20 comments

  • 2_listerine_pls 2139 days ago
    No such thing as learning styles, it's a myth.

    https://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-styl...

    > So how did a false belief become so widely-held? In his paper on the subject for Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Howard-Jones argues that it’s not a result of fraud, but of “uniformed interpretations of genuine scientific facts.” The assumption behind learning myths seems to be based on the scientific fact that different regions of the cortex have different roles in visual, auditory, and sensory processing, and so students should learn differently “according to which part of their brain works better.” However, writes Howard-Jones, “the brain’s interconnectivity makes such an assumption unsound.”

    • waynecochran 2139 days ago
      I always thought it was counter productive to “pigeon hole” oneself as only able to learn one way. The whole “I’m a visual learner” becomes a self-fulfilling reinforced statement. Sort of like people who say they are not a “math person”... well if you think that way you certainly won’t be.
      • rwnspace 2138 days ago
        I find it's much more effective to think of yourself as a secret agent, superhero or a magician. When you can catch a flying plane a bit of calculus is a small hurdle, when you can cast arcane, mystical spells, struggling with the borrow-checker in Rust is just a temporary setback.
        • thesz 2138 days ago
          I think that "secret agent" analogy is very deep. Secret agent must monitor what he is doing and the results of his actions and make his actions either the best possible (wash a dish in a best possible way) or most compatible with ways of others (put washed dish where other think it should belong).

          Deliberate practice grows here naturally.

          And this attitude extends everywhere, not just to programming and/or washing dishes.

          • rwnspace 2138 days ago
            Yes, deliberate practice is my favourite topic.

            I find ego to be persistent, expansive and not very deliberate. Mythical or fictional identities are deliberate, perhaps through their ephemeral nature, limitless yet constrained. For me it's a way of tapping into a play/flow state and compartmentalising away stress and uncertainty. As a teenager the mythic entity was my self; as an adult I have had to turn elsewhere to find that spark (this was a very painful lesson).

            • vertexFarm 2138 days ago
              There's so much in this little paragraph. Thank you for sharing it.
      • vertexFarm 2138 days ago
        I wasted years of my life believing I wasn't "good at math" or whatever platitude was popular with everyone. I rediscovered math long after school and it has been a marvel. I really wish I wasn't so convinced by a faddish belief that most people can't do math. It was just an excuse to ignore, and then of course you won't know what's going on. That's not you, that's your past ignorance.

        It just took one person to speak up when everyone was jokingly trash-talking their own math skills. One normal-looking guy, not bookish or anything but tatted up and heavy-set with a big biker beard, broke in to the conversation and said "I actually really like math." All of a sudden I just felt so stupid and realized what I'd been doing to myself. High school me was literally a moron. At least I still had time to catch up.

        • waynecochran 2138 days ago
          Good! I always cringe when I hear people deprecate themselves as not being a "math person." Math and abstract thought is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Also, math is a very creative process and allows us to model the Universe we live in.
    • jdietrich 2138 days ago
      Quite understandably, there's a lot of wishful thinking in education. Most teachers have good intentions and want to see their students succeed, so they struggle with the reality that a lot of students just aren't academically inclined and really struggle with the basics of the curriculum. It would be nice to think that everyone is a genius; the "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" theories offer the very appealing notion that everyone is gifted deep down and a teacher just needs to find the appropriate tools to unlock that inner brilliance.

      Unfortunately, this wishful thinking can lead to an inadvertent cruelty of unrealistic expectations. Through no fault of their own, some people just aren't very intelligent and have no real chance of excelling academically. We encourage those people to go to college, without considering whether they have any real chance of graduating. We lumber them with a few semesters worth of student debt for no good reason. We offer them no good alternatives in terms of vocational training or apprenticeships. We don't provide them with the educational, social and emotional support they need to make the most of their potential and find a path towards a fulfilling life. The flip side of "anyone can succeed if they really set their mind to it" is the rather callous "if you didn't succeed, it's only because you didn't try hard enough".

    • coldtea 2139 days ago
      >No such thing as learning styles, it's a myth.

      Some studies go one way, other studies go the other way on the matter.

      Plus studies in such soft sciences are notoriously feeble, and there's also the whole replication crisis.

      I don't think we're ready to discard the whole idea just yet.

      • Delfino 2139 days ago
        Teacher here, can you provide links to studies that support the existence of distinct learning styles? I've yet to find any compelling evidence so it's not that I've discarded the idea but was never presented with a case to accept the idea in the first place.
        • coldtea 2138 days ago
          What's commonly being debunked are particular systems for classification of individuals into learning styles, not the idea of learning styles in toto, or the idea of individuals being more inclined to/effective with a specific style. The naive way with many researches jump on the "so it's all a myth" bandwagon obscures the distinction. Here's how a meta-paper puts it:

