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Learning styles don’t exist?

August 23, 2008, 10:04 pm

By Robert Talbert

Interesting, well-produced, and potentially controversial video here:

“Good teaching is good teaching. And teachers don’t have to adjust their teaching to individual students’ learning styles.”

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  • Comment (8)
  • Camarilla

    Each of those three keys help you remember the meaning. So a visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learner would find the meaning easier to come up with if they were taught in their specific ways. As to the second part, it is completely true that some things need to be learned in a specific way.

  • lee

    Here is an anecdote for consideration: When my youngest son was in kindergarten, he came home one day very proud of having learned to add numbers. He wanted to show off, so I asked him what 5 + 4 was. He thought about it for a minute and then responded that he didn’t remember its name, but it was “that round number with the line going down”! At that moment I realized that he certainly accumulated information in a different way than I did….

  • Dean

    Very interesting. I continually ask our head of institutional research for the data supporting her claims (I’m a statistician) and get the response “these are not ideas that yield themselves to scientific verification”.
    We are also told to be aware of “multiple intelligences” of our students. Woo woo.

  • virusdoc

    It seems to me that the presenter said that while many aspects of the theory are correct, it breaks down when pushed to its absolute, reductive prediction. This sounds more like a poorly worded or poorly conceptualized theory than a wrong theory, and dude just sounds like a strict reductionistic empiricist. I am unconvinced by his argument, and I also question whether all proponents of learning style theory would interpret either the theory or its predictions so narrowly.

  • Scott

    I can’t resist pointing out that the highlighted country isn’t Algeria, it’s Chad. But maybe Algeria sounded right. ;)

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  • http://www.timvansant.com/otoh/ DigiTim

    Ooh, this should provide some lively discussion around my school! Thanks.

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