
Study: Students did not benefit from studying according to “learning style” - empath75
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/04/03/another-nail-in-the-coffin-for-learning-styles-students-did-not-benefit-from-studying-according-to-their-supposed-learning-style/
======
2_listerine_pls
No such thing as learning styles, it's a myth.

[https://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-
styl...](https://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-styles-is-
one-of-the-greatest-neuroscience-myths/)

> So how did a false belief become so widely-held? In his paper on the subject
> for Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Howard-Jones argues that it’s not a result
> of fraud, but of “uniformed interpretations of genuine scientific facts.”
> The assumption behind learning myths seems to be based on the scientific
> fact that different regions of the cortex have different roles in visual,
> auditory, and sensory processing, and so students should learn differently
> “according to which part of their brain works better.” However, writes
> Howard-Jones, “the brain’s interconnectivity makes such an assumption
> unsound.”

~~~
waynecochran
I always thought it was counter productive to “pigeon hole” oneself as only
able to learn one way. The whole “I’m a visual learner” becomes a self-
fulfilling reinforced statement. Sort of like people who say they are not a
“math person”... well if you think that way you certainly won’t be.

~~~
rwnspace
I find it's much more effective to think of yourself as a secret agent,
superhero or a magician. When you can catch a flying plane a bit of calculus
is a small hurdle, when you can cast arcane, mystical spells, struggling with
the borrow-checker in Rust is just a temporary setback.

~~~
thesz
I think that "secret agent" analogy is very deep. Secret agent must monitor
what he is doing and the results of his actions and make his actions either
the best possible (wash a dish in a best possible way) or most compatible with
ways of others (put washed dish where other think it should belong).

Deliberate practice grows here naturally.

And this attitude extends everywhere, not just to programming and/or washing
dishes.

~~~
rwnspace
Yes, deliberate practice is my favourite topic.

I find ego to be persistent, expansive and not very deliberate. Mythical or
fictional identities are deliberate, perhaps through their ephemeral nature,
limitless yet constrained. For me it's a way of tapping into a play/flow state
and compartmentalising away stress and uncertainty. As a teenager the mythic
entity was my self; as an adult I have had to turn elsewhere to find that
spark (this was a very painful lesson).

~~~
vertexFarm
There's so much in this little paragraph. Thank you for sharing it.

------
rectang
I don't have a strong opinion about learning styles. However, and I think this
is related, I have strong negative reaction when names in code are not easily
pronounceable.

Good: "regex", "func". Bad: "regexp", "fn".

This is because I hear code aloud in my head when I read it, and if I don't
know how to pronounce something it interrupts my reading momentum until I
figure out some way to say it.

Naturally I suppress my reaction because it's just a coding style thing and
not worth arguing about with colleagues and collaborators.

But it is definitely a strong enough effect that if other people had my
tendency we would never get a keyword like 'fn', at least from other native
English speakers. The explanation I've tended to believe is that other people
perceive code more visually and less audially than I do.

~~~
stordoff
I'm largely of the opposite group. Having names that aren't pronounceable
helps me read code faster, as I don't try to pronounce it, and can just treat
the entire word as a unit rather trying to "read" it.

I do the same in English when reading fast. I distinctly remember reading
"Hermione" in Harry Potter as a child, and, because it was a name I hadn't
encountered before, just "reading over" it and not thinking about the actual
pronunciation. I didn't think about the actual pronunciation until some years
later (probably when it was brought up in the books). Even now, if I try to
pay attention to my internal monologue whilst reading, it's often words
running into each other or being skipped, unless I deliberately slow down,
because I'm not actively subvocalising and I'm reading faster than I would
pronounce them.

~~~
rectang
That makes sense. Then the question in the context of "learning styles" is, if
these differences are real, are they _actionable_ \-- can we produce
measurable differences in outcomes?

------
coding123
Curious thought process... we spend about 12-20 years of our life going at a
specific pace to learning "stuff" in different categories. What if you were
given a choice - Learn the stuff in a class in 12-20 years of wasted time OR
just have a list of all the material you must know, along with sample
questions (so you know you're learning the right material) and have a venue to
turn in work (so you get feedback). But instead of spending 12-20 (or more)
years, you are given the choice to do whatever pace you want. So in that
sense, could really fast people basically "Doogie Howser" it and start a
career by 15?

And possibly a related question - instead of doing ANY higher learning
activities, we push all that into vocations - basically if you want to be a
rocket scientist you ... start being a rocket scientist intern, learn the
trade by being a peon in the shops?

~~~
toomanybeersies
In regards to self guided study, don't fall into the trap of thinking that
because you could do it, everyone else could.