          "The dominant theme was a stated need to use a diverse range of teaching methods. This is a separate issue to the use of Learning Styles and there was no suggestion in the survey that to not use Learning Styles was to advocate for all students to be taught the same way, and/or to use only one method of teaching. Neither of these approaches are advocated by the wider literature which seeks to ‘debunk’ Learning Styles, but it is clear from the abundance of comments on this theme that these two issues were related in the view of many of the participants. This is supported by the emergence of the related theme of ‘styles of learning rather than Learning Styles’; many participants had a looser definition of ‘Learning Styles’ than those introduced early in the survey. This finding leads us to urge caution and clarity in the continued ‘debunking’ of the ‘myth’ of Learning Styles. Learners obviously have preferences for how they learn. In addition, there is an obvious appeal to using a variety of teaching methods and in asking students to reflect on the ways in which they learn. However, these three concepts are unrelated to the (unsupported) idea that there is a benefit to learners from diagnosing their ‘Learning Style’ using one of the specific classifications (Coffield et al., 2004) and attempting to match teaching to those styles. However, these concepts were clearly linked in the mind of many of our participants".

          https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5366351/

          • alan-crowe 2138 days ago
            Your link offers this example of why believing in "Learning Styles" might be harmful

            > These include a ‘pigeonholing’ of learners according to invalid criteria, for example a ‘visual learner’ may be dissuaded from pursuing subjects which do not appear to match their diagnosed Learning Style (e.g., learning music),

            I struggle with learning music off by heart. The suggestion that has helped me most was to learn the score by visualising the appearance of the notes on the stave. I've taken the usual approach: break it down into small pieces (that is learn a bar at a time), practice by writing out notes from memory onto music manuscript paper and checking, spaced repetition.

            Learning music off by heart is still terribly hard. Even when I can picture the appearance of the score in my head, I start of only able to play from that score at under quarter speed and without rhythm. Building up speed by repeatedly playing from my visual mental image takes a huge number of repetitions.

            The two concepts of "Learning Style" in play here strike me as very different. One is strategic "Oh, you are a visual learner, best give up playing the piano, because that is so auditory.". The other is tactical "Oh, you are a visual learner, here is the appropriate technique for learning to play music from memory."

    • vertexFarm 2138 days ago
      It's really weird how people desire to classify their personalities. I suppose it's a human instinct to classify and organize all information.

      Same with Meyers-Briggs personality types, which are accepted as truth by so many that some companies use the test with new hires. It's about as scientific as a horoscope. All the personality traits described are tuned to that magical level of vagueness--vague enough to describe literally anyone from time to time, as we are all many different people as time goes on, but specific enough to seem eerily accurate. We want to believe things like this.

      Same with "learning styles." It's a convergence of cognitive bias. We want to classify, name, and organize everything--especially when it pertains to ourselves. We want to be unique and know ourselves. It has an added bonus of being an excuse for our failings as well.

      I think most people don't know what science really is, but they think they know how it sounds. So people easily believe and even self-diagnose themselves with pseudoscientific phenomena like this. It's so important to be able to look for predictions that are being made and then confirmed or disproven, and the rigor of an experiment to prove it's not just wishful thinking or bias.

      If you decide you have a different learning style because [brain words], then do an amateur experiment to try to assess how it has affected you, it's really hard to actually nail down what's happening. You might simply be focusing harder because of the novelty of the situation. You only have a single subject for your experiment, and the subject is also the observer. Terrible setup. But most laypeople will believe that seeing is believing, and that they have proven something to themselves beyond doubt. Thus pseudoscience spreads.

    • danharaj 2139 days ago
      In mathematics there's always several ways to apply one's senses to understand and manipulate a concept. For example, an equation can be understood as being a string of symbols or a commutative diagram, or as a string diagram. These emphasize symbolic processing and spatial manipulation to varying degrees.

      It would be perverse to tell a mathematician to use only their best intuition to learn. These sort of thing lean on each other to make one another stronger. Why would it be any different for any sort of learner?

      • hyperpallium 2138 days ago
        Not "learning", but I recall a survey of mathematicians, and their main reasoning styles broke down something like visual (80%), kinesthetic (15%), linguistic (5%) - the main point was that most mathematicians don't think with notation, it's just a way to nail down details and communicate.
    • custos 2138 days ago
      I know I have horrible auditory memory, and really good visual memory; which at first gives some credibility to learning styles being a thing.

      But then I read this: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-audi...

      According to that article, the brain remembers visual/tactile memories equally well and better than auditory memory.

      So in order to prove learning styles exist, we'd need to find people who provably have better auditory memories than visual memories.

      I've not seen any studies or data for this, so I'd hesitate to call it a myth until I did, since on the surface the idea seems plausible. Wish the paper referenced in that article wasn't paywalled. Be curious if it's been shown that all (or a large majority) of people tested show the same result (visual/tactile > auditory).

  • rectang 2139 days ago
    I don't have a strong opinion about learning styles. However, and I think this is related, I have strong negative reaction when names in code are not easily pronounceable.

    Good: "regex", "func". Bad: "regexp", "fn".

    This is because I hear code aloud in my head when I read it, and if I don't know how to pronounce something it interrupts my reading momentum until I figure out some way to say it.

    Naturally I suppress my reaction because it's just a coding style thing and not worth arguing about with colleagues and collaborators.

    But it is definitely a strong enough effect that if other people had my tendency we would never get a keyword like 'fn', at least from other native English speakers. The explanation I've tended to believe is that other people perceive code more visually and less audially than I do.

    • stordoff 2139 days ago
      I'm largely of the opposite group. Having names that aren't pronounceable helps me read code faster, as I don't try to pronounce it, and can just treat the entire word as a unit rather trying to "read" it.

