The nice thing about the snow and the end of the semester is that I can finally sit down to do some reading- reading that I want to do, not what I am told to read.  On my growing list of books is Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? It is definitely a provocative read, one that challenged a few of my notions about teaching and learning.

What sets this book apart from other titles is the fact that Dan Willingham is a cognitive psychologist.  Through accessible examples, Willingham applies years of personal research and decades of studying psychology to the classroom.  He challenges the work of people like Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences) as well as educators’ ingrained notions about student learning styles.

His chapter on learning styles impacted me the most, in part, because I wholeheartedly believED in their importance.  As a former elementary teacher, I often tweaked my lessons in an effort to differentiate activities to meet the needs of my auditory, visual, and kinesthetic students.  Honestly, I did not consider any of the other styles mentioned in the literature.  It turns out, in the eyes of Willingham, my differentiation criteria was bogus (read: not differentiation, just the fact that I was thinking that learning styles really mattered).

[According to Willingham and others,] the visual-auditory-kinesthesia theory holds that everyone can take in new information through any of the three senses, but most of us have a preferred sense.  When learning something new, visual types like to see diagrams, or even just to see in print the words that the teacher is saying.  Auditory types prefer descriptions, usually verbal, to which they can listen.  Kinesthetic learners like to manipulate objects physically; they move their body to learn (p. 118).

Okay, this makes perfect sense.  This is what I thought was one of the key definitions of learning styles.  Willingham goes on to debunk this theory, and his rationale and evidence is quite reasonable!

It is true that some people have especially good visual or auditory memories.  In that sense there are visual learners and auditory learners.  But that’s not the key prediction of the theory.  The key prediction is that students will learn better when instruction matches their cognitive style.  That is, suppose Anne is an auditory learner and Victor is a visual learner.  Suppose further that I give Anne and Victor two lists of new vocabulary words to learn.  To learn the first list, they listen to a tape of the words and definitions several times; to learn the second list, they view a slide show of pictures depicting the words.  The theory predicts that Anne should learn more words on the first list than on the second whereas Victor should learn more words on the second list than on the first.  Dozens of studies have been conducted along these general lines, including studies using materials more like those used in classrooms, and overall the theory is not supported.  Matching the”preferred” modality of a student doesn’t give that student any edge in learning (p.119-120).

What?  Hmmm…  I wish that I could look up the studies that Willingham vaguely references.*

How can that be?  Why doesn’t Anne learn better when the presentation is auditory, given that she’s an auditory learner? Because auditory information is not what’s being tested! Auditory information would be the particular sound of the voice on the tape.  What’s being tested is the meaning of the words.  Anne’s edge in auditory memory doesn’t help her in situations where meaning is important.  Similarly, Victor might be better at recognizing the visual details of the pictures used to depict the words on the slides, but again, that ability is not being tested.

The situation described in this experiment probably matches most school lessons.  Most of the time students need to remember what things mean, not what they sound like or look like.  Sure, sometimes that information counts; someone with a good visual memory will have an edge in memorizing the particular shapes of countries on a map, for example, and someone with a good auditory memory will be better at getting the accent right in a foreign language.  But the vast majority of schooling is concerned with what things mean, not with what they look like or sound like (p. 120).

Why does this seem so right?  Why does this misconception abound in education preparation programs and schools in general?  I think that the most telling reason is that “students do differ in their visual and auditory memories.  For example, maybe you’ve watched in wonder as a student has painted a vivid picture of an experience from a class field trip…  [This student] may well have a really good visual memory, but that doesn’t mean that [the student is] a ‘visual learner’ in the sense that the theory implies” (p. 121).  The learning styles theory deals with matching the delivery or assessment with a specific modality to improve learning, and this is different from the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic capacity of working/long-term memory.

Said in a different way by Willingham himself…

My thoughts about learning styles are changing…

*Since I wrote this post, a new meta-analysis research report came to my attention courtesy of Discovery’s Friday News Feedbag.  I have not read the report, just the news brief.  Perhaps I will have a chance to explore this at a later time.  Thanks to Will, Jorge, and James!