Learning styles

Just reminding myself about the learning styles myth. The problem with some of these myths is that they feel intuitively useful. I know for instance that I find it really hard to learn a new item of vocabulary unless I see it or at least visualise it in my head. So I always ask the person who has used the word to spell it for me, then I feel vaguely hopeful that I can memorise it. Maybe the act of doing this is what helps me to memorise it – the simple thing fo repeating it is what forms the link. I have always thought I was a strong visual learner. I love creating diagrams to help me understand concepts. I mindmap most of my notetaking. I explain things to other people in diagrams. So if I feel a strong preference for learning in a certain way then I assume that everybody else does too. Of course, they don’t. So my daughter, a hopeless speller who sees mindmapping as torture. hears things and remembers them really well. It makes intuitive sense to me therefore that we learn differently – and the 71(really?) different typologies of learning style grows around this premise, I guess.

So here is the link to the article by Rohrer dispelling the myth about learning styles from an empirical perspective and a blog posting on the same topic. “Educators should instead focus on developing the most effective and coherent ways to present particular bodies of content, which often involve combining different forms of instruction, such as diagrams and words in mutually reinforcing ways.” (Rohrer and Pashler, 2012)