      I do the same in English when reading fast. I distinctly remember reading "Hermione" in Harry Potter as a child, and, because it was a name I hadn't encountered before, just "reading over" it and not thinking about the actual pronunciation. I didn't think about the actual pronunciation until some years later (probably when it was brought up in the books). Even now, if I try to pay attention to my internal monologue whilst reading, it's often words running into each other or being skipped, unless I deliberately slow down, because I'm not actively subvocalising and I'm reading faster than I would pronounce them.

      • rectang 2139 days ago
        That makes sense. Then the question in the context of "learning styles" is, if these differences are real, are they actionable -- can we produce measurable differences in outcomes?
      • Kluny 2138 days ago
        Hermy-own. I stumbled on it every single time.
      • itronitron 2138 days ago
        that reminds me of reading Huckleberry Finn and having no idea what Jim was referring to when he used the word 'chile' until I actually sounded it out and then everything Jim was saying made sense
    • Someone 2138 days ago
      Do you go all the way to

      Good: “begin”, “end”. Bad: “{“, “}”, “:”

      ? I’m asking because one can also see keywords as punctuation, adm punctuation tends to be short. That would make “fn” better than “func” (λ wold be even better, if it were easier to type on common keyboard layouts)

      • Sylos 2138 days ago
        Not the same guy, but similar feelings, and well, I actually dislike it when programming languages actively declare "function", "begin", "end" or even "X references" (Visual Studio).

        Because when I read words, I try to assign logical meaning to them. Whereas symbols and whitespace naturally group these logical meanings into contexts.

        So, having words group the words results in me trying to assign logical meaning to these separator words, and I also just don't find them as clear in separating contexts. Having nothing in a line or just a "{" is much more distinct from actual code than "begin".

        • rectang 2138 days ago
          I prefer brackets over 'begin' and 'end' for scope, though scope also needs to be reinforced by indentation.

          However, I'm fine with function/func/def/proc/sub/method (while averse to fn because of pronunciation) -- because those are all types, not punctuation.

    • jabgrabdthrow 2139 days ago
      FWIW I follow your argument but my perception is not visual at all but “grammatical”. Do you read punctuation out loud in your head? If not then whatever you do is how I chunk “fn”, which if it has to be verbalized gets pronounced by inserting schwas wherever convenient so like “fun”
      • rectang 2139 days ago
        Often, but not always? I might read `(a, b, c)` as "a b c" rather than "a comma b comma c" and unless I was dictating I would not say "left paren", etc. On the other hand, I would read "foo.bar()" as "foo dot bar".

        The specifics of this subvocalization habit, I don't think are salient. What's interesting (to me at least) is that I have to have some verbalization and when something doesn't fit into the model it is disturbing. I imagine that other people with this habit have different specific pronunciations, but the way they experience code is similar.

        For what it's worth, I pronounce `fn` as "effin". Which may or may not be an editorial comment on the spelling, depending on my mood. :)

    • custos 2138 days ago
      I think this has more to do with how our brain processes words written in a phonetic alphabet.

      When reading words we are familiar with, our brain treats the word as a single symbol linked to meaning (or pronunciation).

      When we encounter words that we aren't familiar with, the brain has to revert back to "manual mode", sounding it out to see if there is a link to any known meaning.

      If you use one of the spellings you currently consider bad regularly, it will eventually be recognized as a symbol and treated as such.

      For instance, reading "knife" shouldn't provoke a negative reaction unless you're not familiar with the word; despite it having a silent K which is just silly.

    • st1ck 2138 days ago
      What's hard in pronouncing "fn"? It's "ef-en". You don't pronounce "PC" as "p'k" or "PR" as "prr", do you?
      • uryga 2138 days ago
        Noooo, it's "fnn"!
  • coding123 2139 days ago
    Curious thought process... we spend about 12-20 years of our life going at a specific pace to learning "stuff" in different categories. What if you were given a choice - Learn the stuff in a class in 12-20 years of wasted time OR just have a list of all the material you must know, along with sample questions (so you know you're learning the right material) and have a venue to turn in work (so you get feedback). But instead of spending 12-20 (or more) years, you are given the choice to do whatever pace you want. So in that sense, could really fast people basically "Doogie Howser" it and start a career by 15?

    And possibly a related question - instead of doing ANY higher learning activities, we push all that into vocations - basically if you want to be a rocket scientist you ... start being a rocket scientist intern, learn the trade by being a peon in the shops?

    • toomanybeersies 2139 days ago
      In regards to self guided study, don't fall into the trap of thinking that because you could do it, everyone else could.

      This is going to sound really conceited and condescending, but I'm going to write it anyway:

      I reckon that I could've finished my BSc in Computer Science in probably half the time required. I attended only about 2 weeks of lectures per semester, generally didn't start assignments more than a week before they were due, and didn't study more than about 3 days before the exam.

      For most people though, that doesn't work. They need to go to lectures, they need to study for a couple of weeks before exams, they need to attend the tutorials. Structured learning and the education system is made for the bottom 95% of the population. Schools spend a lot more time, money, and effort on special education and learning support for less gifted students than they do for the gifted ones. It's different at every school, but I remember that through most of primary school, there were no supplemental learning or other activities for gifted students. I was stuck in the same normal stream as everybody else. It wasn't until I got to high school, where students were streamed into different classes, that I actually got pushed to learn and use my abilities, the top stream was basically pushed a year ahead of all the other students.

