Ahhh!! Some interesting grist for the blog mill buried in a comment from dancingnancy33 on one of Traci’s posts!
Learning and How It Occurs
Many times the way I present information in different formats makes a big difference. While these formats may have worked out for me, there is still no proof out there to back them up.
THIS is actually a Good Idea and there’s actually some research out there on repetition of message that shows that the more times people hear a particular message, the more likely they are to remember it. Therein lies the dichotomy and probably the root cause of the confusion with learning styles.
The “Learning Styles” notion holds that you — as teacher — should find out what the various student’s learning styles are (Visual, Audio, Kinesthetic) and tune your message to that style in order to tap into a student’s preferred mode of learning.
That’s not what presenting “information in a different format” is. That’s just good practice. Sometimes you have to say things more than once for people to “get it” and it’s generally considered to be more effective if you vary the message a bit each time so that it addresses the point from a different perspective. This re-statement and re-iteration of the point has nothing to do with so-called “learning styles” because you are not catering to a particular style for particular students.
The difference is that for any give subject matter any given student may “get it” based on any of the following:
- A particular explanation
- A particular encoding
- The repetition
- All the above
Where the notion of “learning styles” falls down — and the reason that it will probably never be proven — is that you cannot tease out the message from the medium. The simple restatement of a message from one medium to another confounds the research because you can never be sure if it’s the change in medium or the change in the nature of the message needed to use that medium that has caused the change in outcome. Furthermore, any given student may “get it” based on one medium/message pair for one topic but a different medium/message pair for another. Yes, this is based on some characteristics of the student but not any given “learning style.”
Rephrased:
You do NOT put it in different formats and repeat it in order to cover the learning style continuum. You use different formats and repetition to attempt to find a representation of an idea that resonates with all the students through the use if repetition and variety. THOSE two constructs have been well established.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Hmm, I see what you mean with catering to the characteristics of students could be considered “learning styles.” Saying something over and over again from different perspectives as been helpful to me in the past. Where one perspective may come from someone who uses language I’ve never heard, it may just need someone who can put it into layman’s terms. That’s a problem in Math sometimes. A lot of the jargon used to describe different concepts students have never heard before and sometimes it just takes a different perspective to bring them to enlightenment.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
I have to be honest, I have always bought into the whole learning style theory. Throughout college, whenever I took notes in a class, I always arranged ideas in boxes, bubbles and the like; I attributed this to me being a visual learner. I was better at geometry than algebra, so it made total sense. Now, I’m reconsidering what it really says about me as a learner, or if it says anything at all. I do seem to remember information better if it is grouped. So, is that just characteristic of me? I’m thinking… preference doesn’t equal a learning style…
October 11th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
That “remember better if it is grouped” idea has to do with a cognitive loading technique known as “chunking.” The boxes and bubbles and all are merely ways for your brain to process information in similar chunks. By going thru the process of grouping using the box/bubble as a kind of cognitive lever, you were creating deeper connections among and across the individual bits of content within the boxes and across the boxes.
Rephrased: It probably wasn’t the graphical image of the box, but rather the process of putting the content IN the box that caused you to remember it.
October 12th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
[...] October 12th, 2007 Mass mis-communication are common in education Dr. Lowell has pointed some out here and here. So the big question is how do incorrect pieces of information get accepted as urban legend for teachers? Do teachers want to believe these ideas so bad that that they will use poorly researched information. [...]
October 12th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
I wish you would tell this to all the people that requires the learning styles inventories and all the PD that we have to go through. I have never really understood the learning styles, since I could put myself into all the learning styles depending upon what I was learning. I really have just brushed it off when a professor or administrator would discuss the different learning styles that we needed to work on adapting our lessons to, so I agree totally with adapting the way the material is presented for all to learn instead of figuring the 5 different learning styles into my class. Thanks for the confidence that all people don’t believe learning styles are the way to go.
October 13th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
I understand that presenting the same information, more than once, using different approaches will eventually reach the majority of students. I am still unsure how stating the procedure in this way disproves the ‘learning style’ theory. I mean….how can you know for sure why and how the information ‘clicks’ at different times for different students. Repetition will work without fail, eventually. Afterall, it only takes 14 days to start a new habit so repetition is bound to work at some point. Im just not sold on the ‘no learning styles’ idea, not yet anyway. Sorry for the narrow-mindedness.
