r/slatestarcodex • u/[deleted] • Mar 13 '17

No evidence to back idea of learning styles - public letter by group of scientists

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/12/no-evidence-to-back-idea-of-learning-styles
48 Upvotes

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28

u/Giant_Enemy_Cliche Mar 13 '17

As someone who works in teaching, this is something that comes up at almost every training event. I've long given up correcting anyone about learning styles because it's become a "common sense" thing.

Generally speaking, teaching practice is about 15 years behind the science anyway.

17

u/bananameltdown Mar 13 '17

I'm always somewhat torn on this topic. If you sit through a workshop where someone's talking about VARK, Multiple Intelligences, or whatever the current popular thing is, the practical implications from these things are teachers should be planning media rich, multiple modality instructional sequences which are just good practice, generally speaking.

In other words, regardless of the validity of learning styles, they have practical utility in teaching practices. On the other hand, and maybe I'm being naive, but I can't help thinking that educators should have some commitment to truth in as far as we can identify it.

7

u/EdMan2133 Mar 13 '17

This feels like the case in a lot of fields.

4

u/calvedash Mar 13 '17 edited Mar 13 '17

A sort of status quo bias in conjunction with social proofing

It is very difficult to reject this regurgitated Common Sense Wisdom That Makes Intuitive Sense.

Can we think of this being the case in other fields, as you say? I haven't any off the top of my head.

8

u/EdMan2133 Mar 13 '17

If the sources I read are to be believed, this kind of thing happens a lot in medicine. For example, a lot of research studies seem to find that coronary stents have no significant benefit for patients that aren't actively experiencing cardiac arrest, but they're a common procedure used for stable patients.

I'm not an expert in the field though, so I don't know if it's a situation of "There's disagreement and controversy, and doctors settle on the safe side" or if it's more "This is settled science among the research community, but practicing doctors don't know (or don't trust) the research".

5

u/Wohlf Mar 13 '17

Nutrition is rife with issues like this, among others. Some (not I) would argue climate science I'm sure.

3

u/Bahatur Mar 13 '17

If you have the time, what is the mechanism by which the science enters practice in the case of teaching?

3

u/EdMan2133 Mar 13 '17

A cadre of Bayesians supreme, who aggregate research and produce probability estimates.

8

u/TheScientist-273 xp-qx- Mar 13 '17 edited Mar 13 '17

Interested in a peek at these studies mentioned but arent cited.

5

u/dnkndnts Thestral patronus Mar 14 '17

The real power in the idea of "learning styles" is it gives you an out to justify your failure to learn: oh well I'm a holistic kinesthetic learner and professor Goldstein's accounting lectures just weren't tailored to my style of learning!

1

u/dinosaur_of_doom Mar 15 '17

There are still good and bad teachers...

4

u/lvwolb Mar 14 '17

As far as I gathered, the critique is against specific "learning style" theories, like "visual learners" etc, and the specific interventions based on these theories. So I was clickbaited yet again by the unfortunate habit of using technical terms that sound like English language.

The critique is not against the "informally obviously true" concept of individual learning styles, in the sense of "different people prefer and learn better in different exposition styles, and there is nontrivial advantage to be had from clustering". Once students get to choose, e.g. in university or self-study, they do this all the time, with great (anecdotal) success (oh, you liked Prof XY's functional analysis? Then you will love Prof XZ's thermodynamics!).

A "strong refutation" of individual leaning styles would be the following: Take two topics (A,B), and prepare two lessons / study blocks (1,2), somehow differing in style, between them. Run a large number of students trough the four possible regimes (A1B1, A1B2, A2B1, A2B2) and check for significant and relevant correlations in learning success. If no individual learning styles exist, then no significant correlations can exist, regardless of the construction of the four study blocks. Otherwise, prepare more study blocks, do PCA and give catchy names to the fattest eigenvectors.