I truly wish these models were available when I was in University. As a visual learner it would have been much easier for me to understand certain topics with illustrative diagrams rather than reading a wall of text.
This may be a myth. Big paper in 2009, but nobody's proved it's real in the 15 years since.
In a 2009 review paper entitled Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, researchers investigated the “meshing hypothesis,” which is the idea that students learn better when instruction is provided in a format that matches their learning style. Their conclusion is a hard pill to swallow. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers wrote. “If classfication of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.”
…but the illustrative diagrams are a simulacrum; if you ask Qwen, or any image-generator, for an “accurate” poster-design featuring a representation of a model of an atom and explaining its constituent parts I expect you’ll get an imitation-airbrush rendering of red, blue, and grey table-tennis balls orbiting in perfect circles; you might get an electron-shell diagram if you’re lucky. What you won’t get is anything remotely related to probability-clouds.
Edit: just to test myself I asked Nano Banana 2 to generate “an undergraduate infographic poster about how atoms work” - and the result was something right out of a middle-school science textbook and very Bohr…
This is the image I got for the same prompt: https://jumpshare.com/s/mqqBdl7U59FWPiEXjwoM. It's more like high-school level, but not bad. I can imagine a collage professor can improve the prompt the create a more accurate and detailed diagram
This seems like something that could be solved by asking an LLM to write the prompt for the image model. You can also feed in the output of an image model into an LLM and ask it to check it/make improvements.
There's definitely more dogfooding that needs to be done. And id argue that if your purpose is truly to learn or to teach, the process of describing that image will do wonders for retention.
> if your purpose is truly to learn or to teach, the process of describing that image will do wonders for retention.
If you're wanting to learn then you won't have the expertise to craft a prompt that has the correct details or to spot when the model makes a mistake in its output.
If you're in a teaching position then you won't have anything to learn.
Not necessarily. A reproduction task as a spaced repetition activity can help embed learning. If you are trying to write that prompt there is no reason you can't refer back to the text book to build the prompt and check the output.
My wife has taken all her recipes and fed them through ChatGPT image gen to make zine pages and they’re really cool! She’s building a recipe book for the kids so they’ll know all the recipes from their childhood.
This may be a myth. Big paper in 2009, but nobody's proved it's real in the 15 years since.
In a 2009 review paper entitled Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, researchers investigated the “meshing hypothesis,” which is the idea that students learn better when instruction is provided in a format that matches their learning style. Their conclusion is a hard pill to swallow. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers wrote. “If classfication of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.”
2009: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-...
2022: https://fee.org/articles/learning-styles-don-t-actually-exis...
APA goes so far as to say (2019) believing in learning styles is detrimental:
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...