I agree with a lot of this, disagree with "multichannel" bit. The idea of "learning styles" is dead in the field of psychology and the advice isn't actionable in the context of a presentation or meeting anyway (how does your average powerpoint aid these supposed "kinesthetic" learners?").
I'd never heard of back-briefing but see that as something my company could benefit from, however. So thanks for that!
See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5366351/ , which cites several of the papers that put the last few nails in the coffin. It also inventories the somewhat depressing situation we're currently in.
Learning styles are an oversimplified theory that many serious psychologists had suspected to be bollocks for more than twenty years, if not more. However, it's simple enough that it was easy to adopt by large companies and resource- (and knowledge-)constrained HR departments, which is why it's still given a lot of attention in these circles.
In 2009, the APS conducted a fairly comprehensive (by psychology standards, at least...) of the existing literature ( http://steinhardtapps.es.its.nyu.edu/create/courses/2174/rea... ) and unsurprisingly found that all except one of the very few studies on the subject that actually had a proper methodology had negative findings. Its conclusion was that there was no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice.
In short: it is not, and never was, a viable scientific theory, and no serious scientist is treating it as such anymore.
Skimming, that paper says there's no support for it, rather than there being evidence to falsify the idea that different people learn better in different ways.
I seem to learn best when I write stuff down; I've assumed this wasn't true for everyone.
Presumably a basic test like presenting new subjects to a group in 3 different ways (lecture, reading material, activity -- say) and test the group, see if subject matter uptake is identical in each case. Could someone link that, it seems to be like the first thing you'd test?
94% of UK teachers think their pupils learn better through individualised learning methods (according to your first link), but you contend their belief is false ... even though there's no formalised support (again according to the link) why do you think teachers feel there is. Surely they see a portion of their pupils are giving better responses if they present knowledge in one way vs another? Any thoughts on how nearly all teachers are mislead in this way?
It also says, roughly, a third say they'll continue to present according to personalised methodologies even if there's no evidence (yet!) to support that pedagogy. That seems natural; if something appears to work when you do it, even if someone else has no evidence that it works you'll keep doing it.
So which method of information is best for all people, as the contention is this isn't variable: all people learn best by ...? (hearing, seeing, taking part, watching, ...)?
> Skimming, that paper says there's no support for it, rather than there being evidence to falsify the idea that different people learn better in different ways.
Yes. That's the phrasing you get when researchers mean "As far as we can tell it's bullshit". Generally coupled with data that shows them looking for effects and finding zilch - which is the negative evidence you're looking for.
The part that's always deliberately ignored in these studies is, that people may have a preference for different presentations and processes. So while, if you force people (in an experimental environment) to use one techinique, and they end up learning about as well, it ignores the idea that they would have resisted learning that thing at all if it was only presented that way?
First, you'd think that, if adjusting learning styles actually made people more interested, or if it made the whole experience feel more inclusive, and make people more drawn to it, the outcomes would be better, because that's how motivation works. The fact that there is no improvement in outcome suggests that that's just not happening.
Second, though, one might convincingly object that, well, maybe it's like that if you're only measuring short-term results, but maybe in the long run it improves results, because it makes school less unfriendly, for example. But there are several studies (e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022027021014189... ) which show that it actually leads to worse results because adjusting teaching style for everything is very unproductive from a pedagogical standpoint.
The studies I'm aware of devote little time on speculating whythat's the case, but in my experience, while teaching something in a manner that does't match a person's preference can be daunting or uninteresting, teaching something in a manner that matches a person's preference but not the topic itself (e.g. it's pretty hard to teach electric motor theory without a lot of pictures) makes it even more uninteresting and dreadful.
Edit: to be clear, what these studies contradict isn't that people have preferences regarding how they learn. There's ample evidence to suggest that people like some better than others (and, obviously, if they learn all by themselves, they'll skip the ones that they don't like, or practice the ones that they like more than the ones that they don't like). What these studies convincingly contradict is the idea that adjusting teaching styles to match these preferences produces better outcomes.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that the idea of Learning Styles, which are about how effectively an individual student learns a subject depending on presentation style, ignores personal preferences of students that don't have an impact on instructional efficacy? Or that it ignores the preferences of teachers?
It ignores the fact that one student will ignore the reading if not forced to do it, while another prefers the reading and completes it. Etc. So we see, in practice, different outcomes for different students depending on how the material is presented.
