.

------
npudar
Around 20 years ago, I met Dawna Markova at a conference where she spoke about
the work she had done in learning styles. My recollection is that the Visual,
Auditory and Kinesthetic forms was not about how you "learn", but rather on
how you stay "focused".

Researchers found that there were three brianwave patterns that corresponded
to your level of focus. For me, Visual stimuli kept me focused. Auditory
stimuli practically put me to sleep. And Kinesthetic stimuli are transitional
for me. In meetings where there is just discussion or words on a chart, I find
myself fidgeting, and that helps me stay focused. So I am V-K-A. (The first
letter for what keeps you focsed, the second letter for the transitional mode,
and the third letter for what causes you to drift into la-la-land.) The
research found that the six combinations of these three types of stimuli was
equally distributed in the population.

The lesson for teachers and presenters is that you should provide all three
stimuli in your presentation so that all people get what they need to stay
focused.

Markova wrote a wonderful book called "How Your Child Is Smart". It was
fantastic resource for bringing up our children and helping them stay focused
in all of the ways they actually learned.

~~~
innocentoldguy
I agree with your comment on being "focused." In analyzing my own learning
preferences, I found it is much easier for me to stay focused if I can speed
my way through something. Speed is the key for me, not the format.

For example, if I have the choice to learn the same information via a video or
book, I'd opt for the book because I know I can read a lot quicker than the
person in the video is going to speak. This helps me to stay focused. On the
other hand, if I can speed the video up to 4 or 5 times its normal rate, I
would opt for that over the printed page because I can listen faster than I
can read. For me, it isn't the format as much as the speed at which I can
complete my learning that is important.

~~~
j10sanders
I highly doubt you absorb much at 4-5x speed. 3x speed is very fast -- if the
speaker talks quickly, it's borderline unintelligible.

~~~
innocentoldguy
I understand where you're coming from. When I first started doing this, 1.5x
was the maximum I could go and still retain information. After a while, I was
able to retain information at 2x, then 2.5x and so on. It took me a year or
two of practice to get to this speed. It also depends on what you're trying to
learn, how clearly the speaker is enunciating, and whether the speaker has a
heavy accent or not, I guess, but it works for me in most cases.

------
danielford
This is a good article, but it only touches on the main issue with learning
styles. Multiple independent groups of educational psychologists (if I
remember correctly it was three) reviewed all the articles they could find on
learning styles. They found that the majority of the studies had poor
experimental design, since they were missing proper control groups. Of the
remaining studies there were more examples of negative results for learning
styles than positive results. This was pretty damning, given the publication
bias for positive results in academic research. The article links to one of
these reviews, but here is another one:
[https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf)

I teach science, and it's frustrating that nearly all of my students can tell
me their learning style. Their previous teachers have taught them about
learning styles as a way to improve their studying, and they've jumped on that
information. But the literature indicates that matching instruction to a
learning style doesn't improve learning. This is a total waste because we're
effectively giving students a magic talisman to help them learn science,
because once students find out it's wrong they'll be less likely to take our
advice on studying, and because the time we waste on it could be spent on
telling people about real things that actually improve learning.

~~~
dhimes
The studies I have seen (I'll admit- I didn't read TFA- maybe I have in the
past idk) all used some sort of _survey_ to identify learning styles. Nobody,
to my knowledge, has measured _learning_ by modalities to identify them.

You are spot on that attempts to match instruction to learning style have been
futile in the VARK-like learning style classifications. They also assume that
if a student has a learning style, it will be the same across subjects. If it
turns out there is such a thing as learning styles I woudn't be at all
surprised if it varied by what you are learning.

------
nategri
Since it's an identity thing, I'm guessing people are _not_ going to want to
let this one go. Just like they won't let go of their identity as a Meyers-
Briggs I-N-T-whatever-the-hell, even though there's zero evidence for it as a
meaningful framework.

~~~
virusduck
I've found that M-B or the like is really useful to give people words to talk
about who they think they are (which can be incredibly difficult without some
starting point). When you have words to describe something, you can start to
talk about it and in this case, how your personality interacts with others.
That is, where are there things in the ways others describe themselves that
you recognize in yourself or that you find entirely foreign. Then, you can ask
how can recognizing these types of differences help you get along better.

I don't see M-B as a scientific readout, but it is helpful in giving tools to
help people relate. It's only difficult when folks go off the deep end ("Aw
shit, I'm a Hufflepuff!" syndrome) .