This is going to sound really conceited and condescending, but I'm going to
write it anyway:

I reckon that I could've finished my BSc in Computer Science in probably half
the time required. I attended only about 2 weeks of lectures per semester,
generally didn't start assignments more than a week before they were due, and
didn't study more than about 3 days before the exam.

For most people though, that doesn't work. They need to go to lectures, they
need to study for a couple of weeks before exams, they need to attend the
tutorials. Structured learning and the education system is made for the bottom
95% of the population. Schools spend a lot more time, money, and effort on
special education and learning support for less gifted students than they do
for the gifted ones. It's different at every school, but I remember that
through most of primary school, there were no supplemental learning or other
activities for gifted students. I was stuck in the same normal stream as
everybody else. It wasn't until I got to high school, where students were
streamed into different classes, that I actually got pushed to learn and use
my abilities, the top stream was basically pushed a year ahead of all the
other students.

Even for the normal stream of people though, there are people who will excel
in certain areas and struggle in others. But a teacher has a class of 30
students to teach. The education system is made for the masses, we would
likely get better educational outcomes from having much smaller class ratios,
10 students per teacher maybe, but nobody has the money to pay that many
teachers, and there aren't that many teachers out there.

Anyway, my point is that for the HN community, being given a set of learning
goals and being told to find a way to learn them would work. For most people,
they would flail around and struggle.

~~~
memebox3v
I agree. I think I could have done my degree in a year. Didnt go to any
lectures, do any coursework or workshops, learnt the material in a month
before the exams. Got 1st class marks (although pulled down to a 2.1 because i
didnt do coursework). I used to think everyone could do this if they wanted
and that the school/university system was absolutely terrible. Turns out, I'm
very bright, who knew?

Point is: Most people are not like this, they need the structure, they need
the help.

~~~
didibus
How many hours was spent on that month prior per given exam prep?

Did you have any prior exposure to comp sci? Had programmed before? Had spent
a lot of time on math? Read about comp sci, blogs, articles, books?

What does 1st class marks pulled down to a 2 mean?

How qualified do you feel you are now compared to your coworkers who followed
a more traditional style?

Do you think you could have done this one month prior exam cramming 12 months
in a row with equal success and without losing the motivation to keep it
going?

~~~
michaelt

      What does 1st class marks pulled down to a 2 mean?
    

He means "I got a B+ overall, but I got an A+ on everything I turned in, I
just didn't turn in some graded assignments" and his degree was graded using
the British classification system [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_classification)

~~~
walshemj
Seems a bit silly to blow of the course work and not get a first - also not a
terribly good indicator that they will adapt well to the workplace.

Obvs if its a former Polly the difference between a first and a 2.1 isn't as
important as an Oxbridge First.

------
s0rce
While completely anecdotal I have realized I learn dramatically better by
reading the material as opposed to listening to it (except for physical tasks
like tying a knot where having someone show you is helpful). Over the years,
especially in graduate school I basically stopped trying to learn in lecture
and read the material afterwords. Maybe this has been incorrect or I'm an
outlier.

Regardless, I'm not sure what to make of the last statement in the article
being no longer true, "I can’t learn subject X because I am a visual learner",
was this ever true, seems like simply an excuse, you should be able to figure
out how you need to learn best and then determine how to get the material in
an appropriate form.

~~~
adamnemecek
I feel like all people learn better his way. The current system is a remnant
of a time when books were expensive and a farmers son might have a hard time
affording books.

~~~
_rpd
There are subjects so specialized that there is no textbook, and the time of
the lecturer is so valuable that prep time for teaching is always going to be
minimal. In these cases, lecturing is justifiable, but they are vanishingly
rare. If there is a textbook then lecturing is pointless at best and probably
harmful.

~~~
adamnemecek
Sure however this isn’t how the system is set up.

~~~
anonymous5133
We can change the system, or replace it with something better.

~~~
randomdata
Can we? We've built the system to replace it have seen it transition into
widespread use. However, it turns out that there are strong emotional ties to
the old system and few want to let it go.

------
djajshgsjja
Typical science reporting: “we couldn’t prove x causes y” becomes “we proved x
does not cause y”.

~~~
sirclueless
The reporter doesn't make any claims like that. The word "prove" or "proof"
don't appear at all. Instead they say, "The findings do not support the
learning styles concept," and "Student grade performance was not correlated in
any meaningful way with their dominant learning style or with any learning
style(s) they scored highly on."

If there's a complaint to be had here, it's that the HN poster changed the
word "did" to "do" in the headline while posting here.

~~~
rectang
> _the HN poster changed the word "did" to "do" in the headline_

Well spotted! That's a pretty misleading change.

