Brain Myths: Part 4 - Learning Styles

This is the big one, y'all. 

It's the myth that will not die. 

Not only to 90% of teachers in surveys espouse this view, the general public views it as a given. It shows up in the most unlikely places, from casual conversations to group fitness trainer certification videos. People have decided what their learning style is and believe they will learn better if they are taught in that style. One problem, 40 years of research have not found any evidence for it. In every study, there is no improvement in performance if the teacher uses the students' preferred style, even if every student in the room believes themselves to be the same style and the teacher exclusively uses it.

So, how did we get here? As with many of the myths we have discussed in this series, it comes from a well meaning person who didn't know the difference between conclusion made from observation and conducting science.

It starts with a New Zealand government official named Neil Flemming. Neil had the role of Chief Faculty Inspector for the country of New Zealand, a job I would love. He traveled the country observing as many classes as possible and making recommendations to the government based on what he observed. 

In observations of 9000 classrooms, he noticed something that isn't exactly groundbreaking. Some teachers were able to reach more students than others. He went to his notes and notice a correlation - those teachers who were more effective taught in multiple modalities, pairing visuals and hand motions with their verbal instruction.

Now, if this led him to contact a researcher and say, "I see something here. Can we test it?" we might be onto something. After all, in any scientific study, 9000 would be an awesome sample size, and he had an interesting hypothesis. But that's not what Neil did. He went straight from proposal to conclusion and made recommendations for policy changes. 

What was his conclusion? Students must have an individual style in which they learn best. He laid out four styles - Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Tactile/Kinesthetic.  If we start having teachers plan their lesson in all of those styles, we could reach all students. Because he was in a position of advising a national curriculum, it took hold.

To make matters worse, this was all taking place in the 1980s, the beginning of the "everyone is special" era, so people liked the idea that they had their own style. It's also a handy way for parents to blame the teacher when their child wasn't doing their work. "He can't do it because it isn't in his learning style."

We all took learning styles assessments (sometimes in every class period on the first day of school) and "discovered" what our style was. Teachers started wearing themselves out in the attempt to make differentiated lesson plans, which isn't possible. 

As I said earlier, this is one sticky myth. That is, in part, because we still like the idea of being special. But it is also because teachers did, in fact, get results when they added visuals to their instruction.  Herein lies the kernel of truth behind the learning styles myth, a concept known as dual coding.

In all of our brains, there are two pathways for the processing of incoming information - a verbal pathway (words, whether heard or read), and an image pathway. It absolutely helps to pair high quality visuals with verbal instruction, but it is not because some kids are responding to the visuals and others are responding to the sounds. It's because we ALL learn better when the two pathways support each other. 

Teachers, this is good news! You can stop beating yourselves up for your inability to plan the same lesson in three ways. You can start focusing on the creation of one high quality learning experience that includes visuals (including hand motions - they are a way of creating a visual with your hands) that support the instruction. 

NOTE:  Not all visuals are created equal, so it doesn't mean to just throw an image on the screen and call it a day. If I am teaching about velocity, little will be accomplished by adding a picture of a race car to the screen. But a position v. time graph that I can reference and point to while I'm teaching will be useful. A labeled diagram of a flower will do more good than a photo of a daisy. You are looking for visuals that support the content you are teaching.

Teachers, when. you show your work, students learn about themselves. If you say, "I know some of you believe you are visual learners, but in reality we all benefit from a strong visual image because we all have that pathway into our brains, you stand a better chance of having an impact on their learning. 

Methods of Encoding - Pairing Visuals

A popular applause line at education conferences is "Nothing has changed in education for 200 years!"  It gets everybody fired up for the "new" thing that the speaker wants to promote, but it simply is not true.  I taught for 25 years and was, of course, a student for 17 years before that.  And just in that relatively short time, education has changed dramatically.  The fact that we sit in rows at desks notwithstanding, my grandparents wouldn't recognize most of what happens in classrooms today.  Have you ever picked up a textbook from a hundred years ago?  It is only a few millimeters thick, has tiny font, no pictures, and little spacing - printing was way too expensive to waste precious space.

Tech has brought about a million flashy changes.  Kids can make videos of their own, but the most profoundly effective change was probably the simplest - pairing visual images with explanations.

I know you were expecting something more fun, and I'm certainly not going to be able to sell this to people at conferences.

But it really is this simple.  

Is the impact because we are addressing the learning styles of visual learners?  

No.  That isn't a thing.  You aren't a visual learner.  Stop saying it.  Your child is not a visual learner.  Just stop.  Stop it now.

The reason pairing visuals with explanations is so powerful for encoding information is because we ALL essentially have two pathways in the brain for processing information. Verbal and images.  

Verbal information can be spoken or written - it doesn't matter because they are both words, and words are processed by the verbal pathway.  Images are, of course, pictures. Or animated video. Or even pictures we imagine in our minds.  When these two processing centers are used in conjunction, they compliment each other, and encoding is more powerful.  It's called Dual Coding, and it helps EVERY student (and is, I believe, one of the reasons the learning styles myth just won't die - people don't understand the difference).

But just as I said last week that not all explanations are created equal, the same is true of how we pair our images and explanations.  I'm not talking about clip art, here. I fell for this for a while, so I want to be clear that some images serve as nothing more than a distraction.  If I am teaching physics students to solve kinematics problems (the relationship between acceleration, distance, and time) and include a picture of a race car just for the sake of having a picture, that is NOT dual coding.  If I put in a gif of a race car going past over and over again because I think kids like gifs, that is NOT dual coding.  Those images are impeding learning, not enhancing it.

An image that helps your explanation is one in which the image provides detail, context, or anchors that words alone cannot.  A photograph of a flower in a science book is unlikely to help (unless it is just to show types of a certain varietal), but a labeled diagram of a flower with lines pointing to the structures being named can enhance a paragraph in which those structures are explained.  

The less eye movement required to take in the information, the better.  An image with direct labels is better than one with letters corresponding to words elsewhere on the page.  In very detailed pictures (like anatomical drawings), this may not be possible, but put it as close to the image as possible.  Ideally, the words and image can be processed simultaneously without splitting your attention.

What's nice about understanding the difference between the truth of dual coding and the myth of learning styles is that you don't have to pressure yourself into making three different lesson plans for the same subject.  You can design one high quality lesson with modalities that fit the content, and ALL students will benefit.