      Even for the normal stream of people though, there are people who will excel in certain areas and struggle in others. But a teacher has a class of 30 students to teach. The education system is made for the masses, we would likely get better educational outcomes from having much smaller class ratios, 10 students per teacher maybe, but nobody has the money to pay that many teachers, and there aren't that many teachers out there.

      Anyway, my point is that for the HN community, being given a set of learning goals and being told to find a way to learn them would work. For most people, they would flail around and struggle.

      • ZeroGravitas 2138 days ago
        Like with 'learning styles', it's easy to assume that lectures help others even though I personally found them stupid and pointless but the research is fairly consistent that they're worse than other options. And now we have cheap video recording, I'd imagine that live lectures are even worse. They're just "the way it's always been done" not an attempt to meet the learning needs of the majority of students.

        I'd guess that applies to most other stuff that could be tweaked based on svience to benefit all students, rather than pit "gifted" against everyone else.

        • toomanybeersies 2138 days ago
          Live lectures have the advantage that you can ask questions. However, nobody wants to ask questions (except mature students) as they don't want to hold up the lecture.

          Most of my lectures at university were recorded. Whenever I watched them online I'd speed them up 1.3x, so a 1 hour lecture would only take 45 minutes, with no negative effects, I could speed them up even faster, but I had to pay more attention and sometimes rewind. Unfortunately, some lecturers didn't record their lectures, it was their choice, which seems sort of silly and discriminatory to those students who couldn't make it in for whatever reason (illness, anxiety, etc...).

          I personally see no reason why for a lot of subjects we couldn't have online lectures, where we could sit in the comfort of our bedroom, and ask any questions to the lecturer online.

      • forapurpose 2139 days ago
        > for the HN community, being given a set of learning goals and being told to find a way to learn them would work

        It depends very much on what you are learning. Even in computer science, much of what there is to learn - and most of the important things - can't be found in the book. Personal advice by an expert on technique, concepts, and perhaps most crucially, on what you don't know that you don't know, is invaluable. Also, a university has computer resources that no student can match. Then imagine chemistry, history, drawing, etc.

        If you only mean passing courses in one field - that's vocational training, and passing courses is only a proxy measurement anyway. You're missing out on a lot if you think that's education.

        • leetcrew 2139 days ago
          > Also, a university has computer resources that no student can match.

          this probably only matters for graduate+ level studies and perhaps a couple upper level electives for undergrads. in my whole time as an undergrad (at a well-regarded regional school), i only used our HPC cluster once for a trivial parallelism project in my algorithms class. the vast majority of my school projects required the compute resources of a 10 year old laptop, anyway.

          having paid experts on staff that are required to hold office hours and field questions is a much more compelling advantage of university imo.

      • didibus 2138 days ago
        > I reckon that I could've finished my BSc in Computer Science in probably half the time required. I attended only about 2 weeks of lectures per semester, generally didn't start assignments more than a week before they were due, and didn't study more than about 3 days before the exam.

        Something seems to be missing from your reasoning. What were you doing the rest of the time and beforehand? Are you sure it didn't involve computer science related activities? This would mean no reading blogs, HN, programming, no math puzzles, and also no toying with advanced computer use like IT related things.

        That's the first requirement, otherwise you already spent a lot of time and effort learning comp sci.

        The other requirement I see for your reasoning to hold true, is that none of the downtime in between courses, exams and assignments was needed for your brain to process the info and absorb it, to relax and be ready for the next mental effort, and for your motivation to keep up and not get bored or distracted.

        There's also a third implicit, were you actually good and knowledgeable in comp sci, or just successful at passing your university's curriculum? If we suggest changing the system, we want it to produce equally or better qualified individuals. You mention that you've not followed the traditional route, and went at your own pace, which involved short bursts and big downtimes in between (presumably). Did this actually made you a better comp sci practitioner?

        • toomanybeersies 2138 days ago
          To be honest, in my time in between I was largely drinking and working in a restaurant.
      • memebox3v 2138 days ago
        I agree. I think I could have done my degree in a year. Didnt go to any lectures, do any coursework or workshops, learnt the material in a month before the exams. Got 1st class marks (although pulled down to a 2.1 because i didnt do coursework). I used to think everyone could do this if they wanted and that the school/university system was absolutely terrible. Turns out, I'm very bright, who knew?

        Point is: Most people are not like this, they need the structure, they need the help.

        • throwaway3924 2138 days ago
          Same here. I studied for an EE degree in a very demanding university. Learning exclusively from books proved to be more effective.

          > Most people are not like this, they need the structure, they need the help.

          Only because they've been educated to be passive learners!

          For centuries, aristocrats could afford large family libraries and were very self-directed in their studies. Today we expect scholars and researchers to be avid readers and able to find their own sources.

          There is no evidence that the remaining 95% is born without the ability to learn from books. (No, IQ is not very relevant here.)

        • didibus 2138 days ago
          How many hours was spent on that month prior per given exam prep?

          Did you have any prior exposure to comp sci? Had programmed before? Had spent a lot of time on math? Read about comp sci, blogs, articles, books?