October 13th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Could it be that if there are really learning styles, these come from the way we were taught as children. As Tippi said, it takes 14 days to develop a habit (I heard it was 30) and if we are exposed to content at an early age in the same way, perhaps that becomes our preferred way. In my mind, that preference would not exclude other ways of learning when we’re exposed to those. I think if students are to be successful, they need to make a conscious effort to learn what is being taught. I don’t mean that a teacher should just teach any way he/she chooses and expect the students to “just get it”, but I do think that the learner needs to broaden the scope of how he/she learns and apply a little persistence. In this day of differentiated instruction and the likelihood that all students will eventually have an individualized plan of instruction, that probably will not happen. Since I’m being totally honest here, I just want to say that even though I try to make sure my students “get it” when I’m explaining a math concept,
I am getting very frustrated with the “meet my needs” mentality of our whole society. Okay, don’t shoot me…… I understand that some students have special needs that must be met and differentiated, but many students just give up and/or blame it on the teacher when they are having problems. I agree with Barbara in that it depends on what you’re learning as to what style you use. I really think it comes down to whether the individual is a student or a learner. Learners do what it takes to learn. The big question is “how do we get them to become learners?” I think a lot of it comes down to “relationship” . We’ve all had teachers for whom we would go the extra mile. When we connect with our students, they will learn. I don’t know of any research to back that up…..just personal experience.
October 13th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
There’s an issue of logic that’s being missed here. The problem is a confounding of several notions.
One confounding issue is the idea that catering to a particular preference has a positive effect on learning. While it’s true that we all prefer to learn what we want to learn, it has not been proven that catering to “learning styles” will improve outcomes. Keep in mind that I’m talking about a very specific notion here — the visual, auditory, kinesthetic style inventories — when I talk about “learning styles.”
Another confounding factor this is Gartner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences — which is pretty well established but has NOTHING to do with learning style inventories, even tho they look a lot alike on the surface. Internal combustion and perpetual motion look a lot alike on the surface, too, but they’re not related.
Another is “multi-channel” encoding which holds that sending the exact same message on multiple channels simultaneously has a better chance of overcoming cognitive loading bottlenecks. This is a good theory that’s usually implemented badly, but that’s another story.
Last, you’re hung up on the fact that people are requiring you to do it. “They” wouldn’t be making you do it if it were wrong, would they? At least a couple of you believe in your heart of hearts that it’s a good and valid theory. That’s fine. Faith has its place in teaching — the Supreme Court and many flawed interpretations of the law notwithstanding.
Here is the problem. What matters to learning — not to teaching but to learning — is that the messages be encoded in a way that carries the message inherent in the lesson most effectively. I don’t care how many people say they’re “visual learners!” They CANNOT understand Beethoven’s Fifth or Tchaikovsky’s Firebird or even Lennon-McCartney’s Lady Madonna by looking at a picture of the artist. And it doesn’t matter how many students are “audio learners” — they are never going to appreciate Titian, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, or Klein by listening to somebody describe the paintings! And PLEASE do not confuse the use of “manipulatives” with “kinesthetic learning.” You can play with blocks all day, but you’re never going to learn how to construct a sentence without some instruction in grammar — what it looks like, what the rules are, and how it sounds.
Which leads to the other logical flaw. Learning styles cannot be “disproved.” There’s no valid evidence that suggests they exist. I can’t prove that the Flying Spagetti Monster doesn’t exist either, but there’s no credible evidence to suggest that it does. There is, in fact, some evidence to suggest that the whole notion was invented by an Oregon State graduate student. Even with his assertion that he made the whole thing up, nobody can “disprove” it. The best that can be asserted is that nobody has found any evidence to support it.
There are a lot of mis-conceptions out there. Lots of people still think the world is flat,that we never put a man on the moon, and that girls just don’t do as well as boys in math so it’s a waste of time to teach them. “Learning styles” is just another misconception — and unfortunately — one that’s been codified into a lot ot practice without good research to back it up. There’s not much we can do about misconceptions except to continue to try to educate people.
If you think that catering to learning styles makes you a better teacher, then please cater to learning styles. You will be a better teacher for it. And if you really believe that wearing your lucky socks makes you a better teacher, please wear your lucky socks. You will be a better teacher because there is something in your lucky socks that makes a difference , but it’s not the socks.
It’s you.