[malauxyeux]

The author isn't defending debunked "learning styles", which were popular in the 90s and 00s.

"Learning styles" usually refers to one of a handful of specific ways of dividing up people. E.g., as preferring visual, aural, reading/writing, or kinesthetic learning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Neil_Fleming's...

The body of the article acknowledges that those "learning styles" have been debunked:

> Briefly: the theory was that some people were inherently visual learners, while others were textual learners, among other kinds. This has been proven untrue.

The author is defending this idea instead:

> I’m talking about learners finding paths that work for them.

Fair enough, but recycling "learning styles" in the title is knowingly and needlessly confusing.

[Mordisquitos]

Thank you for debunking the myth of the myth of the myth of learning styles.

Seriously now, the way I see it, there is a common problem when a general descriptive observation—in this case that some learners subjectively prefer certain learning approaches to a greater or lesser degree—derives into an overly assertive model as to which types of "learning styles" exist, the assertion that each person must fit into each category, and prescriptive assertions as to how each "type" of person learns better. This is common in many other observations that are overly reified into people believing they must fit into a category and believe that identifying as part of it confers predictive power or expectations. This happens in the myriad of personality type models, attachment styles, and, to a lesser extent, even sexual orientations (see how often young people will ask questions online in the vein of “I am a h(eter|om)osexual g(uy|irl) but I am attracted to my (fe)?male friend. Can I still be $1sexual?”).

The legitimate observation of average differences and tendencies, as well as their descriptions, is overshadowed by going too prescriptive. And sometimes, when there is legitimate backlash against these overgeneralisations as happens in "learning styles", the pendulum goes to far the other way and society rejects the initial observation entirely. And yet, in certain circumstances, some people do prefer different ways of learning than others. They may even be correct that, in that given case, they learn better that way. Let's accept the messiness of human diversity without coming up with overly defined boxes.

[spondylosaurus]

Something something the map is not the territory.

To your point about "overly defined boxes," it's a little ironic how 10-15 years ago the prevailing thought in LGBT spaces was (more or less verbatim) "Society wants to fit us all into these rigid boxes, but I say fuck your boxes!" and now it's more like "Society wants to fit us all into rigid boxes, but there's actually a lot more boxes out there that you may not know about, so just keep looking until you find the right box. But you will find a box."

E.g., the extent to which nonbinary has almost become a defined third gender category with its own set of expectations rather than a catch-all for anyone who finds that the main two categories just don't quite cut it.

[redactyl]

Yes, I often see people putting things into mutually-exclusive categories when I rather think they should be thinking with more of a tag system.

[pierat]

So many people (at least in the USA, but likely everyone) are so bound to an identity that includes X but explicitly excludes Y.

Worse yet those identities changed in their root definition, so that if you were some identity 20y ago, that now means something different.

For example, if you were a 2nd wave feminist, you're likely assumed to hate transgender people.

[exmadscientist]

Or, to sum up in a pithy sound bite phrase: labels might describe people, but must never define us.

[coldtea]

>The body of the article acknowledges that those "learning styles" have been debunked

I'd say some dubious quality research (like most educational / psychology research is) was done to favour learning styles.

Then some newer, still dubious quality, research was done to "debunk" them.

Meanwhile, we probably don't know more about what objectively works in learning than we did before both sets of research were reported.

It's more about churning papers and taking sides in different academic camps, than actual scientific work.

Like with "Thinking, Fast and Slow" I wouldn't bet on either the original research or the debunking, having "settled" the issue.

[SamBam]

It's extremely difficult to prove anything in education research, just like any kind of sociology or psychology research.

Humans aren't like bowling balls dropped from towers, they're very non-deterministic, and the number of background factors that every individual has makes it very difficult to make federal statements.

Source: current ed research master's student.

[smogcutter]

It’s not even about churning papers in Ed research.

The grand prize is any kind of gimmick that can be turned into staff development material and a lucrative publishing/consulting career.

[sandspar]

See Angela Duckworth's "Grit"-based cottage industry ("A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, Angela has advised the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune 500 CEOs.") The grandmaster of the form is Yuval Noah Harari, who, among other things, has parlayed his pop histories into children's books and graphic novels.

[pengstrom]

It's also confusing to talk about learning styles without it's context. They always come from the detached top. Here in Sweden it's primarily used (along with most trends teachers have to stomach) to distract from budget cuts. The initiatives never seem to include smaller classes or more teachers, only mire work for an already overworked profession.

[dhimes]

They actually haven't been debunked IMHO. They've done a handful of tests that tend to show that people remember pictures better than words. They have not tested, as far as I have seen, Active vs Reflective, Inductive vs Deductive (or Sequential vs Global), etc.

I don't think it's been studied in a long time because of the influence of the "Learning Styles is Bullshit" gang.

[gopher_space]

The term 'learning style' has two completely separate meanings depending on whether it's a tool at your disposal or an external requirement. People in the latter group talk about "debunking" a "myth" in the same way that programmers write "agile is bullshit" blogs.

It hasn't been seriously studied since the late 90s (imho) because the people working on it were all fairly satisfied with the new tool they'd created for certain struggling teachers in very specific circumstances. From that perspective, potential research questions might boil down to "Is empathizing with a different point of view useful?" or "Exactly how attracted am I to the idea of archetypes?"

[hooverd]

I'm starting to think that debunkers of X are tedious than people who are pro-X. It's so easy to find a study that says X has some flaw and debunk away. There was an oft cited study about plastic bags with some weird methodology that everyone used to smugly proclaim that their single use plastic bags were actually better and people who used reusable bags had been debooonked.

[Jensson]

Nice debunking of debunking there, you found an argument and now debunking is debunked!

[hooverd]

It's debunking all the way down.