~~~
ghaff
Or just as a starting point to realize that people are different and view the
world differently. Many users approach software differently than programmers
for example.

The problem comes when you start doing things like match people to jobs or
tasks based on their MB profiles.

------
lr4444lr
Every time someone someone tries to sell me on this tired idea, I ask them: if
you had to teach someone the difference between different bird calls, e.g.
that of the robin vs. the sparrow, and you're told that person is a "visual
learner", do you mean to tell me you'd opt to show them the oscilloscope
representation of the sound wave that each bird makes rather than playing them
an actual recording of each call?

It's a patently reductionist and limiting idea that human beings have a
stronger modality for learning any information regardless of the type. Yes,
there may be a nugget of truth that some people will have profoundly more
tactile sensitivity for example, and will thrive in activities like dealing
cards, or juggling, or wrestling where that modality is embedded in the
purpose of that activity. But the overgeneralization to say that this person
will, for example, learn how to read better by touching words and letters
rather than proven phonics methods is ridiculous.

~~~
dbatten
Your point is well made, but it's amusing that you use "proven phonics
methods" as an example of something that's obviously the best way to learn
something... Apparently, there's very heated debate on that subject. (News to
me, as of a couple months ago.)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-
rea...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-
wars/376990/)

~~~
lr4444lr
My wife is a reading instructor. I myself was a licensed teacher in a former
life. Phonics is not the totality of reading education, but it's definitely
core and dominant. The article you cite speaks to a political controversy, not
a pedagogical debate backed by conflicting data.

Point me to the body of research on whole-language or some other approach as
the dominant way to teach reading (basic reading to early primary grades, that
is) and at least one school district that definitively promotes it as the
dominant way, and I'll seriously reconsider that it hasn't been debunked.

~~~
kolpa
I can't point you at research, but I can point you at a child who has learned
reading through whole language and who emotionally resists any attempt to
"sound out" words. If you spend time with ~5 year olds, I expect you'll met
some who have started learning to read before they've joined kindergarten and
started learning phonics.

------
Terr_
Personally I believe it's all about random success through variety: Present
the same idea enough different ways and you're more likely to stumble across
something which happens to click for a given student at a given moment.

In some cases, the _overlap_ between different (individually unsatisfying)
attempts to teach may itself be valuable, helping the student eventually make
whatever intuitive leap is necessary for that moment of epiphany.

------
andrewflnr
I keep seeing these articles, but I think they're only debunking the craziest
interpretation of learning style theory. Obviously it's not going to be
perfect, and you're a fool to pigeon-hole yourself into one mode of learning.
But there's too much anecdotal evidence to dismiss the whole idea. When I've
raised this before, over person suggested that we view learning styles as
deficiencies in particular modes of learning, rather than special abilities,
which I think fits both the evidence and the overall theme of learning styles
just fine.

People's brains are different, and learning is an important thing we do, so it
should surprise no one when people learn differently. It should also surprise
no one when those differences turn out to be complicated and hard to measure,
just like our brains. So yeah, the pop psych version is over simplified, but
don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

------
VyseofArcadia
If I had a nickel every time a student came up to me and said, "I'm an x
learner and your class is very y," I'd have a lot of nickels.

Every single time what they really mean is, "I'm doing terrible in your class,
and even though it's probably my attitude or study habits or preparedness, I'm
going to blame you."

~~~
leetcrew
i do actually learn best by reading. if the professor produces a set of
authoritative notes for the class, i will get an A on every exam. as long as
the professor makes it clear exactly what sections of the text are important,
i will learn everything and still get an A every time.

if the professor says important stuff during lecture that cannot be read
somewhere, i have no chance of retaining that information.

~~~
watwut
Writing own notes help in situation where informations is only said. Then you
can read it. Pretty much no one is able to consistently remember heard
information after single hearing, overwhelming majority of people need to
revise it.

