![]() ![]() Shaylene Nancekivell, an assistant developmental psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has surveyed how people think about learning styles. “If you aren’t able to do a good job reading and comprehending, you don’t reading to comprehend, you need to actually work on being able to read.” Two Sides of the Mythĭespite having little evidence to support it, the concept of learning styles is still very popular. “If you need to improve your skills, you don’t just keep doing what’s easy to you,” she says. Letting students learn in their preferred manner doesn’t push them to improve weaker skill sets, Rogowsky says. ![]() Someone who prefers to learn by listening instead of more visual approaches might just have underdeveloped reading skills. The team’s study noted that a preference to learn material using a certain method could mask skill deficits. Both groups simply did better on the test when they listened to the material rather than reading it. But the team didn't uncover a relationship between their preferred learning styles and academic performance, Rogowsky says. ![]() What the team uncovered did confirm this, as the visual learners did in fact score higher overall on the comprehension tests than the auditory learners. According to the learning styles hypothesis the team used, the visual learners would have higher reading comprehension scores. ![]() Students were given standardized reading tests, in both written and audio formats. In one study published in Frontiers of Psychology this year, Rogowsky and her colleagues tested fifth-graders with preferred auditory and visual learning styles. Rogowsky herself has confirmed that learning styles don’t hold up in her recent studies of the field. In the 2000s, when researchers started to do just that, they found little evidence that matching students to their supposed learning style helps them retain information better. Rogowsky says the idea of using learning styles emerged in the 1980s as different researchers voiced their support, but few actually tested their concepts to confirm the validity in randomized, experimental settings. “If my students didn’t understand the material, if they couldn’t read it, they would listen to it whatever they would prefer, they would do,” says Rogowsky, who is now an associate professor of teaching and learning at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania.īut there's a problem with preferred learning styles: They don’t always seem to help children retain information or understand concepts any better than when presented via non-preferred methods. Learning style theories had their heyday in the 1990s, when Beth Rogowsky was just starting as a middle school teacher. There are also kinesthetic learners, or those who learn best through hands-on activities. Others might fall into the auditory learning subtype, meaning they tend to comprehend material by listening to instruction. According to VARK, some people purportedly learn best by reading material, while others are more visually-oriented and must see something to understand. The acronym stands for visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinesthetic - the primary sensory modes of learning information. While there is no agreed-upon definition of learning styles, there are generally some similarities across the different iterations. The idea is that people learn material better when it is taught in a way that suits their individual strengths. Teaching trends come and go, but one theory has persisted for decades, having earned a foothold in our culture: the concept of learning styles. ![]()
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