          What does 1st class marks pulled down to a 2 mean?

          How qualified do you feel you are now compared to your coworkers who followed a more traditional style?

          Do you think you could have done this one month prior exam cramming 12 months in a row with equal success and without losing the motivation to keep it going?

          • michaelt 2138 days ago

              What does 1st class marks pulled down to a 2 mean?
            
            He means "I got a B+ overall, but I got an A+ on everything I turned in, I just didn't turn in some graded assignments" and his degree was graded using the British classification system [1].

            [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_c...

            • walshemj 2138 days ago
              Seems a bit silly to blow of the course work and not get a first - also not a terribly good indicator that they will adapt well to the workplace.

              Obvs if its a former Polly the difference between a first and a 2.1 isn't as important as an Oxbridge First.

      • mitchdoogle 2139 days ago
        The Truth is you don't know how you might have turned out in a different system. Perhaps you excelled because of the system, and not in spite of it.
    • mieseratte 2139 days ago
      As someone who found their path earlier than most, and has a bit of the protestant work ethic I see the appeal. However, there's two problems to this that I can see:

      First, most folks do not know what they wish to be from a reasonably young age. For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a geologist, probably until about high school, despite having discovered computing at an early age. Funny enough, I never really recognized that I could turn programming into a career. To me it was just something fun that I did.

      Consider the trope of the college kid who goes to school to find themself, bounces around majors, and graduates late. I know some nations have success tracking students earlier, but that is usually around the high school timeframe at best. Part of early education is setting the foundation and teaching one how to learn. This reduces the amount of years available for "Doogie Howser" self-study down to only four or so, plus an additional three or four for higher learning.

      Second, even if someone "knows" what they want to do I think many don't necessarily have the drive and resilience for self-guided study and the associated struggle. Many need the structure, and "hand-holding" that comes with a normal classroom.

      Additionally, some see value in the "well rounded" model of education and so depending on what you want to be it may or may not make sense. Having been of the "I speak English, why study it" school of thought, well, I'm sure this "essay" and the comma atrocities therein speak for itself. Just imagine if I had spent even less time in an English course.

      If we wanted a more utilitarian society of technicians this would be a good idea, but there are many facets to education besides occupation.

    • cortesoft 2139 days ago
      The most important skill I learned in school was how to deal with other people when you have to be together every day.
    • jseliger 2139 days ago
      If you are interested in this topic, the book you're really looking for is Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...
    • j45 2139 days ago
      One issue is learning is largely prepared and delivered as a linear experience.

      Our paths in life, are not linear.

      What we learn, grow from, transfer skills through is not as pretty as a sequential grade or degree system.

      Employers care about hiring competencies - institutions try to call it holistic but there remains a poor signal to noise ratio in terms of transferable skills.

      The traditional 2,000 year old form of higher education is no longer able to keep up with the rate of change in society.

      Today by the time higher institutions prepare new learning material release, it's outdated.

    • EGreg 2139 days ago
    • aje403 2139 days ago
      Great example, rocket science, let’s throw a bunch of 15 year olds who say they want to be a rocket scientist into nasa. What could go wrong? The mit engineering grad has proven for a few more years that he’s less likely to screw things up. The system sucks but it’s not an easy problem to solve
      • itronitron 2138 days ago
        >> less likely to screw things up

        By virtue of education or selection process?

        The main problem with throwing 15 year olds into NASA is that, for a given year, there are far more of them than there are MIT graduates.

        What is unbalanced about how we educate teenagers is that we saturate them with too many interactions with other teenagers (8 classes a day with 30 other students ~240 unique edges per student) and expect them to be able to focus on learning the course material. This despite the fact that adults outnumber teenagers by a considerable margin. It should be no surprise then that our society in the US is largely centered around childish interests as the majority of our social interactions have occurred as children with children.

        • aje403 2138 days ago
          By both virtue of education and selection process, and given that their education was adequately rigorous, they've likely been working hard at academics for > 10 years, they had the mental faculties to understand everything in their field, and they're certified by grades from the most educated people in their field on the planet (same is true for other top universities, as well). There are far more problems with hiring 15 year olds at NASA than sheer volume of applications - I would advise you to think more deeply about what you're suggesting as, even in your alternative education scenario, it's a truly terrible idea.

          Devil's advocate: why is that a bad thing? Kids get social/organization exposure, to sports, music, basic education. The motivated ones are still apparently rising to the top despite the shitty environment. Most humans don't need to go into rocket science, and half of your graduating class will end up directly selling things to other people (in some form or another).As well, are you arguing that kids need less social exposure? That would be true if most kids were going to become software developers, which is not the case. Most of our social interactions do not occur in childhood; you're not speaking for everyone.

          What I will say, that is somewhat similar to what you're arguing, is that it would be great if students had direct access to more challenging curriculums at every stage of their education. To my knowledge, ambitious high schoolers need benefactors willing to pay for college courses that are standard fare for secondary school in a lot of countries. If you're naturally bright and hard working without affluent parents, you're SOL in HS, which is not fair, and I think it's also unreasonable that they need to rely on being autodidactic from a young age, which is really the only alternative.

          • itronitron 2136 days ago
            I do think kids need less social exposure, if only for their own sanity. There is only so much water bottle flipping, fidget spinning, and faggot calling that some children (and adults) can put up with in one day.

