At The Atlantic web site on April 11, 2018 there was an article by Olga Khazan titled The Myth of ‘Learning Styles,’ subtitled a popular theory that some people learn better visually our aurally keeps getting debunked.
At the Scientific American web site on May 29, 2018 there
was another article by psychology professor Cindi May titled The Problem with “Learning
Styles. She discussed a recent magazine article by Polly R. Husmann and Valerie
Dean O’Loughlin that was in Anatomical Sciences Education magazine titled Another
nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy
students’ study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning
styles. You can read the abstract at PubMed. They found that:
“Results
demonstrated that most students did not report study strategies that correlated
with their VARK assessment, and that student performance in anatomy was not
correlated with their score in any VARK categories. Rather, some specific study
strategies (irrespective of VARK results), such as use of the virtual
microscope, were found to be positively correlated with final class grade.
However, the alignment of these study strategies with VARK results had no
correlation with anatomy course outcomes. Thus, this research provides further
evidence that the conventional wisdom about learning styles should be rejected
by educators and students alike.”
Nick Morgan briefly discussed learning styles in a November
18, 2014 post on his Public Words blog titled Some myths of neuroscience and
public speaking. He said:
“So
let go of the idea that you’re required, as a good speaker, to sing to the
auditory learners, put up slides for the visual learners, and dance for the
kinesthetic learners. That’s bad pedagogy based on bad science.”
But you can’t expect people to learn how to do a dance like ‘The
Bird’ from an 8-minute audio recording, like that by Morris Day and
The Time. Instead you need to watch their 4-minute YouTube video.
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