Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
A number of bloggers are happy to consider the case closed after viewing this video - D-Ed, for example, and Tabor and Chris - from Dan Willingham, who has been getting some mileage publishing with the Hoover institution. There are no learning styles, says Willingham. There may or may not be learning styles. But this facile treatment hardly closes the case. As I comment here, "To determine what is 'learned' by determining how much of a list of things they can remember is a very shallow view of learning [and] similarly, 'the shape of Algeria' is hardly typical of what we would want a student to learn in a class. Explanations about 'how we learn' must first correctly describe 'what we learn', and in this the video (and attendant papers, which I have read) falls far short." The unanimity with which they all declare the issue resolved based on such flimsy evidence is suspect.How do I lean on the matter? Well, I think that we need to take into account the different capacities people have to learn. There is no point showing a blind person a visual aid, no matter how central you think it is to the presentation. The same concept will have to be taught another way - that's not just some unsupported supposition, that's pretty plain empirical fact. Other factors may also come into play - some people may be less able to learn from evidence, as a study I talked about earlier this week suggests (no mention of that in the Willingham video that followed shortly after). Similarly, you would not generally do well teaching in Russian to an English speaker. So there's something about the learner's knowledge, capacities and inclinations that must inform how we teach these students, and dogmatic protestations to the contrary (which is really all that we are seeing here) are a disservice to the community. eduwonkette, Weblog, August 22, 2008. [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Books, Video, Learning Styles, Web Logs] [Previous][Next]
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
There may be different learning styles, but are they as important in learning as the modality of the object being learned? For instance, someone who is supposedly an auditory-inclined learner and listening to a lecture on basketball is still eventually going to have to go into kinesthetic mode, pick up the ball, and begin playing. But here are two links to others who know a lot more about the topic than I do:
Baroness Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institute and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, is cited in the Telegraph, as saying it's "nonsense" due to our senses working in unison http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1558822/Professor-pans-%27learning-style%27-teaching-method.html
Daniel Willingham, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Virginia, in the American Educator states, "What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn't affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content's best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality."
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/summer2005/cogsci.htm
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
To charles: Yes. But what I am saying is that they may be wrong. And I offer reasons for that assessment, none of which are considered or responded to here. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
I think it's getting into rather simplistic name-calling rather than intellectual debate I'm afraid.
Should we adjust teaching to individual students' learning styles? If, like me, you largely work 1:1 then surely the answer is absolutely yes. Is there anyone who would honestly say they don't adapt how they teach to their sole student if they're lucky enough to work in that way.
If you're lecturing to 300, then the answer is equally surely no: because (all other things being equal) you've got a fairly even mix of learning styles and some serious constraints on how you can work with them.
Somewhere in the middle there's a tipping point where you go from more likely to adapt to less likely to adapt - probably somewhere around 10 or 12 I'd guess where you've got enough people to have a fairly even mix of learning styles under whatever set of criteria you prefer.
As the author of your previous comment noted, there may be choices, or restricted choices, thanks to what is being taught as well: the auditory learner must do something kinaesthetic to learn to play basketball (that doesn't mean you can't adapt and do more auditory teaching than you would to a kinaesthetic learner mind).
I don't only work 1:1 (although I don't often lecture to 300 these days), but I do work with groups in the 15-20 learners range and as suggested above I don't often hugely adapt what I'm teaching to their learning styles. But, even there, learning styles come into it: I try to consider examples and learning activities to cover a range of learning styles. Not everyone will get every part of the lesson delivered how they'd like it best, but everyone should have bits of the class that cater well to their learning style as well as parts that don't and I mix them around.
It might be worth planning classes that way (it works for me at least, although an anecdote of 1 isn't that convincing scientificially) - although you won't keep every student's attention all the time, you at least stand a reasonable chance of re-engaging them fairly often which might just help them learn better overall. Does that make it a waste of time? Surely not. [Comment]
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
I meant to sign in for the above comment. I'm happy to stand by it. El. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
I don't see how your points contradict Willingham's. He doesn't say that there is a single best way to teach someone and he doesn't deny that there are learning styles. Instead he states that no research has supported any effectiveness for teaching according to learning styles, while research has supported teaching according to the modality of the content matter.
And he doesn't talk about prior experiences influencing later experiences in learning. That's commonly assumed by everyone. Your points about "good nutrition, quality experiences, positive social connection" from your other post aren't related to either learning style or learning modality. Neither is the point of the language of instruction.
Perhaps you can clarify a little, because right now it seems to be comparing apples and oranges. [Comment]
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
Charles:
> I don't see how your points contradict Willingham's. He doesn't say that there is a single best way to teach someone
I have never said he says this.
> and he doesn't deny that there are learning styles.
Right - I should have modified my language slightly. He says there may be learning styles, but that they're irrelevant from the point of view of the teacher.
> Instead he states that no research has supported any effectiveness for teaching according to learning styles, while research has supported teaching according to the modality of the content matter.
His point is a bit stronger than that. He argues that research shows that teachers need not adapt their teaching to the learning styles of the students. That is the point of the studies he cites regarding the memories of lists of items.
