Comment by arghbleargh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arghbleargh | Hacker News Reader

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I do think "learning styles" can be easily used as an excuse to give up at the first sign of difficulty. However, I'm not sure that it's "rubbish". I've always been very good at spatial reasoning, so I often try to explain things in terms of pictures. Among generally intelligent people, some of them understand me immediately, and others require a lot of tries with different variations on the explanation.

I would be tempted to say that the people who don't understand should just be more willing to think spatially instead of being stuck in their other modes. However, then I imagine how it must feel for someone with perfect pitch to try to explain to me how to recognize pitches. I can't do it just by "trying" harder; I don't even understand what it is I'm supposed to be doing.

This is not to say that e.g. people who are not good at spatial thinking shouldn't still try to get better at it. But it does lead me to think that to some extent these learning styles really are, if not genetic, at least deeply embedded in our personalities and early childhood development.

You'll note that I didn't say they were rubbish BECAUSE students use them as an excuse. What's more, I didn't say that students use "learning styles" as an excuse, only that they believe whole-heartedly in their reality. As evidence of the fact that they believe in their reality, they say things like "This explanation doesn't really work for me — I'm more of a visual learner."

Why do you think "learning styles" have any independent reality to begin with? Why do you think the specific sense/modality/medium is of primary importance when it comes to understanding or modeling how people learn?

This explanation doesn't really work for me — I'm more of a visual learner."

Given that people say this, what do you think they mean by saying it?

It means they believe in the idea of learning styles and that whatever they're currently experiencing is accounted for by that belief.

As for how I translate that sentence into something useful for me as a teacher, I choose to hear it as: "Nothing in this explanation relates to anything in my picture of the world." It then becomes a problem of understanding the student's prior experience and current picture of the world.

The modality only matters insofar as it establishes congruence with the student's prior experience (IMO).

Well, for example, if you compare two persons, one who reads a lot, and one who doesen't read anything, the one that reads will have a much better time processing information in the written form.

It's probably more a thing of which method of "information gathering" are you more used to, and, of course, the notion that "it doesn't change with time" it is kind of stupid, as our mental processes are constantly evolving. But in the end, how used are you to process information in a certain mode will have an impact in the learning process.

The "learning style" mentality can also have the opposite effect, though. My mentor says she never understood programming when she first started learning it and thought she was just inherently bad at it and was going to give it up. Then she started learning in a different way that she says was more in line with her "learning style," and it came much more naturally to her. Now she talks about learning styles as a reason NOT to give up.

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