~~~
kolpa
Writing helps because _writing_ is an effective learning style, even if you
burn the notes as soon as you write them. (Reading might help even more, but
reading without writing helps less than writing + reading)

~~~
watwut
Learning style theory says that some people learn by reading, others by
writing and yet others even differently.

------
iamcasen
This article really just seems to be mincing words and debating what "style"
means.

The fact remains: some methods of presenting information is worse than others.
Some students will think they hate the subject material, but really what they
hate is the teacher's relationship to the subject material. The teacher
understands a subject a certain way, and that way might not make sense to a
student. A different teacher will likely be able to present in a way that
student _will_ like.

Perhaps that's not a difference in "style" but it's a difference that matters.

~~~
roywiggins
The myth is that everyone has a learning style, that style can be summed up as
one of a few categories, the style never changes, and will be stable year to
year, and once you have identified what the style is with a questionnaire, you
can tailor teaching to it to target particular students.

Once you weaken all those things, the predictive value of the theory is pretty
well nil.

~~~
kolpa
I've heard many more debunkings of learning styles than I've heard advocacies
of learning styles. It's just fun to be contrarian.

------
moate
Learning and Teaching are hard. Maybe learning styles are a "myth", maybe
there just infinitely more complex things going on in a classroom/school than
can be controlled for.

Also, some people are smart (read: have preexisting understanding of the
concepts that precede the material being taught, typically combined with a
desire to learn the material) and some people are stupid (read: the opposite
of smart) and that can create its own set of hurdles.

------
dhimes
I don't know if 'learning styles' are a thing or not, but I will point out
that there are two broad categories. The first, which is often refuted in
studies like these, I think of "sensory input" learning styles. The VARK
(there are others) are basically, roughly, talking about how we get
information into our brains. More or less the five senses.

More interesting to me are a second group, the cognitive learning styles, such
as
[http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Lea...](http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Learning_Styles.html)

These are more about the mental processing that goes on. Are you better at
learning one step at a time, or do you need to get the "big picture" before
the steps even make sense and are somewhat tractable to you?

~~~
moate
I think it's hard to refute the idea that "certain people do better learning
certain things in certain environments." It's hard to figure out which levers
should be used (change the people? change the material? change the learning
environment/teaching style?) to best educate.

------
adrianratnapala
I'm impressed that "Learning Styles" merely show no evidence of helping,
rather than being actively harmful.

When I grapple with a hard problem, I will draw diagrams, talk to myself, use
my hands or nearby objects as models, and also do the internal mental
equivalents of all those things. In particular, I keep switching between
things that might be called "geometrical visualisation", "formal reasoning"
and "informal verbalisation".

I solve hard problems by tackling bits of them with whatever tool is works and
then I try all the tools again on whatever parts of the problem remain. Thus
the different tools work together, and are much more powerful combined than
individually. If I stuck to using my "natural" tool, I might learn to use it
very well, but I would get stuck as soon as it was the wrong tool. I would
loose all that lovely synergy.

------
oldmancoyote
Bull Pucky!

Let me tell you my story. By third grade I could not read. I didn't get it.
How could people remember all those words? Yet I had one of those off the wall
IQs. In third grade they put me in Remedial Reading taught by Mrs. Gordon. If
there is a Heaven, then there must be a special place in it for people like
Mrs. Gordon.

Up until then we were supposed to learn to read by reading. It was the big
thing then: learn to read the same way we learned to speak: by doing it. It
worked for lots of kids. Not for me.

Mrs. Gordon taught me phonetics. That summer I was reading novels.

I once read a textbook on cognitive psychology. The author ranted about how
awful phonetics was.

Clearly there are differences in learning styles. VARK appears to be wrong. It
looks like too much thought and too little experimentation to me.