            Because that is the social environment within large middle schools and high schools, it detracts significantly from their education. Since it is not something that they will experience often as adults it seems like a waste to force them through that during their education, just sayin'

  • s0rce 2139 days ago
    While completely anecdotal I have realized I learn dramatically better by reading the material as opposed to listening to it (except for physical tasks like tying a knot where having someone show you is helpful). Over the years, especially in graduate school I basically stopped trying to learn in lecture and read the material afterwords. Maybe this has been incorrect or I'm an outlier.

    Regardless, I'm not sure what to make of the last statement in the article being no longer true, "I can’t learn subject X because I am a visual learner", was this ever true, seems like simply an excuse, you should be able to figure out how you need to learn best and then determine how to get the material in an appropriate form.

    • conistonwater 2139 days ago
      Lectures are a notoriously inefficient method of teaching, though, so you probably aren't comparing "merely" listening vs reading. One simple way to introduce a difference is if you're just passively listening to a lecture vs actively studying material when reading (conventional theory says the latter is better, because of it being active, IIUC). You might have decent study skills of your own.

      Learning styles are a surprisingly specific idea (i.e., it refers to specific differences between people and makes specific predictions about how well they'd do when learning in specific ways, which is what doesn't turn out to exist), so you could totally have learning styles turn out to be bunk, yet have plenty to say about different teaching methods. Education research literature is full of stuff by people trying different things, that's where inverted classrooms came from, but that's not anything to do with learning styles.

      • mamon 2139 days ago
        Lectures as a form of teaching made sense at the time when they were first introduced: the Middle Ages. That was before printing press was invented, books were rare and expensive items so the students would gather in a big hall and the professor would read the book aloud, which for most students would be the only chance in their life to learn from it.

        Now that we have invented not only the print, but also computers, ebook readers, tablets, the lectures as a form of teaching are complete waste of time - trading them for more classroom/lab time is the way to go.

        • faceplanted 2139 days ago
          You're forgetting the most important selling point of lectures: Anyone can give them with little to no preparation if they know the material.

          Lectures are basically the "default" teaching method, you take something you already know and explain it piece by piece. putting knowledge down in any form of media is almost inherently harder and more expensive than just explaining it in person or on camera.

          Back in university, every time I had to find an explanation for something online on YouTube, recorded lectures were usually the worst choice, if I had a choice, because there was often no produced video explaining something, but there were always lectures recorded from somewhere. Because lectures are easy.

          I did actually find one place where lectures were better than directly reading the material, and it was mathematics lectures, just because amount of symbols and obscure language that often goes into putting something mathematical down in text over just explaining it can be ridiculous to someone like me who has never managed to learn the latin and greek alphabets however many times I tried.

          • mamon 2138 days ago
            There’s a joke that lectures are how professors are doing spaced repetition of their basic knowledge :-) It also gives them the opportunity to advertise the books they’ve written
        • anonymous5133 2138 days ago
          Completely agree. If lectures are built they are to be interactive type lectures where the student actively has to interact. The rest of the time should be spent doing simulations/projects or anything else which directly requires the student to apply the subject. That's really how you learn: Get some project/problem to solve then work through it. If you have issues, you attempt to find the solutions to solve the problem. Rinse and repeat.
    • adamnemecek 2139 days ago
      I feel like all people learn better his way. The current system is a remnant of a time when books were expensive and a farmers son might have a hard time affording books.
      • _rpd 2139 days ago
        There are subjects so specialized that there is no textbook, and the time of the lecturer is so valuable that prep time for teaching is always going to be minimal. In these cases, lecturing is justifiable, but they are vanishingly rare. If there is a textbook then lecturing is pointless at best and probably harmful.
        • adamnemecek 2138 days ago
          Sure however this isn’t how the system is set up.
          • anonymous5133 2138 days ago
            We can change the system, or replace it with something better.
            • randomdata 2138 days ago
              Can we? We've built the system to replace it have seen it transition into widespread use. However, it turns out that there are strong emotional ties to the old system and few want to let it go.
      • davidmurdoch 2138 days ago
        Honest question here: are textbooks not expensive anymore? Circa 2003 I'd pay ~$600/semester for course textbooks.
    • anonymous5133 2138 days ago
      I am working on an educational related project.

      Pretty much what I do is have traditional textbook type materials for students to read. I also have the same materials in a visual interactive type lecture that basically explains/shows how to do something followed by some sort of interactive exercise where the student can apply the previously taught materials. The interactive exercises also act as a way to teach material as well. By analyzing how the student interacts with the exercise I can determine how well they understand the lesson. Nothing is locked in. If students don't want to read the textbook then they don't have to. Likewise, if students don't want to listen to the lectures then they don't have to either they can skip to the exercises.

      After learning about 10 of these lessons that compose the chapter they can take a skills quiz to see how well they know the material. I intentionally make all the skill quizzes extra hard just to make sure students know the material before progressing to the next chapter.

      If you have ever used codecademy then it is very similar. The only difference is my project is focused on entire college courses. If you took MIT OCW and combined it with codecademy then that is basically what I am working on. I am combining the formal structure of a college course with the technological innovation seen in codecademy.

