thinking back on elementary-high school…I had some teachers who were really really nice, seemed to love their job, cared about the students and the subject they were teaching… had a nurturing personality but they were not perhaps the best at teaching. so sometimes passion and knowledge do not translate into being good at transferring concepts or knowledge. I had a few other teachers that you wondered how they ever became teachers or kept their jobs. but some of the best teachers did not always come across as the friendliest most enthusiastic folks but they could really teach. they just had a natural ability to do the job. and I doubt they took in to account different learning styles.
If some people have a natural ability to perform a specific job, does it seem all that absurd that some students have the ability to learn through a specific learning style?
Thank goodness Gardner is out of fashion! I do know I have preferred methods of learning. I have figured out some of it is the boredom factor. I glossed over the article- I wonder if anyone has found a way to account for this?
The issue isn’t whether some people learn better by reading whereas others may learn better by hearing the information. Cutting to the quick, we are talking about comparing general intellect (g) to what is considered to be a differentiated view of intellect whereby intellect is presumed to be composed of various mental abilities (that can be reliably differentiated) a la Gardner. Teachers often love Gardner but evidence is weak, at best.
The branch of neuroscience called “brain plasticity” has yielded some interesting findings.
Basically, when a person is blind at an early age, the brain is able to “re-wire” itself to use the portion of the brain that is usually allocated to processing the information coming in from the eyes (a task that is very computationally intensive) to support the sense of touch. This allows an early blind person to read Braille (which requires a large amount of processing to decode the spatial relationship of the bumps) much faster. At the behavioral level, this would probably be perceived as a “higher level of intelligence”, or “the ability to learn better through a particular sense (in this case touch)”.
So the “wiring in the brain” isn’t as “hard” as was once thought, and differences in “wiring” can be perceived at the behavioral level as differences in “intelligence” and “learning ability”.
An analogy in the world of computers is that if you are not using your graphics processor for the computations necessary to display information to a user, then you can use it to do complex scientific calculations more quickly.
In essence, you change your computer from an “artist” to a “scientist” by changing the path along which the information flows and reallocating the existing processing resources.
http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teachingP140C/Papers/Hamilton_Pascual-Leone_1998.pdf
Neuroplasticity doesn’t mean that reorganization is easy or fast. So it doesn’t negate the fact that individuals have particularized mental strengths and weaknesses, and tend to learn best with methods that key into their strengths.
The problem with the claim about their being “no evidence” of “learning styles” is that it is based on the false assumption that all empirical, quantitative studies are necessary to demonstrate the existence of something. Actually, quantitative studies are a particular poor way of measuring or identifying complex issues related to behavior, psychology, or learning, because of the broad range of individual differences and the extreme difficulty of setting up testable definitions and protocols. In short, you can’t really get far using quantitative studies to study theories or subjects that cannot easily be quantified.
If it were as simple as all human beings falling into neat categories like visual / auditory / kinesthetic and uniformly relying on that category for all types of learning – then you could study it. But it isn’t: brains are a lot more complex than that, and the broad categories used by educators are simply that – easy ways to describe a wide range of variations. It is akin to saying that there are three colors – red, green & blue. With those three color values I can create 16.7 colors on a computer screen – but depending on the combination of color values, there are areas of overlap where it is very difficult to distinguish colors from a different category from one another.
Quantitative studies and statistical analysis tend to hide individual differences in data – it gives you numbers that can be used to determine trends or averages. If I aggregate the data from a 5th grade classroom about the height of children, that is going to give me a good sense of the typical height of a 5th grader. But it is not going to negate the existence of the child who is particularly short or the one who is particularly tall, nor account for the fact that some of the children in the classroom may be younger or older than is typical for that grade.
When it comes to learning styles, we don’t even have an agreed standard on how to define them. You can measure a child’s height, but what standard do you used to determine if that person tends toward being a visual or an auditory learner? And if you don’t have an agreed standard for the definition, how can you test outcomes?
But learning can be quantified! And quantitative studies can totally deal with individual differences—in fact, I work with that a lot, though not in education or learning, in my own quantitative research.
I really hope that this doesn’t devolve into a quantitative vs. qualitative vs. mixed-methods vs. intuition shouting match. Really, all of those approaches have their place, and all of them can be useful.
