{"id":51816,"date":"2020-04-13T13:41:57","date_gmt":"2020-04-13T20:41:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=51816"},"modified":"2020-04-13T13:41:57","modified_gmt":"2020-04-13T20:41:57","slug":"learning-styles-are-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/learning-styles-are-fake-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning styles are fake news"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Before \u201cfake news\u201d, we used to think that demonstrating the falsity of a claim consigned it to irrelevance for all but a delusional fringe. But perhaps it is time to accept that myths persist and mutate as malignantly as viruses.<\/p>\n

Academic research can have its own myths. Education research certainly does. Perhaps the most pervasive of these is learning styles.<\/p>\n

The theory is based on the common observation that people have different preferences for absorbing information. The hope is that by matching education to individuals\u2019 preferences for absorbing information, inequality of attainment can be significantly reduced. This individualistic, egalitarian appeal is illustrated by the title of a 1995 paper<\/a> by Neil Fleming of Lincoln University in New Zealand: \u201cI\u2019m different; not dumb\u201d.<\/p>\n

There may be little scope amid the mass unplanned online switchover to cater to different learning styles, but the concept is still prominent in the plethora of advice being offered about how to do online teaching. In fact, however, there is no strong evidence<\/a> that students\u2019 learning is improved when education is matched to their posited learning styles. By contrast, learning is demonstrably affected strongly by many other factors, including ability; motivation; prior attainment; family, social and economic backgrounds; and the course\u2019s particular curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and teachers.<\/p>\n

All learning-style theories assume that an individual will learn best if all the education or training is delivered in the same individually preferred way, regardless of what type of knowledge or skills the learner is seeking to master. \u201cVisual\u201d learners would learn best visually regardless of whether the subject were visual arts, music, languages or mathematics.<\/p>\n

In 2014, Paul Howard-Jones, professor of neuroscience and education at the University of Bristol, reported<\/a> that between 93 per cent and 97 per cent of schoolteachers in the UK, Greece, the Netherlands, China and Turkey believed that \u201cindividuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style\u201d. And a Google search of \u201cuniversity learning styles\u201d generates about 70,000 results. Typical of the results on the first page is a university that claims that<\/a> \u201can obstacle to effective teaching and learning can arise when students and instructors fail to recognize different learning styles\u201d.<\/p>\n

The reality is that different knowledge and skills have different structures, methods and modes of representation, which are best learned in different ways. Teachers should support students to develop their ability to learn in the way that is most suitable for each subject.<\/p>\n

Education has evidently failed in its special responsibility to equip students to evaluate knowledge claims. However, while it should not give up trying, it is so pre-2016 to think that education alone can block myths\u2019 malign influence on public policy. People shape their children\u2019s education more on views picked up from personal interactions and what they find on the internet than on experts\u2019 advice. Hence, even before the coronavirus thrust all parents into the role of educators, there had been a sharp increase in homeschooling and alternative schools, such as academies in the UK and charter schools in the US.<\/p>\n

There seems to be a need to address scholarly communication\u2019s increasing bifurcation into journal articles targeted at research specialists and mass media articles targeted at the public, which report biased or faulty \u201cresearch\u201d without qualification. This gap could be filled by systematic reviews<\/a> of research, written in plain language for practitioners and the public. Such reviews would be a good way of accessibly reconciling and synthesising disparate findings. A good model would be the global not-for-profit network Cochrane, which maintains 7,000 plain language summaries of its systematic reviews of primary research in healthcare and health policy.<\/p>\n

A hierarchy of research syntheses of increasing generality, supported by research funders and overseen by scholarly societies, would promulgate the broad scholarly consensus with more authority than separate, unendorsed studies. They may not get us out of the post-truth era, but they would be easily identifiable and accessible alternatives to the misinformation that pervades public forums and even infects university teaching.<\/p>\n

Author Bio:<\/strong> Gavin Moodie is Adjunct Professor ofEducation at RMIT University, Melbourne, and the University of Toronto.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before \u201cfake news\u201d, we used to think that demonstrating the falsity of a claim consigned it to irrelevance for all but a delusional fringe. But perhaps it is time to accept that myths persist and mutate as malignantly as viruses. Academic research can have its own myths. Education research certainly does. Perhaps the most pervasive […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":51817,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15645],"tags":[351631],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-51816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-learning-styles"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLearning styles are fake news - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/learning-styles-are-fake-news\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Learning styles are fake news - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Before \u201cfake news\u201d, we used to think that demonstrating the falsity of a claim consigned it to irrelevance for all but a delusional fringe. 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