The point I make above, "To determine what is 'learned' by determining how much of a list of things they can remember is a very shallow view of learning [and] similarly, 'the shape of Algeria' is hardly typical of what we would want a student to learn in a class," is a refutation of the argument citing these experimental results.
> And he doesn't talk about prior experiences influencing later experiences in learning. That's commonly assumed by everyone.
I do not say that he talks about these things.
> Your points about "good nutrition, quality experiences, positive social connection" from your other post aren't related to either learning style or learning modality. Neither is the point of the language of instruction.
Please note that the item I link to from earlier in the week appears *prior* to Willingham's video and is therefore not a response to it.
That said, note at the beginning of his video where he asserts that while he is focusing on certain types of learning styles, his argument applies to the whole list of differences proposed learning styles.
My response is to the effect that there are *some* differences, that may or may not be called 'learning styles', that may or may not appear on Willingham's list, that may impact how the teacher adapts his or her teaching.
> Perhaps you can clarify a little, because right now it seems to be comparing apples and oranges.
Hope that helps.
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
As a parent, I prefer teachers honestly saying that they've no intention to modify the teaching style to meet my child's needs rather than saying the politically correct mumbo jumbo. I tried homeschooling but the truth is there's a fixed number of hours in the day that an adult wants to spend with their kids so what you give during the day gets subtracted somewhere else. What worked best for me was to not ask for special consideration but rather let the kids get what they can from the school system and then add activities that strengthen their weakness without them realizing it. Like I told my kids, only teachers rank people by whether they read their first book in nursery school or college. Employers only care about your current math and reading skills and whether you're an asset or a liability in the workforce. Even though their teachers thought they were dumb as door nails, it ended up pretty much like the tortoise and the hare race for my turtle reader children. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
The quote of Frank Coffield, at the end of the Telegraph article with Baroness Greenfield that Charles has linked to, pinpoints the problem well:
"We do students a serious disservice by implying they have only one learning style, rather than a flexible repertoire from which to choose, depending on the context."
More on Coffield's research on learning styles can be found here:
http://www.nonformality.org/index.php/2006/04/excuse-misuse-or-abuse/
Learning differences do exist, but they do not exist between people, rather between contexts -- and these go far beyond the modality of the content matter: they have to do with the learner and their current state of mind and mood, even their level of exhaustion, the timing, the content, the educator, the relation and level of trust between the actors, the environment, the spoken and unspoken expectations, and many more.
Whoever argues for content modality as the defining factor of teaching is as wrong as the fans of learning styles. Both arguments don't reach far enough, both suggest wrongly that there is one decisive element in choosing a teaching style, and both start from the wrong assumption that (all) learners always learn (the same content) the same way.
// Andreas of Nonformality (not logged in) [Comment]
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
> "Learning differences do exist, but they do not exist between people, rather between context."
This needs to be cashed out, but yes, I think this is probably closest to the truth. Well said.
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
Willingham doesn't seem to think that content modality may have just one mode. At one point in the link provided above, he notes, "If the teacher wants students to learn and remember what something looks like, then the presentation should be visual. For example, if students are to appreciate the appearance of a Mayan pyramid, it would be much more effective to view a picture than to hear a verbal description."
However, he adds, "Many topics may call for information in more than one modality. In a unit on the Civil War, in addition to lectures and reading, it might be appropriate to include recordings of martial music used to inspire the troops, visual representations (maps) of battlefields, and perhaps a chance to handle the pack and equipment the troops carried so that students could appreciate their heft. Similarly, if students are to learn the form of an English sonnet, they should hear the stress forms of iambic pentameter, and then see a visual representation of it." [Comment]
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
Charles: Willingham, however, suggests that the *only* modality that should be considered is content modality. He agrees that etachers should adjust their teaching in order to adapt to the content - but not in order to adapt to the student. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
Doesn't research point out that for most people, visual trumps all other senses and that multiple modalities lead to best/fastest/most learning?
Shouldn't effective teaching take that into account? [Comment]
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
Stephen
Rather late with this comment. . .
First, you note that the examples used in the video are not representative of what happens in the classroom. That's true, but those examples were provided because they can be explained quickly and briefly in a video. The actual studies on which the conclusions are based often used materials that the researchers tried to make as close as possible to classroom activities. (For a review of this research see Kavale, K. A. and Forness, S. R. (1987). Substance over style: Assessing the efficacy of modality testing and teaching. Exceptional Children, 54(3), 228-239.)
I agree with you that one must take into account what a learner already knows and that it's useless to teach in English to a Russian speaker, but I don't see what that has to do with learning styles. I get the sense that you're concluding that I'm claiming every child and every classroom can be taught in exactly the same manner--a conclusion you could fairly draw from the clause in the last sentence of the video "good teaching is good teaching." let me withdraw that and note that teachers should, as best they can, account for students interests, motivations, and so on.
But the point of the video was really about theories of learning styles--which hold that *the mechanism by which learning occurs* differs among students. And they are not supported. [Comment]
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Re: Should Teachers Adjust Their Teaching to Individual Students' Learning Styles?
BTW the country highlighted in the video is not even close to the Algeria. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
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