Learning styles. I hear about them from my students, we teach them in our classes, and I see them as a variable in many research studies. So are they good? bad? What are they useful for?<\/p>\n

Lets start out with the good. During a learner analysis it is good to know as much as possible about your learners. So a learning style inventory can be one of many pieces to the puzzle. However, I would never use it as the only piece and I would probably hold it as least important.<\/p>\n

Now lets move to the bad. Designing curriculum based on learning styles has not been shown to improve learning. For instance, look at this study:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.voced.edu.au\/content\/ngv13692<\/a><\/p>\n

Why are learning styles not good? Well lets say that 60% of my learners are visual (this is a common stat I see in the literature). What does that tell me to do with my instruction? Honestly, it does not tell me anything. There are a number of much more important things I need to consider and think about when developing instruction. First of all is information processing – how many concepts can a learner work with at one time in short term memory? Then I think about dual coding theory. I know that learners minds of comprised to two channels for learning: visual and auditory. Each has a certain capacity in working memory. Another concept in cognitive load. If I give a learner too much information they will start to forget because their working memory is overloaded. Then I think about the multimedia theories – learning (problem solving objectives) is greater when learners view a combination of visual and auditory content rather than just one of those individually. All of these theories, which have much positive research backing do not support learning styles. If 60% of my learners are visual, showing them only visuals will not increase their learning. In fact, only visuals would hurt their learning whereas a combination of visuals and auditory learning (such as video) has been shown to increase their learning. I realize I spoke very briefly about several theories which require a much deeper understanding but if you are interested about them, please feel free to look them up on my blog as I have written about all of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learning styles. I hear about them from my students, we teach them in our classes, and I see them as a variable in many research studies. So are they good? bad? What are they useful for? Lets start out with the good. During a learner analysis it is good to know as much as possible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[298],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1344,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343\/revisions\/1344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}