~~~
dang
Probably because the 80 char limit kicked in. But we can squeeze in "did" by
squeezing out "their".

~~~
forapurpose
Could someone add (2015) to the story linked below? It seems to have been
overlooked, and the title is otherwise misleading about an alarming topic.
Thanks.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112746)

~~~
dang
I've added it. But please don't post off-topic comments to get our attention.
Email hn@ycombinator.com instead. This is in the guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

~~~
forapurpose
OK, will do.

------
excalibur
> Other activities, such as using flash cards, were associated with poorer
> performance, perhaps because they were a sign of learning by rote rather
> than deeper learning.

But that's remarkably similar to the way "Deep Learning" is typically
achieved. Perhaps it's a bit of a misnomer.

~~~
ggm
It's a complete misnomer. It's such a bad fit, it has to be marketing.

------
tgb
Isn't this surprising to a _huge_ extent? My gut tells me that it's not that
people don't have different learning styles, it's instead a combination of (A)
the learning styles not being as obvious as the ones studied here and (B) we
aren't exploiting those learning styles effectively. Is it really plausible
that _all_ humans learn in exactly the same way?

I recall the Feynman story about realizing that some people see the numbers as
they count and others hear the numbers. This was tested by having people do
either visual or auditory tasks while counting the seconds. People who "saw"
the numbers were less consistent counting to 30 seconds when doing something
visual at the same time and vice versa for those who heard. How is it
plausible that these two groups of people learn to do arithmetic _in the same
way_? How many other little differences are there between people's brains that
we don't notice? Maybe we're just terrible at noticing and using the
differences that exist.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
First and foremost this is just another social sciences study. Most of
everybody is aware of the reproducibility crisis yet seem to fail to connect
the dots to new studies - it's not going anywhere which means that science,
particularly in the social and physiological sciences, is somehow deeply
flawed. That said, this study confirms my own biases so I want to believe. One
big reason is to consider the academic output of schools in places such as
Korea and China. Learning is extremely structured and more analogous to a
factory line than a school, in the US style, and their output absolutely
dwarfs ours. The typical argument against this system is that mechanical
teaching leads to mechanical thought, which is is supposed to support things
such as the fact that China has an abysmal rate of Nobel laureates.

However, something missing there is that Nobel Prizes are frequently rewarded
long after something is first done when its relevance is proven or otherwise
becomes more clear. For instance Stephen Hawking never received a Nobel prize,
yet if we observed Hawking Radiation - he likely would have been awarded one
for a theoretic hypothesis dating back to 1974. The point there is that as
recently as the 1950s Chinese were starving to death by tens of millions and
they had little to no academic culture to speak of. Their riveting success is
a very much a new thing and so the lack of Nobel standard achievements is
something that's not [yet] a reasonable indication of much.

------
daveguy
I always felt that learning styles didn't really have an effect. But I have
thought that _multiple_ modalities does improve. Take notes, make flashcards,
read, discuss, have others quiz you, etc. I wish they could have included that
in the test. Use one modality for 1hr minutes vs 2 modalities for 30 minutes
each. It may be just as weak/nonexistent as learning styles in general, but I
would hypothesize that using multiple modalities will make a difference over
using a single modality.

------
themodelplumber
Here is the "learning styles" in question:

> The acronym VARK stands for Visual, Aural, Read/write, and Kinesthetic
> sensory modalities that are used for learning information. Fleming and Mills
> (1992) suggested four modalities that seemed to reflect the experiences of
> the students and teachers. Although there is some overlap between them they
> are defined as follows. [For a detailed description of the initial
> construction and limitations of VARK, and for other works on learning
> styles, see the bibliography and the seminal article.]

From: [http://vark-learn.com/introduction-to-vark/the-vark-
modaliti...](http://vark-learn.com/introduction-to-vark/the-vark-modalities/)

(I wish the writing/linking could be amended to "VARK learning styles" or even
initial-caps "Learning Style," as there are differing theories on learning
styles, and a lot of good learning styles theory is probably going to get
babied with this bath water...)

------
sometimesijust
The design of this experiment is terrible. At best it proves that the VARK
questionnaire does not correlate with actual learning style but I don't even
think it even does that due to the poor experimental design.

Perhaps it is leaning heavily on previous findings but since the population
selection is so heavily biased to begin with and the course appears to be
conventionally taught rather than making equally comprehensive study aides for
the different styles. The fact that more than half of the students did not
study using the style they self reported to prefer with is also an obvious red
flag.

Note I believe VARK is over simplified nonsense but so is this research.

