Do We Learn in Different Ways?
But at least one person who read that article is highly skeptical. Here's what he wrote to me in a recent email:
This is an old idea that has become embedded in the educational establishment with little good research to support it. (Note: I did not say little research. There is a huge body of educational research but is is not well designed. Most cognitive psychologists point out that different areas of learning are associated with more effective techniques. If I want to learn the music to a song, I ask someone to hum it to me. This does not make me a auditory learner. If I want to learn how to get from point A to point B, the best approach may be to get someone to take me there on my first trip; this does not make me a kinesthetic learner. And so on.I can't claim to have done any original research on the subject, although when it comes to language it coincides with what I have seen in my own family. I also am married to a teacher who has had great success by paying attention to individual students' learning styles an incorporating them into her instruction. So I'll concede that my knowledge of learning styles is partly anecdotal.Let me use a sports analogy. You have got 11 auditory learners, 11 kinesthetic learners and 11 visual learners. You don't give the auditory team tapes of old radio announcers doing the play-by-play of old games. You don't have the kinesthetic learners do nothing but scrimmage. You don't have the visuals study the play book nigh and day. And on game day you certainly won't field the top five or six players from each of the categories and expect anything but a rout.
As an approach to education, the "learning style" approach does assure that a teacher will, possibly after a couple of false starts, eventually hit on a better approach to presentation. I believe this is why this myth persists.
Finally, there is an argument against "learning styles" that is rooted in evolutionary biology. The style best associated with survival should replace the others and , either it has, or there is no net reproductive effectiveness associated with it. It seems much more likely that learners with the ability to learn in all three modes would have the evolutionary advantage.
Some other About Guides also have written on the subject:
- Learning Styles (by Melissa Kelly)
- Learning Style Quiz (by Grace Fleming)
- Know and Use Your Personal Learning Style (by Grace Fleming)
- Jungian Learning Styles (This article by Kendra Van Wagner takes a different approach than the others in classifying learning styles.)
What do you think? Have tried taking a learning-style approach to developing method of study? Is this concept merely one of those fads that sweeps the educational world every few years? Or something in between? If you'd like to share your thoughts, please click on the Comments link below.
Comments
Hola Gerald-
It appears to me that the email you received has taken this idea ad absurdum in assuming that anyone one person must be a certain type of learner and not a combination of these types. As a learner it has been my experience that the method should be fit to the means to optimize the learning experience. The email touches on this but only slightly in a reference to learning a song before veering into nonsense.
His point on evolution is just silly. Our experience as humans is 90% sight. That does not equate to having no use for our other senses. The human brain is far more complicated the on/off for our senses as tools. It shows that he has little experience of the actual world; people have different strengths and weaknesses which is why we cannot all be Mozarts and Michaelangelos. More than that though, people will favor learning in a way that is easiest for them and what seems to them to be most conducive. Whichever way that happens to be will obviously become stronger because they exercise it.
The learning styles method is not meant to be used “all or nothing” but rather to be a tool used to help teachers to recognize the individual strengths and weaknesses of their students and cater their lessons to the students accordingly. It is not meant to label children and only allow them to use whichever sense their teacher declares they are, but then I think this individual might be the only person I have heard of that thought that was its purpose.
Peace
Euthyphro
I suppose I’m a mutant - I learn music much faster from reading it, and I learn to drive somewhere by studying a map and then driving myself. Can’t ever pay attention while someone else is driving, for whatever reason.
The wikipedia article on Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences presents some pretty damning conclusions about the lack of empirical evidence for this theory. As a trainee english teacher I am concerned that I am obliged to learn and teach using this theory.
As a teacher of structured finance, what works best for me in trying to get adults to break out of their habitual routines and comfort zones (which is similar to teaching adults an unfamiliar language) is to find something that they do extremely well naturally and “sell into” that ability. People are extraordinarily diverse and quirky in how they develop themselves. Often they don’t know just how clever they are, and everyone can use a little recognition and reinforcement.
I am skeptical of classifying people as types of learners, but it is clear that people’s aptitudes for analysis and synthesis are different, and that good analysis or synthesis require different combinations of visual, auditory and kinesthetic experience.
Your emailer has it wrong. The idea of a person being a visual, auditory, or tactile learner was developed by Howard Gardner in 1983, 25 years ago. The idea is that people learn using all modalities but often one modality tends to be more dominate. I can say from my own experience as a dyslexic, a learner, a graduate student, and a teacher I have a dominate modality.
I hardly think after 25 years this could be a fad.