That doesn't mean there aren't differences in learning styles.

~~~
taejo
> Up until then we were supposed to learn to read by reading. It was the big
> thing then: learn to read the same way we learned to speak: by doing it. It
> worked for lots of kids. Not for me.

My impression is that it's pretty much settled science that Mrs. Gordon was
right and phonics is better than or as good as look-say for the vast majority
of children.

Most children might cope better than you did, but they may have done even
better with Mrs. Gordon's phonics, and moreover the most successful ones may
be "secretly" using phonics-type methods which they either worked out for
themselves, or learnt at home or kindergarten.

------
amp108
Are there styles which are not tied to the type of sense input? I know that I
sometimes learn some things by rote, going through a linear process, and
subsequently discover patterns in it. Other times, I need to know the abstract
principles behind a procedure before I can work in the details. Anecdotally,
that suggests that there are two different ways of conceptualizing tasks
(i.e., something close to "learning styles"), and also suggests that different
tasks require different learning styles.

Is there any research into this meaning of learning styles, as opposed to tied
to sensory modes?

------
ilitirit
I've never really thought about "learning styles" in this way. For me, it has
more to do with nurture than nature (i.e. culture, upbringing, environment
etc) than something inherent. I recall a talk on "systems thinking" and how
certain tribes in Africa (? - I don't recall exactly) fared very poorly on
certain Western tests that required them to group certain objects together. It
turns out that due to their culture they thought of things in terms of their
roles in a system, rather than classifications that may seem more fundamental
to us. e.g. We might group cooking utensils together, whereas they (and this
is just an arbitrary example) would group the utensils, food and seeds
together because their taxonomy works on a "higher" (or rather, different)
level. From this, it seemed obvious to me that certain learning "styles" are
better suited to developing a _certain type of thinking_.

So from a practical point of view, I don't think that it's a myth at all...

------
innocentoldguy
Personally, I've never put much stock in the "style of learner" mantra. I can
learn anything I want to via whatever means I wish. For instance, I can read
sheet music and I can learn to play songs by ear.

Having said that, I definitely do have my preferences for learning, and
sometimes I decide not to learn something simply because it isn't in a format
I'm interested in ingesting at the moment. In nearly every case, it isn't as
much about the format, per se, as the time it requires. I don't like spending
a lot of time on something if I don't have to. So, if I know I can learn a
song in half the time playing it by ear vs. reading sheet music, and all I
currently have available to me is sheet music, I'll wait until later to learn
the song; not because I can't learn it via sheet music, but because the
motivation just isn't there with that particular format due to the time I
perceive it will take.

------
sudosteph
The learning styles thing always confused me, because I would take the test to
see which type I was, and get a different answer each time. I think it's
because the way that you process different subjects just isn't necessarily
consistent.

Ex: \- Anything related to music is auditory. I learned to read sheet music,
but I can never "visualize" the sounds from that. I would just have to play it
and see what comes out. If I heard the first couple notes of a song I've heard
before though, I can easily hear the entire song in my head and then figure it
out on an instrument.

\- Foreign languages, by contrast, I needed good printouts for. I'm slow at
processing streaming sounds in real time, and even more so for unfamiliar
languages. I think my brain just has to do a lot of post-processing with full
context to make sense of verbal language. But I could read and write the
languages just fine, and if the language is somewhat phonetic, I can lean on
my spelling knowledge to speak it halfway decently.

\- anything technical or mathematical requires that I solve some sort of
problem with it to understand

\- Any "softer" subject (psychology, history, economics) is best reinforced
when I learn via interesting stories. I like that so many textbooks have those
"real world application" sections or whatever to tie things into history or
things I've seen in real life. A good orator though can also tell a compelling
story to keep my attention engaged on the subject.

The absolute worst though is when an educator makes a slide show, prints those
slides out and hands them out before class starts, then reads the slides and
answers questions. That pretty much guarantees I have no investment in the
class, as I don't really have incentive to take notes or listen, and I won't
be surprised by anything because it only takes like 3 minutes to actually skim
everything and see it's just bullet points pulled from the text book.

------
haZard_OS
This is an example of a myth that just won't die. The Skeptics Society (to
give but one example) has been trying for years to put this nonsense to rest:

[https://www.skeptic.com/insight/the-myth-of-learning-
styles/](https://www.skeptic.com/insight/the-myth-of-learning-styles/)

I have even made multiple visits to my children's schools and tried to explain
the actual research connected with pedagogy and communication but to little
avail:

[https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3....](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf)

Like the myth that "we only use 10% of our brains", the myth about learning
styles seems immortal.

