This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday with Ira Flatow.Listen Well, Learn Well: Working with Auditory LearnersĪuditory learners are students who tend to learn best when instruction or information is delivered orally. “But if your goal is to get a multifaceted exposure to certain content, it can be helpful to weave in all different types of modalities.” If you’re teaching music, those are types of things that need to be auditory. “Some types of content really lend themselves to visual presentation … if you’re teaching maps, that’s got to be visual. “I think it really depends on your objectives for the lesson,” Macdonald says. But rather than formatting lessons differently for auditory, kinetic or visual learners, he and Macdonald suggest that teachers tweak their instruction based on content. “If you’re trying to vary what you do in the classroom to respect different styles, variation in instruction is probably a good thing, anyway,” he says. Or as Willingham points out, teachers who teach to different learning styles in the classroom aren’t teaching badly. “We really want to make sure that we’re not emphasizing that all students be treated the same, necessarily - we do recognize that assessing students on a number of variables can be helpful for learning outcomes.” “And I think this is one reason why we need to be so sensitive when we’re trying to dispel this particular myth,” she adds. “It was a word-of-mouth way that I learned about the learning styles theory,” she says, “and I was definitely encouraged to assess my students at the beginning of the year to determine their preferred modality for learning. Lead author Kelly Macdonald, now a clinical neuropsychology PhD student at the University of Houston, even recalls the subject coming up in her earlier training as a teacher. “It was the most pervasive myth of the ones we asked about,” says co-author Lauren McGrath, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Denver. According to a recent study of learning myths in Frontiers in Psychology, 93 percent of the public and 76 percent of educators believe that students learn better when taught according to their individual learning styles. As he writes in a recent blog post, “The (incorrect) twist that learning styles theories add is to suggest that everyone can reach the same cognitive goal via these different abilities that if I’m good with space but bad with words (or better, if I prefer space to words), you can rearrange a verbal task so that it plays to my spatial strength.”ĭespite the dearth of scientific evidence for learning styles, the idea remains pervasive in our society. “That’s not controversial at all,” he says. And that’s been tested, and we don’t see any evidence that that’s true.”īut as he points out, there is evidence that people have different learning abilities - that some of us are good at math or that others excel with words. “If I get the story in my preferred modality, I should remember it better later. “So, a very obvious prediction here,” Willingham says. Later, they’d all be tested on their memory and comprehension of the story. Some people would be told a story using their preferred learning method, like a slideshow or an audio story, and others not. Learning styles should be easy to prove through science, he explains - for instance, by taking 50 auditory learners and 50 visual learners and exposing them to a mix of learning experiences. “The short answer is no,” says Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. But is there scientific evidence that learning styles exist? The idea that people have different styles of learning - that the visually inclined do best by seeing new information, for example, or others by hearing it - has been around since the 1950s, and recent research suggests it’s still widely believed by teachers and laypeople alike.
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