Thursday, April 12, 2018

Learning styles?

I've been hearing about learning styles for what seems like forever—especially related to language acquisition. It sounds good in theory, but...
“by the time we get students at college,” said the Indiana University professor Polly Husmann, “they’ve already been told ‘You’re a visual learner.’” Or aural, or what have you.

The thing is, they’re not. Or at least, a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. In a study published last month in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education, Husmann and her colleagues had hundreds of students take the vark questionnaire to determine what kind of learner they supposedly were. The survey then gave them some study strategies that seem like they would correlate with that learning style. Husmann found that not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests.—The Atlantic, April 11, 2018

<idle musing>
Yep.
</idle musing>

1 comment:

Tim Bulkeley said...

This bathwater really is cold, research demonstrates its lack of warmth, let's chuck it out!

Enriching a learning environment with cues and information of various sorts certainly helps me learn, I get so much more from a book with (well-chosen) pictures, those stupid nursery rhymes also helped some things stick... That I think is the baby in this bath.