The bigger issue here is that there isn’t a clear definition of “learning styles”. Some people use Gardner’s breakdown, some people include things like accommodations for (learning) disabilities in their list, some people use things as loose as simply different instructional methods. The study mentioned at the outset of this thread takes on Gardner’s breakdown of learning styles, though, and actually comes to a pretty clear conclusion that there is no evidence to support that particular list. (Which, contra earlier claims on the thread, is as close to proving the negative as you’re going to get—that set of claimed learning styles has been studied often enough that a review of the literature should give a pretty clear, meaningful conclusion.)
So part of it, really, is that a lot of the discussion on this thread objecting to the conclusions of the paper aren’t really dealing with the subject of the paper itself. That is a problematic approach.
To do an effective quantitative study, you need to be able to narrow things down to a limited number of variables that can be effectively controlled. And of course you need to have sample sizes that are large enough to be statistically significant. So for a complex issue such as human learning, you could pick a very narrow or particular question to study, and that would give you information-- but it couldn’t prove or disprove the bigger question. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with 1000 pieces. That quantitative study give you one piece, kind of – it’s a piece that doen’t really count unless and until it is replicated, and that’s a rarity. See http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248
I can give you examples of quantitative studies that look at the little pieces, though all have flaws. It’s very difficult to study human behavior and learning because of the control issue. Experiments tend to be set up with artificial situations or situations which may give insight into real-world contexts, but do not necessarily hold true outside of the testing environment.
In any case, the flawed reasoning from the original article cited is that believe that absence of evidence = evidence of absence. Basically, there is a concept based on common, practical observations that is difficult to study or quantify; because of those difficulties it is easy to find fault with whatever studies have been done – and then to declare that the observation-based assertions are a “myth” because they haven’t been proven.
No, and no. Seriously. And also no to some of the other things you assume about quantitative studies. (Also, did you actually read the study the OP references? If you did, reread it—you’re mischaracterizing its analytical methods.)
What you describe in your post is the traditional way quantitative research worked decades ago. There are new methods available for quantitative researchers emerging all the time, however (just as there are for qualitative and other sorts of researchers).
But we’re drifting far from the original topic at this point, I suppose.
OK, how about this: why don’t you post a suggested study design to test whether or not children have different learing styles?
Because it’s not my field of research expertise. There’s a difference between being able to read the research literature in a field, and actually being able to do it.
ETA: Not to mention that there would be a cost to it, and I don’t have ready access to grant funding for education.
I lead several day workshops for groups of clients where they have to absorb the info I present, internalize, teach one another, then take the material and use it to create specific action plans. Of course there are different learning styles. Duh. Anyone doing a job like this can see that. So you have to design what you do to reach those who learn best visually, those who learn best by listening, those who need to be hands-on, etc. Not to mention those who like overviews and then the supporting data, versus those who want to build from data to conclusion.
Personally I’m a visual learner and have a harder time just listening / following along unless I have reference materials or can take notes. I don’t have a strong ability to recount the plot of a movie or even reconstruct a conversation, but give me a time line and structure and I’m all over it. But that’s just me.
Can you reference your materials’s original data about learning styles? I’d be interested to read it, as a skeptic who is totally open to contrary data.
From the original article:
From calmom’s comment on the results from the neuroscience research paper (i.e. post #45)
@calmom - I was actually presenting the results in support of the notion that different people can learn more or less effectively given the same sensory input.
I am from the field of Computer Engineering, not Psychology. I’m avoiding the term “learning style” because I don’t feel qualified to discuss it. I read the neuroscience literature to try to figure out ways to design computers that can behave more like people. Likewise, the design of computers and the fields of artificial intelligence/machine learning can provide insights into how the human mind works.
Since you misinterpreted my interpretation of the scientific results, does that mean that it is no longer a “neuromyth” , or does that mean that it is now a “double neuromyth”? 
Since we can’t read Jones’s paper without paying for it, we will never know…
[QUOTE=""]
Since we can’t read Jones’s paper without paying for it, we will never know…
[/QUOTE]
That’s the problem. I read a LOT of scientific papers regularly – and it is my consistent experience that there is always all sorts of qualifying information in the body of a report that is not reflected in the abstract. So I can’t know what someone has managed to show in a paper I can’t read. (Obviously, in my work I can and do often pay whatever is necessary to get access to papers … but that’s not something I am willing t do for the sake of debunking a dumb headline-grabbing statement on CC)
But I also know enough in this particular field to know that claim is in fact bunk – the best any scientist could honestly say about the concept of learning styles is that there is not a sufficient body of research to convince that scientist of the merits of the theory. But,for example, any study purporting to show that “different people can learn more or less effectively given the same sensory input” could only show, at best, that the individuals recruited for that particular study learned the particular task that was given to them in the study without significant differences based on whatever learning style they were deemed to have. You couldn’t even begin to assess whether that finding could be generalized to other situations without replication and repetition of similar studies in different contexts.