    • nol13 2139 days ago
      Yup. I might read one section over a few times before moving on, and/or spend way less time in others. Reading I go at the pace I can digest it, not the pace of the lecturer.
  • djajshgsjja 2139 days ago
    Typical science reporting: “we couldn’t prove x causes y” becomes “we proved x does not cause y”.
    • sirclueless 2139 days ago
      The reporter doesn't make any claims like that. The word "prove" or "proof" don't appear at all. Instead they say, "The findings do not support the learning styles concept," and "Student grade performance was not correlated in any meaningful way with their dominant learning style or with any learning style(s) they scored highly on."

      If there's a complaint to be had here, it's that the HN poster changed the word "did" to "do" in the headline while posting here.

      • rectang 2139 days ago
        > the HN poster changed the word "did" to "do" in the headline

        Well spotted! That's a pretty misleading change.

    • vorg 2139 days ago
      > “Another nail in the coffin for learning styles” – students did not benefit from studying according to their supposed learning style

      > By Christian Jarrett

      > The idea that we learn better when taught via our preferred modality or “learning style” – such as visually, orally, or by doing – is not supported by evidence.

      Specifically, x is "when taught via our preferred modality", and y is "we learn better". The first sentence of the article gets it right, but the headline is where the false leap of logic occurs. Perhaps the headline-writer is a different person to the article-writer.

      Edit: As pointed out by sirclueless, the headline was further distorted by empath75 when posted on HN.

    • ddtaylor 2139 days ago
      It's hard to justify funding if "all you're doing" is in/validating or peer-reviewing work so it gets repackaged at a breakthrough =(
  • excalibur 2139 days ago
    > Other activities, such as using flash cards, were associated with poorer performance, perhaps because they were a sign of learning by rote rather than deeper learning.

    But that's remarkably similar to the way "Deep Learning" is typically achieved. Perhaps it's a bit of a misnomer.

    • ggm 2139 days ago
      It's a complete misnomer. It's such a bad fit, it has to be marketing.
  • tgb 2139 days ago
    Isn't this surprising to a huge extent? My gut tells me that it's not that people don't have different learning styles, it's instead a combination of (A) the learning styles not being as obvious as the ones studied here and (B) we aren't exploiting those learning styles effectively. Is it really plausible that all humans learn in exactly the same way?

    I recall the Feynman story about realizing that some people see the numbers as they count and others hear the numbers. This was tested by having people do either visual or auditory tasks while counting the seconds. People who "saw" the numbers were less consistent counting to 30 seconds when doing something visual at the same time and vice versa for those who heard. How is it plausible that these two groups of people learn to do arithmetic in the same way? How many other little differences are there between people's brains that we don't notice? Maybe we're just terrible at noticing and using the differences that exist.

    • TangoTrotFox 2139 days ago
      First and foremost this is just another social sciences study. Most of everybody is aware of the reproducibility crisis yet seem to fail to connect the dots to new studies - it's not going anywhere which means that science, particularly in the social and physiological sciences, is somehow deeply flawed. That said, this study confirms my own biases so I want to believe. One big reason is to consider the academic output of schools in places such as Korea and China. Learning is extremely structured and more analogous to a factory line than a school, in the US style, and their output absolutely dwarfs ours. The typical argument against this system is that mechanical teaching leads to mechanical thought, which is is supposed to support things such as the fact that China has an abysmal rate of Nobel laureates.

      However, something missing there is that Nobel Prizes are frequently rewarded long after something is first done when its relevance is proven or otherwise becomes more clear. For instance Stephen Hawking never received a Nobel prize, yet if we observed Hawking Radiation - he likely would have been awarded one for a theoretic hypothesis dating back to 1974. The point there is that as recently as the 1950s Chinese were starving to death by tens of millions and they had little to no academic culture to speak of. Their riveting success is a very much a new thing and so the lack of Nobel standard achievements is something that's not [yet] a reasonable indication of much.

  • daveguy 2139 days ago
    I always felt that learning styles didn't really have an effect. But I have thought that multiple modalities does improve. Take notes, make flashcards, read, discuss, have others quiz you, etc. I wish they could have included that in the test. Use one modality for 1hr minutes vs 2 modalities for 30 minutes each. It may be just as weak/nonexistent as learning styles in general, but I would hypothesize that using multiple modalities will make a difference over using a single modality.
  • themodelplumber 2139 days ago
    Here is the "learning styles" in question:

    > The acronym VARK stands for Visual, Aural, Read/write, and Kinesthetic sensory modalities that are used for learning information. Fleming and Mills (1992) suggested four modalities that seemed to reflect the experiences of the students and teachers. Although there is some overlap between them they are defined as follows. [For a detailed description of the initial construction and limitations of VARK, and for other works on learning styles, see the bibliography and the seminal article.]

    From: http://vark-learn.com/introduction-to-vark/the-vark-modaliti...

    (I wish the writing/linking could be amended to "VARK learning styles" or even initial-caps "Learning Style," as there are differing theories on learning styles, and a lot of good learning styles theory is probably going to get babied with this bath water...)

  • sometimesijust 2139 days ago
    The design of this experiment is terrible. At best it proves that the VARK questionnaire does not correlate with actual learning style but I don't even think it even does that due to the poor experimental design.

