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The University of Vermont is looking to create a new system to help appeal to students’ different learning styles. According to an article by Tim Johnson in the Burlington Free Press:
Two years into a three-year, $1 million federal grant to implement “universal design for learning” across campus, faculty at the University of Vermont are being encouraged to draw from an array of new pedagogical techniques — not just for students with “special needs,” but for others as well.
The idea is that students have different learning patterns — some learn better auditorially, some better visually, some by using their hands and so on — so they can be most effectively engaged in different ways. A video of a professor talking about what a course will cover, for example, might be reach some students better than a conventional syllabus in text.
UVM is now hosting a three-day conference called “Better Learning By Design” in which national experts discuss flexibility in presenting information and engaging and evaluating students.
The idea of universal design appears to be for teachers to present courses in multiple ways. Different components appeal to different learners. This is not just for students with disabilities; everyone apparently has different learning styles and might benefit from creative, innovative presentation.
Well, maybe. $1 million federal grants aside, there’s not actually much evidence that learning styles really matters. The whole thing might actually be sort of made up. As psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork demonstrated in a paper they wrote for Psychological Science in the Public Interest back in 2008, “learning-styles hypothesis has little, if any, empirical grounding”; there’s no strong evidence to support the idea that different people learn best with strategies that attempt to address their individual learning methods. [Image via]
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Shantyhag on May 18, 2010 6:38 PM:
Interesting article, but I would have to disagree with the assertion that learning styles make little difference. I learned, too late in my college career, unfortunately, that I was absolutely a 'kinesthetic' learner... as a life long percussionist, it turns out that I absorbed information better if I was tapping my foot or keeping rhythm with my hands. Same was true when I was reading or writing (creatively, or otherwise).
I can only give anecdotal evidence, but for me this knowledge helped me better succeed through those last years of school and since.
Doctor Biobrain on May 18, 2010 7:19 PM:
While I don't necessarily agree with the specific learning-types they've outlined, I KNOW that there are differences in learning. Specifically, many teachers, particularly at the lower levels, teach by making their students memorize things, yet I have a HORRIBLE memory. So I do bad with any teacher who doesn't actually explain things. Other people have really GOOD memories, while explanations allude them.
So I was a bad student until college, where I stopped attending classes with teachers who couldn't explain things, and instead read the book and learned how to explain the material to myself. It worked great and I graduated summa cum laude. I've never understood the appeal of having a teacher stand in front of the class and recite the material, as I simply can't absorb anything that way. Besides, memory fades, but understanding never does.
Oh, and another thing, some people just don't require homework. I guess it works for some people, but for me, homework wasn't necessary. Even in high school, I could ace tests, but did badly in class because I didn't do busy work. That's just dumb. It should be about knowledge, not pointless work. If someone can pass a test without doing the homework, they should pass the class.
Texas Aggie on May 18, 2010 8:45 PM:
Memorization vs. understanding is absolutely a key point. In practically every discipline, some of both are necessary, but the relative amounts vary with the discipline (and the way the test is set up). The valedictorian of my high school class was an excellent memorizer, but she had no grasp of science because in science you have to understand relationships and she didn't. I can't memorize for beans, but I grasp relationships easily so I did rather poorly in history but well in science.
I've seen too many of my own students who have different learning styles to dismiss the learning style paradigm. I wonder if it really is true that there is "little, if any, empirical grounding” for the learning styles hypothesis.
Eric E on May 18, 2010 10:17 PM:
The paper is excellent. I work in the medical industry, and we have the same kind of difficulties in establishing an evidence base around whether something is worth doing (in that it is effective individually AND leads to different and better outcomes for patients as a whole). The paper nails this same problem with respect to individual learning styles.
While the previous posters' anecdotes point to differing experiences on how best to learn, and certainly it sounds like it was valuable to reflect on ones' own learning style, with all due respect, the paper is answering a different question. The paper is asking whether there is any evidence that when teachers use these techniques and try to adapt material for different learning style (which, in my limited experience as a teacher adds a good bit of work) there are demonstrably different results for large numbers of students based on adapting classes to student learning styles. That is, can one show empirically that outcomes for students en masse differ based on the adaption or non-adaption, which would justify the time and effort of doing the assessment and adaption.
A good example of this from medicine is the gradual use of more and more advanced imaging diagnostics. Individual patients and doctors are frequently happen that these scans were done as they give more information than older imaging (like X-rays, even really old methods of diagnosis like doctors palpating the injured area), and people like that. Problem is, doing more scans often may not actually affect outcomes - people have the same rates of dying from heart attacks, cancer, etc., in spite of more frequent and more expensive scans. That kind of thinking was the basis of the recommendation that women need not get mammograms below the age of 50 - there simply is not any demonstrable impact on outcome on women en masse.
That's not to say that thinking about learning styles lacks value, but it should inform whether institutions or society should invest in adapting teaching materials to learning style.
paul on May 19, 2010 9:53 AM:
Seems to me that if we a) know that there are different learning styles (and we do) and b) know that current attempts to present information in ways that cater to those styles is not measured to improve educational outcomes, we might want to look at a) whether the style-specific ways of presenting information can be improved and b) the quality of our outcome measures.
(Not saying this is what the paper's authors did, but we have to remember that the current most widely used outcome measures, aka NCLB tests, are widely believed to contribute to worse actual education.)