MIs+and+learning+styles

...Dan Willingham is a cognitive psychologist. Through accessible examples, Willingham applies years of personal research and decades of studying psychology to the classroom. He challenges the work of people like Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences) as well as educators’ ingrained notions about student learning styles. His chapter on learning styles impacted me the most, in part, because I wholeheartedly believED in their importance. As a former elementary teacher, I often tweaked my lessons in an effort to differentiate activities to meet the needs of my auditory, visual, and kinesthetic students.

It is true that some people have especially good visual or auditory memories. In that sense there are visual learners and auditory learners. But that’s not the key prediction of the theory. The key prediction is that students will learn better when instruction matches their cognitive style. That is, suppose Anne is an auditory learner and Victor is a visual learner. Suppose further that I give Anne and Victor two lists of new vocabulary words to learn. To learn the first list, they listen to a tape of the words and definitions several times; to learn the second list, they view a slide show of pictures depicting the words. The theory predicts that Anne should learn more words on the first list than on the second whereas Victor should learn more words on the second list than on the first. **Dozens of studies have been conducted along these general lines, including studies using materials more like those used in classrooms, and overall the theory is not supported. Matching the”preferred” modality of a student doesn’t give that student any edge in learning (p.119-120).** ...Why doesn’t Anne learn better when the presentation is auditory, given that she’s an auditory learner? **Because auditory information is not what’s being tested!** Auditory information would be the particular sound of the voice on the tape. What’s being tested is the meaning of the words. Anne’s edge in auditory memory doesn’t help her in situations where meaning is important. Similarly, Victor might be better at recognizing the visual details of the pictures used to depict the words on the slides, but again, that ability is not being tested. The situation described in this experiment probably matches most school lessons. Most of the time students need to remember what things mean, not what they sound like or look like. Sure, sometimes that information counts; someone with a good visual memory will have an edge in memorizing the particular shapes of countries on a map, for example, and someone with a good auditory memory will be better at getting the accent right in a foreign language. **But the vast majority of schooling is concerned with what things mean, not with what they look like or sound like (p. 120).**

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