------
supreme_sublime
I like seeing people applying science to education. Something I didn't know
about until recently is there has been a lot of study done on the other side
of the equation; instructional styles. It seems "direct instruction" is by far
the leader in terms of outcomes. [0] I'm curious how well known this is and if
I was just ignorant.

[0] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd_9rszR27s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd_9rszR27s)

------
coldtea
They might not have boosted their scores, but were they more comfortable and
enjoyed the process more when it used a style that they preferred or not?

Also, I find this is one of the cases that personal experience trumps all this
"research".

Much the same way people were told not to eat this and that (with research
supporting all those dietary suggestions) and then those suggestions were
found to be false.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Having fun is different from learning. If fun learning is ineffective, it's
not good learning.

~~~
coldtea
> _Having fun is different from learning._

Yes, you can have fun without learning (e.g. at a strip club -- at least
without learning something academic that is), and you can learn without having
fun.

However you can't learn if you're bored out of your mind and tuned out, and
having some fun in your learning helps with that.

------
a_bonobo
If anyone is interested in the scientific literature on learning, Greg Wilson
has been writing a book based on Software Carpentry materials on how to teach
programming, which cites a lot of the scientific literature, it's free here:
[http://third-bit.com/teaching/](http://third-bit.com/teaching/)

------
nurettin
I think we choose learning styles just as we choose a lifestyle, a political
party, sports team or candidate, or favorite color. It is only meaningful to
us. We get discouraged from using, say, visual memory, because it is hard at
that moment. But in a proper learning environment based on encouragement, you
get over that easily.

------
jpster
FTA

> Also, while most students (67 per cent) actually failed to study in a way
> consistent with their supposedly preferred learning style, those who did
> study in line with their dominant style did not achieve a better grade in
> their anatomy class than those who didn’t.

Isn't this self-selection? Introducing sampling bias?

------
swoorup
I found learning by history to be easier. For example if i want to understand
certain thoery, it helps me by understanding its history, its origin and why
it was needed. I think this is however too slow if you need to consume more
amount of information.

------
himom
This reminds me of the unproven teaching fads pushed into public schools in
the late ‘70’s and ‘80’s, which causes some educators to leave and start their
own private schools which used proven teaching approaches like phonics.

~~~
walshemj
Well phonics was also considered a fad and the optician that diagnosed my
dyslexia asked if I had been taught using phonic's as that was though to have
worse outcomes for Dyslexics (neurodiverse) students.

------
JoeAltmaier
Certainly we all have preferences. Never mind whether they work better; folks
will resist learning the 'wrong way'. So its still something to attend to when
teaching.

------
adamnemecek
Ok so what exactly is the universal learning style?

~~~
ta1357
Doing, failing, reflection.

~~~
baron816
Reflection is the main thing. Think about the topic at a later date, try to
dig deeper, compare and contrast it against similar concepts, apply it to
different scenarios, summarize it in your own words and write that down, teach
it to another person, etc.

------
j45
What a refreshing read.

This pattern of long-standing beliefs that education academics don't really
seem to question seems real as ever.

\- Academics need as much if not more support as the students they aim to help
when it comes to remembering how to learn, and teach, especially with the use
of technology. The old saying help yourself before helping others...

\- The academic education/edtech world seems full of more academic talking
heads that are far removed from both teaching, and learning, but not one's
credentials.

\- As a technologist hanging out in Education again.. this appears quite
commonly when education academics speak about technology - too many of whom
don't understand what technology is capable of, because society has passed
most of them by in the baseline technological competency.

The results appear to be speaking about things like pedagogy. Pedagogy is how
children learn, but academics will talk about Pedgagogies when it comes to
adult learning strategies.

There's some slightly ostracized academics who are telling it how it is...
most in academia won't say much because they don't want their jobs to be
threatened.

It's truly a sad situation where the instructional industry is concerned more
about self preservation than perhaps participating in the lifelong learning
themselves that is often preached to their students.

~~~
fjsolwmv
I have some connections to schools, and "learning styles" is not a major
concept at all. "Teaching modalities" (lecture, reading, labs) seems similar
at a glance, but it's quite different. It's not that each person has a
preferred modality, it's that different modalities have different benefits in
a relative non-student-specific way.

It's a weird contrarisn fad on HN to constantly rehash old debunkings of
research no one in the real world cares about.

~~~
j45
Nice. By schools, I'm presuming you meant K-12 in the US.

My comment is about the post-secondary academic research community focused on
education (particularly in North America, and more so in Canada).. Modalities,
pedagogies, all are drawing away from the experience that the students are not
getting that they should.

US post-secondaries are starting to innovate, still good pockets of activity
are not making a suit.

Happy to chat offline, have been a technologist in delivering digital
education (K-12, Post-secondary and corporate) for a while.

