Learning styles don't exist...or not

[mareserinitatis]

tomysky made a comment the other day that got me curious. He mentioned reading something about how learning styles don't exist. I found the YouTube video under that name, and my response is, "Yah, sure, you betcha." (That would be North Dakotan sarcasm

Comments

Styles versus Abilities and Disabilities

[anonymous]

"Education" sometimes has a "25 lesson plans for 25 students" mentality below the college level, driven by the Learning Style folks that made it all the fashion about a decade ago. Maybe your school is an exception to this trend. Our college seems poised to adopt it, and/or perhaps the even newer fashion of various Brain-Based ideas (which contradict Learning Styles in one major respect, by emphasizing parallel processing of many inputs, and in another by sometimes arguing that all of today's students need a TV-based presentation style because their brains have developed differently from ours), without bothering to look at any research-based evidence of their validity.

There is a distinct difference between the claims of the Learning Style folks and what you are talking about, a difference that I though he explained pretty well when contrasting what is true with what is not. But perhaps you have not been through any of the indoctrination sessions that we have, which would make it harder to notice the difference between styles and abilities. The point he makes is that the ABILITY to store information in a particular way does vary across any population, but there is no evidence that you need to get kids to dance around the room blindfolded to act out an ideal gas to teach the meaning of that concept to "kinesthetic learners".

None of which argues that you should have a one-size-fits-all classroom. Quite the opposite, as he makes clear. Any effective teacher needs to use a variety of approaches. (My best ski instructors blended visualization and auditory input with kinesthetic ones to teach a purely kinesthetic skill that lives in muscle memory.) Finally, all teachers adapt their lessons to assist students with an identified specific learning disability via the recommended remediations, which can include an alternate format. A blind student can't see my drawings, after all.

Consider this: How do you know that your son's problem is that he is a non-auditory learner in class, even if he has an actual auditory processing disability? Maybe he is an impulsive learner (another Learning Style) like some might say I was? When reading, I can jump ahead to the next new idea, while a lecture paced to the slowest student in the classroom left me bored and distracted.

BTW, you could have seen it on my blog this week:
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2009/03/learning-styles.html

Sorry for running on so much. You can retaliate by posting an equally long objection to what I wrote in my blog. ;-)

Dr. Pion, aka CCPhysicist

PS - Did you notice that the country he outlined is not Algeria? Not even close.

Re: Styles versus Abilities and Disabilities

[mareserinitatis]

In my introduction to learning styles (which came as a part of an NSF education project I worked on), we were told about learning styles but it was also made clear that everyone learns a little bit each way. Thus, the best approach is to teach using a variety of methods so that everyone will benefit.

When my son was diagnosed, I spent a great deal more time digging into this because of the fact that he cannot learn auditorily. (And we know this because, in order for him to process anything spoken, he must repeat it back to you before he understands what is said. As you may have guessed, this doesn't work so well in a classroom.) The giftedness (being severely bored) was also brought up as an issue. However, despite what impressions people may have, most elementary school teachers really don't have a good grasp of learning styles, learning disabilities, or giftedness. They really have a hard time with the concept of differentiated instruction.

Therefore, even if college is looking at differentiation, it's only because those with the most difficult learning issues have been plucked from the system (unless they were extremely lucky).