~~~
Izkata
> Like the myth that "we only use 10% of our brains"

I've heard that the commonly-debunked version of this is a totally
misrepresented version of the original claim. The debunked one being that we
only use 10% of our brain matter ever, while the original claim was something
more like "at a given instant in time, only ~10% of your neurons are firing".

~~~
taejo
> "at a given instant in time, only ~10% of your neurons are firing".

At any given instant in time, your computer is using less than 50% of its RAM:
more than half of the bits are off!

------
q12we34rt5
So-called "learning styles" is only useful in that it forces the instructor to
repeat the material 3 or 4 times thus reinforcing what he's already said.
Repetition isn't necessarily a bad thing but wrapping it in this mythology
leaves some to be desired. And this myth is alive and well at least where I go
to school. One professor even has us go through a book and fill out a
questionnaire to "determine" our style. And another, while not doing anything
with it, brings the idea up frequently. I don't want to get a target painted
on my back by going against orthodoxy so I play along. Sucks though. Feels
like a real waste of time humoring this nonsense.

------
unit91
So glad to see this article. From time to time, my wife will ask me "how do I
get the kids to learn X?" My answer is always the same: "Forget about the
'learning styles'. Drill baby, drill!"

~~~
watwut
Except that pedagogy matters and the way you teach things matters. Learning
style don't exists research is not in opposition to that.

------
dlwdlw
I think the issue is more about teaching styles rather than learning styles.
Teachers often only know one way to teach things and can't adapt at all to
level differences. They often enjoy working MOST with the kids who ALREADY
know everything due to tutors or parents.

So the kernel of truth is that different approaches are needed for different
individuals but it jumped too quickly into specific archetypes.

Another kernel of truth is that everyone has the same potential but the
majority flow often dienfranchises individuals who can't take advantage of the
mainstream winds.

------
stochastic_monk
Clearly, the 'learning styles' propaganda we've been fed for decades was
hogwash, like the type A/B theory or the MB personality style concept.

However, that doesn't mean that thinking about multiple ways to learn a
concept is fruitless. Personally, the more ways I can be taught a concept, the
better my chances are of understanding it.

I've benefited enormously from professors in math, physics, or computer
science who've taken several approaches to teaching a difficult concept.

------
rdiddly
Even if there _were_ distinct styles, seems like it would be better to develop
the ones you're _not_ good at, than the one you're already good at.
Specifically this should be biased toward, and I say this in all seriousness,
the teaching style that is cheapest. Because that is going to be the default
not only in school but throughout life, and wherever people are concerned
about costs, which is most places. Get good at that, and you've got it made.

------
Izkata
> You can’t visualize a perfect French accent, for example.

Maybe not a "perfect" one, but you _can_ visualize the sounds - pitch,
hardness, etc. It's something I did back when learning Spanish to help
memorize certain pronunciations. Think "maluma" vs "takete". But the shapes -
which I'm hesitant to even call shapes - are extremely abstract, enough so
it's not something I'd be able easily to draw on a piece of paper.

------
optimuspaul
I think the only thing the referenced studies proved is that people don't know
what their actual learning style is.

------
reitanqild
It only take one real counterexample to disprove something, so let me take a
stab at this:

If learning styles were not real then why would people waste time making
boooring videos when text is so much easier to both create an consume?

Or am I right that some people actually like those long winded videos? What
about podcasts?

Spoken as someone who would sometimes skip the lectures, read the book and get
best in class grades.

------
Chris_Jay
yet another phenomenon plenty of people experience subjectively being
'disproven' by experiment. It's no wonder the stock of so-called experts is
diminishing...

------
walshemj
the "but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of
the late ‘80s and early ‘90s."

tells me that the author has a political axe to grind here

------
dhimes
Obligatory YouTube from Willingham (mentioned in article).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk)

------
PowerRangError
I don't care who calls what a myth. I'm different, and I'm not arrogant enough
to think I'm special.

[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226886/origin-
of...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/226886/origin-of-i-hear-
and-i-forget-i-see-and-i-remember-i-do-and-i-understand)

This doesn't apply to me, now even 40 years later. I hear and I remember, I
see and I forget. The doing part is correct enough.

------
poster123
Much pedagogy, such as "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" is an
effort to evade the reality that IQ is important and varies among students.

