

Student "Learning Styles" Theory Is Bunk - cwan
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/daniel-willingham/the-big-idea-behind-learning.html

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blasdel
DCPS's policies have long been significantly driven by pedagogy fads straight
out of the latest inane D.Ed. theses. There's the direct influence of
Congress, several prominent Ed departments sending in troops, and an expensive
top-heavy bureaucracy full of idiots.

Teacher Education has always been pretty bad, but adding massive financial
incentives for teachers to obtain graduate degrees has led to an explosion of
idiocy, even at otherwise top-tier schools. In the DCPS every teacher I saw go
back to school (and not just the diploma-mill ones) came back dramatically
worse as a teacher -- any cleverness hammered down, any laziness replaced with
thoughtless zeal.

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JacobAldridge
There are links to a number of supporting articles and papers on the OP's
website - <http://www.danielwillingham.com/>

My two cents as an educator of business people? Any system that tries to
categorise from an EITHER/OR perspective will be limited - human beings are
too complex to fit into neat boxes, especially when there are only three
options.

When you come from an AND perspective, you can use these frameworks (eg, using
Visual AND Aural AND Kinesthetic tools in a lesson plan). Students are their
own unique combination of factors, and by using all the tools available you as
the educator are creating a framework for them to learn according to their own
needs.

~~~
Periodic
I wouldn't be surprised if this was where any success of the system comes
from. Simply providing students with different ways to learn gives each of
them the ability to pick and choose what they will learn best with.

~~~
frossie
My problem with the "different learning styles" theory is that it is quite
disempowering. There aren't many "aural" ways to understand quantum mechanics.
I am concerned that "accomodating different learning styles" is really just
about dog tricks to meet classroom objectives, rather than giving kids the
tools they need to enable them to exceed expectations (most won't, but some
will).

~~~
Retric
While I never went as far as QM I learned a lot of math by listening to a
teacher walk though the problem. I have had plenty of classes where I could
not read the teachers handing writing and I still got A's on the final.

PS: As a rule I never studied which was fine to get the equivalent of a major
in CS, and a minor in math. (I was like 3 classes from a double major, but I
took a semester off and wanted to graduate in 4 years.)

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dflock
I've done commercial IT training in the past and came across this learning
styles stuff during a training-the-trainer seminar. I have found that it seems
that most of the benefits accrue from repetition and re-enforcement, rather
than anything to do with learning styles. In order to try to take advantage of
different learning styles, you will end up explaining the same topic in
different way and presenting the same information in different styles -
spoken, written, diagrammatically, through interpretive dance, etc... Even if
'learning styles' are bunk - which seems quite possible/likely, the repetition
and re-enforcement are pretty much essential anyway.

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billswift
There is a very old saying that undercuts a lot of the type of learning styles
he mostly discusses : "Hear it and forget it, see it and remember it, do it
and learn it"; which is mostly concerned with the student's interaction with
the material. I am very poor at learning material aurally, but I have noticed
that even people who can respond more effectively to aurally presented
information still seem to have more trouble remembering that information than
things visually presented.

Also, he claims that no learning styles theories are well supported; but I
have used learning style theories based on 2 different bases that seem to
help. First is groupers vs stringers (see Lewis and Greene's "Thinking
Better", 1982), some people seem to learn better by encountering small groups
of related facts simultaneously, while others absorb one at a time like beads
on a string more easily. Second, is whether you begin with lots of details and
build up to an overview of the subject, or start with an overview and fill in
the details later. Both of these "styles" are continua, not exclusively
either-or, and people tend to use a slightly different balance of style on
different materials.

Also, I saw a review of his book mentioned in the lead to this article, "Why
Don't Students Like School", [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-
learn/200909/why...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-
learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh) , and he seems to be a bit
out of touch with real world classroom and student behavior.

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skolor
What is this? He seems to be arguing against an issue that doesn't exist. As
far as I know, there isn't a single school that classifies students as
Visual/Kinetic/Aural and then locks them into only those sorts of classes.
Instead, they have teachers teach in a number of different ways.

Even a closer look at his anecdote seems ridiculous. _Watch kids on a museum
field trip and you’ll notice that they stop to look at different paintings:
some like cubism, some like impressionism, some like the Old Masters, and so
on._ That is precisely correct. In the same way though, allowing students to
experience art in several different ways allows them to get it much more (get,
as in learning about the material). What he seems to be arguing against is
telling the students they can't spend the entire trip looking at the Monet
paintings, that they have to see the entire museum.

~~~
blasdel
Have you been in a school in the last 15 years?

Separating kids into different sorts of classes would be _tracking_ , which in
most places is considered an unspeakable horror.

