Learning Style.
It’s really about our preferences, and our preferences are contextual.
I teach a course with a scaffolded term project where students create their own learning unit. At the first check-in, students analyze one of my modules and discuss the content - its variety, usefulness for learning, its appropriateness for the students’ level, that sort of thing. Inevitably, at least one student who analyzes a module with not much video content will comment that, because they’re a visual learner, they think more video content would help.
Photo by Elijah Hail on Unsplash
When they write that, I give them a link to this Atlantic article by Olga Khazan. I do this because Khazan, citing research by Daniel Willingham, Polly Husmann, and others, explains that learning styles is a myth. We have learning preferences, just as we have preferences for clothes, colours, cuisine. But the idea that we are hardwired to learn better using certain channels (aural, visual, etc) just doesn’t stand up to any legitimate investigation.
It would be nice if students could start university without having been told that they have learning styles. (Khazan reports that “more than 90 percent of teachers in various countries believed” that learning styles were valid.) I often tell students that even if learning styles were a thing, they’d be smarter to learn how to adapt to types of learning other than their preferred method because they won’t always be given the option to learn things in their preferred format.
What’s also interesting is that students who do bring up learning styles tend to think they’re visual learners, and for that reason would like to have more video content. I think this actually has to do with the ability of video to immerse viewers more completely than may be the case with reading, though with the way everyone is distracted by their smartphones nowadays it’s hard to think of any delivery system that can withstand that kind of interference.
The other reason that I like having students read the Khazan article is to introduce them the VARK questionnaire. This inventory was developed by Neil Fleming in the 1960s to tell you “something about yourself that you may or may not know,” though its most common use is to help people understand what kind of learner they are (or think they are): Visual, Aural, Read/write or Kinesthetic. In the questionnaire you answer questions such as this:
I want to find out about a house or an apartment. Before visiting it I would want:
a plan showing the rooms and a map of the area.
to view a video of the property.
a discussion with the owner.
a printed description of the rooms and features.
The thing is, you can choose more than one answer. For this one, I chose all four, but even then it’s imprecise because it’s not clear why I want to find out something about the house. Is it because I want to buy it? Is it a house designed by a famous architect whose work I’m studying? Am I thinking of robbing the place? The reasons why I want to learn something will have an impact on how I learn about something. I’ve had students in my graduate seminar do the VARK and they had a similar reaction to me: context is key, not only to this survey, but to learning in general.
In the Khazan article, Husmann gives the following advice on how to study: “really focus on the material,” regardless what the material is. That’s what I tell all my students now.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 41/60.