MGTutoring.com. A Rational Perspective on Education.

Writing in “Cognitive Scientists Debunk Learning-Style Theories” (Inside School Research Blog on Education Week, December 17, 2009, 9:47 AM), Debra Viaderosays:

Writing in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, cognitive scientists Hal Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork argue that, of the thousands of articles published on learning styles in recent decades, few really put the theory to an adequate test.

To really determine if a theory is valid, the researchers write, a study would have to first classify students based on the theory being tested and then randomly assign them to one of several different learning methods. Students would also have to be tested before and after the instruction. If the theory is correct, the researchers said, then students would learn best when taught with the teaching methods that mesh with their individual learning styles.

Yet few studies use that or any kind of experimental method to test learning-style theory. And, among those that did, the authors found, several yielded results that contradicted the theory. The authors write:

We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.”

That’s not to say learning-style theory would never work, the authors add. Dozens of such theories have been identified and some have never been tested at all.
What many of these theories give a name to may actually be a learning preference. And it’s a long way from preferring to be taught one way to actually learning more when taught by a compatible instructional method.

Besides which, it is we humans who must adjust to the world, to reality and all its modalities: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. — it is not the world which will bend to us. Education is about preparing a child to live independently in the world and amongst other self-sovereign people; it is not about training children to stomp their feet at the world and other people in demand that their “learning styles” be pandered to.

Update (3:30 PM): (1) I should point out that, at this time, I have not yet read the article. (2) I wrote a bit about “learning styles” in my blog post Two Points of Pedagogy.

In “Why Raindrops Fall in Different Sizes” (Live Science, 23 July 2009, 09:56 am ET), Senior Writer Andrea Thompson says:

Instead, by analyzing high-speed movies of falling water droplets, Villermaux and Bossa found that the drops go through a series of shape-shifting moves and finally burst apart into a spray of multi-sized drops. [At this point, there is a video illustrating the process. -- MG]

First, the falling spherical drop gradually flattens out into a pancake shape. As it gets wider and thinner, it eventually captures the air ahead of it and deforms into a shape something like an upturned plastic grocery bag, the study shows.

When the inflated “bag” reaches a certain size, it breaks apart into many smaller droplets, which fall to the ground and get you wet. The distribution of droplets that result from the burst matches the variation seen in natural rainfall, the team reported.

This model of droplet burst was known in other contexts, such as diesel engines and liquid propellant combustion, but had never been applied to rain.

“The atmospheric science community simply had another scenario in mind, and didn’t make the connection,” Villermaux told LiveScience in an email.

© Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.

Fascinating…

What’s more, the story shows that knowledge goes to he who appeals, not to authority and tradition, but, like Aristotle, to reason, logic, and the evidence of the senses.

Teresa Bondora, owner of How to Teach Science (HT2S), says:

Science is not like math, which is progressive. In math we teach the simple concepts and then progress through simple operations, fractions, etc. We expect that very young children will learn to memorize their multiplication tables but cannot learn simple rules of chemistry or physics. When they have grasped these basic math concepts, we can begin the ideas of algebra. But in science, there is no linear progression. Science is web-like. All parts are interconnected. To answer one question in biology, we must use chemistry. To understand why in chemistry, we can use biology. Physics is dependent on the biology of the body to explain motion in humans.

Then why did physics develop historically as it did? Why are some concepts and principles more abstract than others, and hence dependent logically on those others? And why did geometry and Euclid’s Elements have such a profound, formative effect on modern physics? And why is math such a big part of science?

She also says:

I have since learned that there is a very wrong way to teach science. The way we were taught, with Chemistry saved for High School, with the elitist attitude toward the “harder” sciences, books that stress content, it is very damaging and not at all the way to show our children how science works.

If you don’t stress content, then what do you stress? (For one thing, method makes no sense without content. For another, the subject(s), i.e., content, of a science is one thing that determines the methods needed to understand and investigate the subject — we cannot do psychology with the methods of physics, and we cannot do physics with the methods of psychology or biology.)

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