actually I never second guessed the concept before reading this article…perhaps it is not real.are 'learning styles" a myth?
http://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-styles-is-one-of-the-greatest-neuroscience-myths/?utm_source=YPL
Why is it a myth when it’s well supported by data that people have different cognitive abilities? Males, for instance, have better spacial skills than females, on average.
Gmt…well I agree with you…but it really gave me something to think about. I am not smart enough to really understand how the brain works, but this is food for thought.
I see it every single day in my classes.
One explanation – say, an algebraic approach–will work wonders with some kids. Then I’ll change focus, going for a graphic explanation to the same topic-- and the visual kids will have their “aha!” moments.
Some kids are visual learners, some auditory, some need to physically manipulate the information, some need to write it… the list goes on an on.
Ask any teacher/
Maybe some kids just aren’t smart enough to understand a certain “learning style”?
People have different skill sets. For convenience sake, you can group those sets in a way that suggests “styles”. I don’t buy the idea that there are set “learning styles”. Rather, the appearance of these styles is attributable to our tendency to lump things together. I have not read the factor analytic studies recently but I believe that most did not support a “learning style” or multiple kinds of intellect (a la Gardner) but people like to think that way.
I don’t think it’s a matter of “smart” as opposed to “stupid.” I think it’s exactly what it sounds like-- a predisposition to understand material when it’s approached one way as opposed to another.
Of course it isn’t a “myth”. You don’t have to spend much time in a classroom situation at all before you start to see that different students learn differently, and that instructional approaches and learning activities that work well for some students are absolutely useless for others.
I feel a lot of things are not done correctly when it comes to teaching or learning styles. that said I have no idea how to fix them. and everything is not wrong or bad in how we teach or learn as a society ( I am not a doomsday believer on this subject) but from my on personal life in high school chemistry I could not grasp" simple" concepts that others seemed to get easily. where as in an anatomy class I could tell different cells and tissues under a microscope very easily and quickly learned them with ease. but the article made me think…that is for sure.
I am a very “spacial” person and learned chemistry much more easily when it was approached with bonding structures at the front so I could visualize why reactions happened. I also found O chem to be easier. I am a person who can see a flash of a map and get where I want to go based on that “mental map” even if I have to improvise on the way. That is a learning style not a matter of smart or stupid. Other people like step by step written directions or directions given verbally (my second choice).
If you have ever tried to teach a group of people anything you will recognize that the proof is in the pudding.
When I teach a new concept, here’s how I approach it:
- I explain it logically for the kids to whom logic appeals
- I give notes, for those who need to see the words.
- I ask them to copy those notes, for those who need to write things down.
- I explain them verbally for those who need to hear the words.
- I use diagrams wherever possible, for those who need pictures.
- I repeat the important things, for those who need the repetition.
Good teachers have been using all these methods, and more, for centuries. There’s nothing new-- or new age-- about learning styles. Good teachers have been adapting their lessons to the varied ways their kids learn for quite some time now.
I used to have a Spanish teacher who required us to produce flashcards for each new vocab lesson. She would have us write feminine nouns in one color, masculine in another, verbs in another, and so on. For me, that worked spectacularly well since I could visualize it when I was trying to remember what type of word it was. Obviously, for my color-blind partner that wouldn’t work at all but it also didn’t work for other students in my class. They preferred to just write them over and over until they memorized words. That doesn’t work for me.
Different people have always had different learning styles. The problem is that we’ve long used a one-size-fits-all approach and the kids who didn’t “get it” with that style just dropped out of school. It’s only in the last several decades that completing high school was considered the norm and the people who did complete school were generally the ones who understood the style that was being taught.
@bjkmom Good teaching doesn’t change with every “new” fad that comes along. Because every seemingly new fad is really just an old one in disguise. It’s cyclical, like fashion. Sounds like your classroom would be a great place for ALL learners.
shellz-the one new fad that should catch on and help a lot of students is make school start later. 715-730am start to high school with a 600am bus pick up will make anyone have a ruff/tuff start to the day. and just because I did it does not mean it should stay that way! teens bodies are growing rapidly and need the sleep!
I completely agree @zobroward! Two of mine opted to take a “zero” period that STARTED at 6:40 am. I’m sorry, but calculus at any hour is horrific. At 6:40 am it’s child abuse 
@zobroward Educators and administrators are well aware that teens would love to sleep later. To be honest, it’s not an educational issue, it’s a logistical one.
- Many districts use one set of buses for multiple runs. So they'll drop off the middle/high school kids, then do the elementary school run. They can't have those little kids up too early, waiting on bus stops and going to school in the dark. So the older kids tend to get the earlier starts by default.
- High school sports are a big part of the problem. If school went from 9-5, then games would start at 6-- for the frosh games, followed by the JV, followed by Varsity for schools with only one gym (or a girls gym and a boys gym.) That means they would go pretty late into the evening. That's a problem. And when they ended, you would have hundreds of fans (for some games) on the streets when homeowners are trying to sleep. For spring and fall sports, many schools don't have lights, so the games need to be over when there's still daylight. Too late a start/finish is a problem here.
- Lots of high school kids need to work. But many part time jobs (say, in retail) end fairly early in the evening. Too late an end to the day would mean that some kids would have to choose between work-- and helping to support their families-- and school. Too many would have to chose work.