What he's arguing against is what happens after you 'train' teachers on this
pedagogy -- they parrot it directly to their students. Common behaviors
include: constantly narrating their actions - 'and now for the _visual
learners_ ' and drilling identity into the students - 'Don't worry, you're a
_kinesthetic learner_.

Your average education student has no poker face -- they can't apply a
pedagogy without rubbing it in.

~~~
skolor
I'm confused. How is that a problem? A student who is having trouble with a
problem, rather than being told "Huh. You must be some special kind of stupid,
everyone else got it" is instead told "Huh, you must be a real kinesthetic
learner."

That does not seem like a problem in the slightest. Yes, it does assign part
of that as an identity to a student, but an identity as "Visual Learner" is a
lot better, and significantly more useful that "Bad at math." I can't tell you
the number of people who have said they were "Bad at math" when their only
problem was that they had only ever been exposed to visual math lessons.

I still don't understand what is exactly the problem with having children
identify with a learning style. Yes, "their" learning style is more based off
of preferences than anything, but being able to acknowledge that you prefer to
learn a certain way seems be a step up, not a step down as the article seems
to be arguing.

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dhimes
There are two very broad classes of learning style theory; the article
addresses one. Variants of this theory are basically a distillation of the
near-obvious: Our brain gets information from our five senses, so use the five
senses for inputs. Makes sense, but I was underwhelmed when I was first
introduced to learning styles as a pedagogical tool.

But there is a second type, a more cognitive approach, that is very
interesting. This approach deals with the way the information is organized in
our brains. As an example of a contrast between these two styles, for the
first type "reading" is a visual activity, whereas for the second type it is a
"verbal" activity. The second set of theories also differ between those that
learn in a linear fashion (sequentially) and those that need to see the
organizational structure of a large part of a subject before they can make
sense of it (global learners).

Here is a very good site about the second type of theory (my favorite of all
I've seen, actually).
[http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILS...](http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSpage.html)

I am excited by the trends in medical brain imaging to see if these
differences (the second class) will be able to be detected, but (somewhat
sadly) I have to agree with the author that the evidence is still lacking.

I'm not, however, ready to throw it out yet.

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tokenadult
I really like Willingham's take on this. I should note for the record that I
refer to different ways of thinking about math when I teach my math classes
(prealgebra and contest problem-solving for young elementary students), but I
also assure my students that they can learn new ways of thinking from me and
from one another, and end up with a larger toolkit for solving problems than
they had before they started the class. I've always thought that learning
styles are LEARNABLE, and that most actual human learners don't fit into one
Procrustean bed or another consisting of just one learning style.

An example of a mathematics textbook series that appeals to multiple problem-
solving approaches is the Singapore Primary Mathematics series

[http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39....](http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39.htm)

and another is the Miquon Math series.

<http://www.keypress.com/x6252.xml>

Both encourage learners to look at problems from a variety of points of view.

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reedlaw
I take this to mean no one is "stuck" with a particular learning style. If
that were the case, few auditory learners could earn PhDs because of the
amount of required reading. Instead of trying to accommodate different
learning styles, why not teach people how to learn better using available
materials? There is a massive amount of print material in every field. There
is not much audio or kinesthetic material in many fields. Therefore, we'd
better learn to be visual learners if we want to master the broadest range of
material.

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Mz
I don't know about public schools, but homeschoolers find the concept very
useful. I have two 2e kids (gifted and learning disabled) and accommodating
for their learning styles has been helpful for getting past weak areas.
However, it is also true that some things are best taught in a particular
format. For me, I am not good at absorbing things aurally. If I'm tired,
please don't try to read something aloud to me. Hand me the flippin book so I
can look! I won't follow it and I won't retain it if you try to use my weakest
pathway when I am already not at my best. Visual-spatial approaches are
generally better for me.

The schools manage to muck up lots of things by bureaucratizing them. That
doesn't mean it's a completely useless concept.

~~~
ewjordan
_That doesn't mean it's a completely useless concept._

...except that according to the article, it _is_ a useless concept, with that
conclusion backed up by data.

So you're really saying that you think the research that the article is based
on is somehow wrong. Which is possible, for sure, but without finding the
article and actually looking through it, I can't comment on that.

~~~
extension
Even if this unspecified data debunks certain models for differentiating
learning styles, that certainly does not imply that no such differences exist,
just that the correct model has not yet been identified, or at least not
widely accepted.

Personal observation of myself and those who were educated along side me
prevents me from even considering the possibility that everyone learns in the
same way. That there are differences is blatantly obvious, though I can't
claim to completely and precisely understand the nature of those differences.

However, I do strongly suspect that catering to certain common learning styles
would severely disrupt the status quo in today's school system, and that
research which recognizes those styles is not received with enthusiasm.

