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There is one idea about learning that almost every adult agrees with. Some people learn by seeing. Some by hearing. Some by doing. So teach each person in their own style.
When researchers put that sentence to thousands of people, almost all of them said yes.
The sentence is really two claims stuck together, and they are not the same.
One: people have a preference about how they are taught. That is true. Ask anyone and they will tell you theirs.
Two: matching the teaching to that preference makes them learn more. That is the claim, and it is the one nobody checks.
This is the useful part, and it works on many arguments.
Sort people by their stated style. Then teach some of each group by pictures and some of each group by sound. Give everybody the same test.
For the claim to be true, the picture people must do better with pictures and the sound people must do better with sound. Crossing over. Both directions.
The picture group learns better from pictures. Does that prove the claim?
A team of psychologists went looking for studies built that way. The literature on learning styles is enormous.
They found at most one study that even came close, and it had serious problems with how it was run. Several solid studies had tested it properly and found the opposite.
Their conclusion was flat and careful. There is no adequate evidence base, they wrote, for using style tests in schools.
Not that the idea is disproven forever. That nobody has produced the evidence the idea would need, despite an enormous amount of writing about it.
Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork, in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2008.
Researchers asked the same question of three groups. The general public. Teachers. And people with real training in neuroscience.
Belief went down as training went up, and it did not go away. Most people in every group still said yes.
That is worth sitting with. Being told is not the same as stopping believing.
Because the preference is real, and preference feels like ability.
Something taught the way you like feels easy while it is happening. Easy feels like learning. It usually is not. The methods that leave you feeling fluent are often the weakest ones later.
So the belief is built on a genuine sensation. Just not the one people think.
The best way to teach something depends on the something.
Where the rivers are wants a map, for every single person in the room. How a word is pronounced wants sound, for everyone. How to tie a knot wants hands, for everyone.
Match the method to the material, not to the learner. That is the whole correction.
You have heard that we only use ten percent of our brains.
No part of it is idle. Scanning shows activity everywhere, and damage to almost any small area causes a loss of something.
A brain is expensive to run. Evolution does not carry nine tenths spare.
The idea that logical people run on the left and creative people on the right.
The halves do specialise for some jobs. Language leans one way in most people. But nobody has a dominant half that shapes their personality, and almost everything you do lights up both sides at once.
The famous Mozart study measured what happened to whom?
Notice what happened there, because it happens constantly.
A narrow finding is real. Then the group gets bigger, the measure gets grander, and the time gets longer. Students becomes babies. One puzzle becomes intelligence. Minutes becomes life.
Nothing was invented. Everything was stretched.
A study finds that adults who did a memory game got faster at that game. Sort the headlines.
Tap an item, then a bucket
Neuromyths are not random. They tend to be kind.
A child who is struggling has a style that was not matched. An adult who feels stuck has nine tenths in reserve. Someone bad at maths is simply a right-brain person.
Each one takes a painful thing and explains it gently. That is why they last.
The other reason is that each of them has a product attached.
A questionnaire to find your style. An app to unlock the unused part. A disc for the baby. A course for the teachers.
A belief with a shop behind it gets repeated far more often than a finding with nobody selling anything.
You do not need to know the science to catch most of these.
Compared to what? Every claim of improvement needs the group that did not get it.
And: does the headline describe the same people, the same measure and the same length of time as the study? That one catches almost everything.
An advert says a memory app is scientifically proven, citing a study of its users. What is missing?
Taking these away does not leave nothing. It leaves the things that were measured.
Testing yourself beats rereading. Spreading practice out beats one long session. Explaining a thing out loud finds the holes.
None of them have a shop behind them, which is exactly why you hear about them less.
You probably still believe the learning styles one, a little, even now, having read all of this.
That is the actual finding of this module. The belief survives being told, in almost everybody, including the specialists. So the useful thing to carry away is not the answer. It is knowing that.