The “teens need sleep” issue is usually answered with “they should turn off the electronics and get to bed earlier.”
This is a classic example of reporters not understanding the difference between lack of evidence and negative evidence, or more accurately for the latter, proof that a hypothesis is false. They say it themselves in the article when quoting a scientist they are trotting out as “proof” this is a myth:
That is simply the same as saying the hypothesis is not proven scientifically. That is absolutely NOT the same thing as saying the converse is therefore proven. They mention a few studies with evidence to the contrary, but the fact that they don’t cite anything concrete indicates to me those studies have weak correlations to the question at hand.
I personally think this is something that is so empirically obvious, as many of you that are in the classroom every day have pointed out, that most don’t bother. Which is a poor excuse for not doing the proper research, I have to agree at least that far. If for no other reason than in doing so, even if the hypothesis ends up easily confirmed, accidental insights are often gained. I also think it is beyond amusing that the next article down is titled “Creative people’s brains really do work differently” and that in the article they point out that creative people most likely have different interactions between the regions of their brain, i.e. more complicated than just the old “left brain, right brain” mantra but in principle still the same general idea that there is a true physiological difference.
Well, if that is true then how much of a step is it to the hypothesis and natural conclusion that people learn differently, based on inherited and/or early development differences in the brain? These differences would be well along in their development by the time the children are in grade school and these different learning methods start to have real meaning as to how we run a classroom.
Oh, and FYI it is “spatial”, not spacial. Sorry to pick a nit, but thought it should be corrected. We don’t want any of our applicants using the wrong word on their essays!
I will also point out that in mathematics and I am sure other areas as well, there are proofs that when tried one way almost inevitably run into dead ends because seeing the next step is so hard. When that same problem is attacked using a different method, sometimes graphical or visual in nature, the solution appears almost magically. Then one can go back and finish the proof the original way by essentially translating what one can see this second way into the first. But there are a handful of people that can see it the first way just as well. This is an extreme example, but it is at the extremes that we often get our best and clearest information, and then we can walk it back towards the middle.
I find this sentiment interesting, since psychological research has provided evidence that people are really good at seeing things that aren’t there and at using our brains to rationalize, fill in “missing” pieces with made up information, and falsely categorize stuff. It’s like lostaccount says
We see learning styles because they “make sense” to us, logically, and because we believe that the science out there supports it. It’s confirmation bias.
The kids who didn’t get it when you lectured on it, but got it when you wrote in on the board, may have simply benefited from a second presentation of the material. Good teachers approach things from different angles because explaining things in multiple ways enhances recall (as does repetition), but the success of that approach doesn’t prove that learning styles exist. SOme students may learn specific concepts or facts better in one way than another, but that also doesn’t necessarily support the idea of “learning styles” - maybe Betty learns algebra best by doing but English best by seeing, etc.
Like this:
How do we know that the other students simply weren’t slower in Spanish overall than you? Or that writing them over and over was better at helping them visualize it later when they were trying to remember than writing them over and over? Sometimes I repeat things aloud because saying it aloud helps me form a picture of it in my head.
I’m not saying that learning styles don’t exist - I’ve always imagined myself a visual learner, although I can learn things well kinesthetically also - but anecdotal evidence isn’t enough on its own to prove their existence. We’d need to do controlled experiments to provide some concrete evidence.
I was curious, so I checked out the article on creative people’s brains and how they “really do work differently”. The article isn’t about brain imaging. The study was conducted in the 1960s:
In a historic study, Barron invited a group of high-profile creators—including writers Truman Capote, William Carlos Williams, and Frank O’Connor, along with leading architects, scientists, entrepreneurs, and mathematicians—to spend several days living in a former frat house on the University of California at Berkeley campus. The participants spent time getting to know one another, being observed by researchers, and completing evaluations of their lives, work, and personalities, including tests that aimed to look for signs of mental illness and indicators of creative thinking…Instead, the study showed that creativity is informed by a whole host of intellectual, emotional, motivational and moral characteristics. The common traits that people across all creative fields seemed to have in common were an openness to one’s inner life; a preference for complexity and ambiguity; an unusually high tolerance for disorder and disarray; the ability to extract order from chaos; independence; unconventionality; and a willingness to take risks.
I take issue with this for a variety of reasons.
- Chief among them is the definition of "creators" or "creativity". Barron's study seems to acknowledge that creativity is diverse, but if creativity in writing is equated to creativity in scientific or architectural endeavors...what about other kinds of creativity, like creating new processes for data entry or new ways to manage people (neither data entry nor management are thought of as "creative" fields)?
- What about the scale of creativity? Measuring a bunch of very successful people at the top of their field is bound to produce outliers. What about normal creativity - the fanfiction writer who never shows anyone their work, the doodler who draws comic books during their lunch break, the hedge fund manager who thinks about abstract mathematics on the side?
- *There is no comparison group*. Barron didn't compare his group of creatives to anyone. How do we know that they are any more open or complex or independent than non-creative people? (Is there even such a thing as a non-creative person? Most people are creative on some axis of life.)
The article links to another article they claim shows that “the creative brain is particularly good…” at certain things. But the actual article from Scientific American simply talks about how brains work, in general, when engaged in the creative process. No weird dichotomies about creative people vs. everyone else.