    Perhaps it is leaning heavily on previous findings but since the population selection is so heavily biased to begin with and the course appears to be conventionally taught rather than making equally comprehensive study aides for the different styles. The fact that more than half of the students did not study using the style they self reported to prefer with is also an obvious red flag.

    Note I believe VARK is over simplified nonsense but so is this research.

  • supreme_sublime 2139 days ago
    I like seeing people applying science to education. Something I didn't know about until recently is there has been a lot of study done on the other side of the equation; instructional styles. It seems "direct instruction" is by far the leader in terms of outcomes. [0] I'm curious how well known this is and if I was just ignorant.

    [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd_9rszR27s

  • coldtea 2139 days ago
    They might not have boosted their scores, but were they more comfortable and enjoyed the process more when it used a style that they preferred or not?

    Also, I find this is one of the cases that personal experience trumps all this "research".

    Much the same way people were told not to eat this and that (with research supporting all those dietary suggestions) and then those suggestions were found to be false.

    • fjsolwmv 2139 days ago
      Having fun is different from learning. If fun learning is ineffective, it's not good learning.
      • coldtea 2138 days ago
        >Having fun is different from learning.

        Yes, you can have fun without learning (e.g. at a strip club -- at least without learning something academic that is), and you can learn without having fun.

        However you can't learn if you're bored out of your mind and tuned out, and having some fun in your learning helps with that.

  • a_bonobo 2139 days ago
    If anyone is interested in the scientific literature on learning, Greg Wilson has been writing a book based on Software Carpentry materials on how to teach programming, which cites a lot of the scientific literature, it's free here: http://third-bit.com/teaching/
  • nurettin 2138 days ago
    I think we choose learning styles just as we choose a lifestyle, a political party, sports team or candidate, or favorite color. It is only meaningful to us. We get discouraged from using, say, visual memory, because it is hard at that moment. But in a proper learning environment based on encouragement, you get over that easily.
  • jpster 2139 days ago
    FTA

    > Also, while most students (67 per cent) actually failed to study in a way consistent with their supposedly preferred learning style, those who did study in line with their dominant style did not achieve a better grade in their anatomy class than those who didn’t.

    Isn't this self-selection? Introducing sampling bias?

  • swoorup 2139 days ago
    I found learning by history to be easier. For example if i want to understand certain thoery, it helps me by understanding its history, its origin and why it was needed. I think this is however too slow if you need to consume more amount of information.
  • himom 2139 days ago
    This reminds me of the unproven teaching fads pushed into public schools in the late ‘70’s and ‘80’s, which causes some educators to leave and start their own private schools which used proven teaching approaches like phonics.
    • walshemj 2138 days ago
      Well phonics was also considered a fad and the optician that diagnosed my dyslexia asked if I had been taught using phonic's as that was though to have worse outcomes for Dyslexics (neurodiverse) students.
  • JoeAltmaier 2138 days ago
    Certainly we all have preferences. Never mind whether they work better; folks will resist learning the 'wrong way'. So its still something to attend to when teaching.
  • adamnemecek 2139 days ago
    Ok so what exactly is the universal learning style?
    • ta1357 2139 days ago
      Doing, failing, reflection.
      • baron816 2139 days ago
        Reflection is the main thing. Think about the topic at a later date, try to dig deeper, compare and contrast it against similar concepts, apply it to different scenarios, summarize it in your own words and write that down, teach it to another person, etc.
    • fjsolwmv 2139 days ago
      The article gives some examples, motly experiential engagement.

      "Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand."

  • j45 2139 days ago
    What a refreshing read.

    This pattern of long-standing beliefs that education academics don't really seem to question seems real as ever.

    - Academics need as much if not more support as the students they aim to help when it comes to remembering how to learn, and teach, especially with the use of technology. The old saying help yourself before helping others...

    - The academic education/edtech world seems full of more academic talking heads that are far removed from both teaching, and learning, but not one's credentials.

    - As a technologist hanging out in Education again.. this appears quite commonly when education academics speak about technology - too many of whom don't understand what technology is capable of, because society has passed most of them by in the baseline technological competency.

    The results appear to be speaking about things like pedagogy. Pedagogy is how children learn, but academics will talk about Pedgagogies when it comes to adult learning strategies.

    There's some slightly ostracized academics who are telling it how it is... most in academia won't say much because they don't want their jobs to be threatened.

    It's truly a sad situation where the instructional industry is concerned more about self preservation than perhaps participating in the lifelong learning themselves that is often preached to their students.

    • fjsolwmv 2139 days ago
      I have some connections to schools, and "learning styles" is not a major concept at all. "Teaching modalities" (lecture, reading, labs) seems similar at a glance, but it's quite different. It's not that each person has a preferred modality, it's that different modalities have different benefits in a relative non-student-specific way.

      It's a weird contrarisn fad on HN to constantly rehash old debunkings of research no one in the real world cares about.

      • j45 2138 days ago
        Nice. By schools, I'm presuming you meant K-12 in the US.

        My comment is about the post-secondary academic research community focused on education (particularly in North America, and more so in Canada).. Modalities, pedagogies, all are drawing away from the experience that the students are not getting that they should.

        US post-secondaries are starting to innovate, still good pockets of activity are not making a suit.

        Happy to chat offline, have been a technologist in delivering digital education (K-12, Post-secondary and corporate) for a while.