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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

They actually haven't been debunked IMHO. They've done a handful of tests that tend to show that people remember pictures better than words. They have not tested, as far as I have seen, Active vs Reflective, Inductive vs Deductive (or Sequential vs Global), etc.

I don't think it's been studied in a long time because of the influence of the "Learning Styles is Bullshit" gang.

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The term 'learning style' has two completely separate meanings depending on whether it's a tool at your disposal or an external requirement. People in the latter group talk about "debunking" a "myth" in the same way that programmers write "agile is bullshit" blogs.

It hasn't been seriously studied since the late 90s (imho) because the people working on it were all fairly satisfied with the new tool they'd created for certain struggling teachers in very specific circumstances. From that perspective, potential research questions might boil down to "Is empathizing with a different point of view useful?" or "Exactly how attracted am I to the idea of archetypes?"

I'm starting to think that debunkers of X are tedious than people who are pro-X. It's so easy to find a study that says X has some flaw and debunk away. There was an oft cited study about plastic bags with some weird methodology that everyone used to smugly proclaim that their single use plastic bags were actually better and people who used reusable bags had been debooonked.

Nice debunking of debunking there, you found an argument and now debunking is debunked!

It's debunking all the way down.

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