There is a fairly large body of psychological / behavioral / educational research supporting the idea of differentiated instruction based on individual learning styles. It tends to be qualitative rather than quantitative research for a variety of reasons, so people like you who are in fields outside of psychology tend to discount them – but there are huge practical and ethical barriers to doing large scale quantitative research on human behavior and learning.
One of the biggest flaws of what is often presented as quantitative research is that sample sizes are too small. I commonly read studies that might present findings from less than 20 subjects-- sometimes published research purporting to be a controlled study with groups even smaller than that. That’s just too small a sample.
Wait—I’m calling a (small, but real) foul here. That’s the same kind of reasoning that says that Fleischmann-Pons fusion hasn’t been proven to be a hoax, because what really happened in the testing that came in the wake of Fleischmann and Pons’s announcement was simply that there was not a sufficient body of research to convince science of the merits of their claims.
No. Just no. The evidence needed to demonstrate (better word than prove, for what science does) a negative is substantively different than the evidence needed to demonstrate a positive.
Bunk or not, collecting data on, analyzing and designing lessons with specific instructional strategies and plans that correspond to “students preferred learning styles” is, indeed, a part of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System rubric. I suspect other states may have this included in their teacher evaluation tools.
@dfdfb – the study of human behavior, psychology & learning is different than the study of physics.
I’m not going to debate you on this because you acknowledge that you have no expertise in this field in your post #50. I offered you the opportunity to suggest a study protocol… and the reason you gave for not being able to even think up the basic outlines for such a study on an anonymous message board was that you don’t “have ready access to grant funding.”
I’d suggest that you stick to what you know and don’t try to debate with people who do have substantial experience in the field.
Human beings are complicated and inconsistent, and it is considered highly unethical to use children as research subjects in any context that could deprive them of learning opportunities-- which pretty much rules out any long term controlled studies.
I’d add that unlike you, I have been involved in the design of educational research protocols. I have been a member of an IRB and last year (to my surprise) I was paid a consultation fee out research grant funding. You don’t even seem to have a minimal understanding of the issues involved.
I object! That’s not what I said. Please re-read what I wrote. I said that I’m conversant enough in the field to read the literature, but not to the point of being able to actually lead a study. (You also mischaracterize the post you respond to, cherry-picking the afterthought I posted rather than the more substantive issue.) I have experience with quantitative research, I have been on teams using mixed methods, I’ve been on research grants, and I have experience with IRBs—and I also know, for example, that your statement that it would be highly unethical to use children as research subjects in situations where they would be deprived of learning opportunities is correct on the surface, but I also know that there are a good number of studies out there that try different educational-context treatments with children and those are perfectly ethical, so I really don’t get what you’re at with that claim.
But seriously, @calmom, saying that someone who’s conversant in the literature of a field has “no expertise” in it, even when it’s not their specialty, is an insult. If you’re involved in research (educational or otherwise), you should know this. I really would like an apology.
(And if you do have experience with this sort of research, you should be aware that you’ve been mischaracterizing quantitative methods and their limits all along. Why?)
@calmom- A point of clarification. The neuroscience papers on TMS are not statistical studies, they are descriptions of physical experiments. They are performed at the physical level, not the behavioral level. They are physics and not psychology.
In the world of engineering where one has to design and build something that exhibits a specified behavior, the delineation between levels of abstraction is very important because you reason differently at the different levels (which is the point of your second quote). It is also important to be able to translate between the levels of abstraction because you build things in the physical level, but your customer evaluates the results of your work at the behavioral level.
You took a quote of mine made at the physical level and proceeded to evaluate it at the behavioral level which is essentially the same as taking it out of context.
In the absence of divine intervention, one cannot learn what one cannot sense. This is physics.
This also means that the ability to learn is tied to the acuity of the various senses.
As long as the behavioral level notion of learning styles is defined with respect to the senses, then physical level experiments can be devised to test behavioral level hypotheses. With other definitions of learning styles it becomes more difficult.
For example:
Blind people are not as effective “visual learners” as sighted people,
therefore;
Different people have different learning styles.
Comparing the differences in learning ability between people who have lost and in some cases regained sight at various ages (i.e. at various level of brain development) as well as using TMS techniques to non-invasively, temporarily, block communication between sections of the brain provides a scientific mechanism for investigating the notion of learning styles that is different from, but complementary to, purely behavioral-level statistical studies.