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> 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. |
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?