As I understand them, these studies of Learning Styles are focused entirely on pedagogical methods and their efficacy at teaching material to students. The implication, as near as I can tell, is that a student's personal preferences for how they might do things outside an instruction environment is not relevant to efficacy inside an instructional environment. You seem to be contending that a person's preferences for how to learn can and should be expected to impact the efficiency of their learning process - which sounds a lot like the Learning Styles idea!
After all, if a student might have resisted an approach in a counterfactual scenario but did learn successfully and as efficiently as a student who would not have resisted that same approach, then the same outcome is achieved in both theory and practice.
Have I missed something? Perhaps I have failed to understand your point?
No I contend nothing nothing about efficiency of each process- its the choice to participate at all that can make the difference.
And I read that first link, which seems to survey teachers and their opinions, with vague questions and no hard data. Not very damning at all? Which paper was nailing which coffins? I missed it.
If a choice to participate or not, based on process and style, affects the outcomes of students do you think this would show up on outcome-oriented studies? Or are you contending that this effect would only be visible in individual outcomes, and cancel out across groups of any size?
> Skimming, that paper says there's no support for it, rather than there being evidence to falsify the idea that different people learn better in different ways.
There is also no evidence to falsify the idea that there is a magical teapot orbiting Mars, and that if you rub it with your left hand in a certain rhythm, the Goddess of Tea herself will emerge and grant you three wishes, as long as they involve tea. But we're not rushing to put a manned spacecraft on the orbit of Mars the way we've rushed to adopt the learning styles theory -- even though enough money has been sunk into it that it might have at least paid for a decent launch pad :-).
Indeed, people prefer to receive information in one manner or another, there's nothing surprising here (like you, it seems to me that I learn best when I write stuff down), and there is plenty of evidence for it.
However, there is no evidence to suggest that adjusting teaching methods based on these preferences leads to better student outcome.
There have been attempts to "rescue" this stuff by claiming that well, it doesn't necessarily make students learn better, but at least it makes school seem more palatable, friendlier and so on, so it's more interesting and so it indirectly does produce better results. But it turns out that, especially when groups and standard curriculae are involves, several studies have shown that it actually leads to worse results (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022027021014189... is the most cited, but there are others as well), because there are pedagogical difficulties in adjusting content and teaching styles.
It may look surprising at first, but if you've ever had to teach, it's almost disappointingly obvious. Adjusting topics that inherently lend themselves to a teaching style to a different teaching style produces vastly inferior results -- and, anecdotally, it turns out to be even less interesting than it would have been in the first place.
> Any thoughts on how nearly all teachers are mislead in this way?
The same way that, 150 years ago, nearly all teachers were misled to think that we were created just like we are today 7,000 years ago. At one point, there was a (more or less) scientific consensus that This Is How Things Are, and if you wanted to pass the exams that you need to pass in order to be allowed to teach, then this is what you had to say. The consensus was abandoned, of course, but the misconception stuck for a long time.
This is especially problematic in volatile and fashion-inducing fields (like psychology): practicing psychologists keep in touch with these things. They were taught this theory in the 1980s, but they stayed in the field and understand that we now know it's bollocks. Teachers don't. If you teach anything except for psychology, you probably took a few classes on psychology and pedagogy back in university and that was it (that's certainly how it went in my case). Unless you're keenly interested in this matter (or, like me, you have a psychologist in your family), you don't follow these developments.
I've done a bit of teaching. My experience has been that some learners (younger primary schoolers and middle aged adults in separate situations) will understand an oral or written presentation, others won't get that at all but still readily comprehend an image, some require actual experience to acquire the presented knowledge.
This could be just literacy and spatial reasoning ... but even so in practice that would support tailored pedagogies.
From the other side, as a student, people use a "memory palace" -- but that is entirely ineffective for me; how does that fit in to the idea that we all learn equally well with the same techniques?
It just seems counter-logical and contrary to my experience (teaching and being taught).
Your examples of self deception/false beliefs are both useless. Teachers have direct and intimate experience of hundreds of student reaction to teaching methods, often across decades. Teachers have no direct experience of orbiting teapots nor Creation.
Did I miss the links to the comparative studies showing students learn equally well across different modes?
I don't have any research to support this claim (unless you consider anecdotal, n=1 as evidence), but I believe that "learning styles" exist, just that they are relatively dynamic and more specific than just "kinesthetic".
If you take learning in and of itself, it requires connecting new ideas to pre-existing ideas. If you present something to an individual that is distant to their current understandings, then of course it will be difficult to understand. You need to learn how to walk before you learn how to run. If you take that concept and sum it over their entire learning background, you get two effects:
1. People that get an early lead/intuition in specific fields/topics/skills tend to keep building on similar fields/topics/skills. Kids that are good at math/comouters early on are more likely to pursue STEM in University. The skill is compounding in this way.
