Learning Lessons

The reading for this week is from Daniel Willingham and discusses learning styles.

Key points

• People do learn differently, but I think it is very important to say exactly how they learn differently and focus our attention on those differences that really matter. If learning styles were obviously right it would be easy to observe evidence for them in experiments. Yet there is no supporting evidence.
• Often, when people believe that they observe obvious evidence for learning styles, they are mistaking it for ability.
• Ability is that you can do something. Style is how you do it. Thus, one would always be happy to have more ability, but different styles should be equally desirable.
• The review (Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D. & Bjork, R. 2008. Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9, 106-119) concluded that learning styles don’t exist.
• The ideal experiment has not been conducted. A lot of less-than-ideal experiments have been conducted, and they are not promising for learning styles theories at all.

Read the full article

What you can do

• Share the latest research into learning styles with your colleagues
• Teachers should be experts in learning. Provide training to your staff about ‘how learning happens’
• Promote an evidence-based approach to decision making in your school

This article is a useful place to start: A Mental Model of the Learner: Teaching the Basic Science of Educational Psychology to Future Teachers (PDF)