2. Specialization in a field/topic/skill (let's use a Math Bachelor's for example) requires that individual to learn/solve problems broadly inside of a narrow domain. Those narrow domains (math) have inherent skills that need to be built (logic, pigeonholing, building on top of root ideas, abstraction, etc.), as well as some supplementary skills that are often developed but not necessarily critical (visualization, fact checking, re-organization, etc.). These skills can be thought of as "learning styles". If you know a Math Major that is strong at visualizing geometry, then describing a mechanical reaction to them would be easier if you simplify the structure to it's simplest level (they don't need to hear about all the fillets you have to smooth sharp edges), and describe the reaction. In that methodology, you can skip all of the engineering terminology you may otherwise use and nail down the representation that they need to think about the problem.
In that way I believe that "learning styles" exist, it just requires case-by-case understanding. This likely plays a role in the numerous benefits reaped through smaller class sizes.
it may not be fashionable in the field of psychology currently to acknowledge "learning styles" but.. "is dead" seems to say "we can prove this does not exist" .. the strongest possible statement about it, in the field of psychology... psychology is accepted as a science, I guess, but really.. the mind is a massive thing.. which mind ? the one that responds when you drop a weight on your foot ? the one that responds after talking to a dear friend ? really.. this is so closed minded..
I agree with you so much. I am the type of person that doesn't learn easily from a book. I need to put my hands on something and write it out and listen to it. Reading it is nearly meaningless to me.
I'm glad there are articles like this and people out there trying to figure out what it really takes to build a great dev team. Still, after all this time trying to find the equation for getting into that magical state I call "the groove" is insanely difficult. It could be compared to a band that put out a really great first album but needs that same energy for another one. I've spent a lot of time around professional musicians and their struggles mirror development ironically. Once I saw 1/2 of a band audition two studio musicians and hit a groove then mint two contracts for a tour in about the span of 30 minutes. That was magical and that was rare- dev teams sort of operate the same way and sometimes when no one is looking that groove happens.
Which continually surprises me and I wonder what content they test the learning on.
Is it on primary education topics or advanced topics?
I certainly can't imagine learning mathematics or coding from a lecture without seeing the symbols. How else would I keep it all in my head[1]?
I don't know what the other 'learning styles' are so I can't really comment on them.
[1] - Surely some with physical impairments, i.e., the blind are capable of doing this as there are blind programmers who make amazing things. But that belies a lifetime of practice of not relying on one's sight.
There is some evidence that different styles work better for learning different topics but not that different individuals learn better with different styles. So e.g. learners might do better on average learning math when visual learning is emphasized and English when auditory learning is emphasized but a given individual will not learn both subjects better if both emphasize their "preferred" style. (Just examples here, not making any particular claims about learning math vs English)
The claim that the learning styles were debunked didn't jive with me because I had a very bad experience being taught German in school using only talking/speaking. And I feel like I need to have things written down to remember them. (For example, I cannot reproduce sounds - like foreign names - very easily, and I have hard time sorting them out. But if you write it down, I can relate it to other sounds and remember it.)
If an individual prefers a style of learning - wouldn't that enable them to enjoy learning for longer periods of time and deeper? Maybe not more efficiently but overall definitely has an impact.
for the full breadth and depth of learning, is debunked, end of sentence ? learning includes a lot of things.. behavior in groups, another massive topic .. this seems dismissive in a startling way
One comment regarding the "embedding". This is similar to the Toyota concept of the gemba, or being where the value is produced. For automobiles, that's the factory floor. For software shops, that's with the developers, testers and BAs.
You want to be able to understand the work flow of your staff in order to catch opportunities for continuous improvement, and the best way to do this is to observe the work being done, but in a respectful way, that is, respecting the staff space and making them comfortable that you are not there to observe them, but the work.
I really don't understand why a manager would want to have an office in the 21st century.
No one has mentioned groups chats from the article. It's kind of scary to think there's a manager out there that is mindfully siloing conversations instead of letting smart people figure it out.
Great article. Threading in a chat tool is an absolute necessity for me. Regarding embedding, I like to wave and smile without talking to makers while they are working. I say hello and maybe chat with managers. Waving and smiling is friendly without interrupting a maker. It still gives them an opportunity to start conversation.
I'd never heard of back-briefing but see that as something my company could benefit from, however. So thanks for that!