The popular theory that some study better either visually or audibly is debunked
In the early 1990s, New Zealander Neil Fleming decided to figure out what was his job while observing classes as a school inspector. He watched 9000 different classes and noticed that only some teachers were able to reach absolutely all of their students. What did they do differently?
Fleming eventually came to the question of how people like to provide information. For example, if you ask how to get somewhere, would you prefer to be told about this, or would you draw a map?
Today, 16 such questions constitute the
VARK questionnaire , developed by Fleming to determine the "learning style" of a person. VARK, which stands for “visual, auditory, textual and kinesthetic,” sorts students into those that are better trained visually, through heard information, through reading or through “kinesthetic” experience. (“Much later, I learned that vark in Dutch means“ pig, ”Fleming wrote,” and could not register the site vark.com, because the pet store from Pennsylvania used it to sell the tooth
dives ! ”[
Aardvark, or an earthen pig / approx. trans. ]).
He was not the first to assume that people had different "learning styles" - in the past there were theories without readers (VAK), as well as some "rationalists" and "assimilator" - but VARK became one of the most popular models.
Experts are not sure how this concept spread, but it may be related to the self-esteem movement of the late 80s and early 90s. Everyone was special, and everyone had to have their own particular learning style. Teachers told students about this in elementary school. “Teachers like to think that they can reach out to every student, even a student who has a hard time, simply by adjusting his material so that it fits with the student’s preferred learning format,” said Abby Noll, a graduate student at Central Michigan University who studies learning styles. Students, in turn, like to blame their training failures on teachers who have failed to adjust their teaching style to their teaching style.
In any case, "when people become college students," says Professor Pauly Hasman of the Indiana University, "they have already been told," you are a visual. " Or audial, or whatever.
But actually it is not. At least, a lot of evidence has been found that people are not really divided into different learning styles. In a study published last month in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education, Hasman and her colleagues asked hundreds of students to fill out a VARK questionnaire to determine which learning style they presumably prefer. Then they were given learning strategies that seemed to fit their learning style. Hasman found that many students did not conduct training in ways that reflected their learning style, and those who used this method did not demonstrate any benefits in the tests.
Hasman believes that students succumb to habits associated with certain learning methods that are difficult to overcome. Students seem to be interested in their learning styles, but not enough to actually change their behavior when learning based on the data. And even if they change, nothing depends on it.
“I think that as a tool of self-knowledge, which will allow you to think about your learning habits, VARK may have advantages,” said Hasman. “But the division of these learning styles into categories does not seem to take root.”
Another study, published last year in the British Journal of Psychology, found that students who preferred visual training thought they could better remember pictures, and those who preferred verbal training thought they would remember the words better. But these preferences had no correlation with what they actually remembered better - words or pictures. In fact, all that means “learning style” is whether a person likes more pictures or words, and not something that is better entrenched in his memory.
In other words, “there is evidence that people try to relate to tasks on the basis of what learning style they consider their own, but this does not help them,” said Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. In 2015, he reviewed the literature on learning styles and concluded that "theories about the existence of learning styles did not materialize."
In the same year, in a paper published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, no link was found between the learning preferences of the subjects (visual or auditory) and their results in tests for reading or listening. Best of all, those who studied visually showed themselves in these tests. The authors concluded that teachers need to stop trying to tune their material under the "hearing aids." “Teachers can harm hearing learners by constantly adapting to this learning style,” they wrote, “instead of focusing on enhancing their visual skills.”
In our conversation, Willingham mentioned another study published in 2009, in which people who claimed to prefer to think visually or verbally actually tried to think so: those who called themselves visuals tried to present a picture, and those who thought themselves a verbalizer, tried to form words. But, as he said, there was a catch: “If you are a visualizer, and I give you images, you remember them no better than those who claim to be a verbalizer.”
This, of course, does not mean that all skills are equally well developed. In fact, as Willingham says, people have different possibilities, not styles. Some people read better than others; some hear better. But most of the tasks that confront us are well suited only for one learning style. It is impossible, for example, to visualize the perfect French pronunciation.
The VARK questionnaire itself illustrates this problem quite well. For example, one of the questions is:
You are planning a vacation for a group of people. You need to hear their opinion about the plan. For this you:
- describe the details of what they can experience;
- use the map to show them the route;
- give them copies with a description of the route;
- call them by phone, send them a message or email.
But, naturally, in 2018, any person will send an e-mail to his friends in order to coordinate a group trip, whether this message includes the three previous elements or not. Another question sounds like: “You are helping a person who needs to get to the airport”, and offers various options for action, including “go along with him”. I believe that the result depends on who you are helping!
The idea of the existence of “learning styles” gained momentum - in 2014 more than 90% of teachers from different countries believed in it. The concept is intuitive, and promises to reveal the secrets of the brain in just a few questions. Interestingly, most research begins with a positive description of this theory, until it comes to explaining that the theory does not work.
Willingham even argues that people must stop finding in themselves visual, auditory, or any other predisposition to learning. "Nothing bad will happen to you if you believe in the existence of learning styles," he says, but it will not give any advantages. “Everyone is capable of thinking with words, everyone is capable of thinking with images. It is much better to assume that everyone has a set of tools for thinking, and to choose which tool will do the best. ”
Hasman says that the most important thing for a person trying to learn something new is just to concentrate on the material - this is what the most successful students from her study did. Instead of, say, sorting through cards with definitions, while “you are actually watching football.”
Works Fleming and themselves warned that you do not need too much to get involved in VARK. “Sometimes it seems to me that students and teachers attribute the results of VARK more significance than they need,” he wrote in 2006. “It may be that you love something, but at the same time you get it good or bad. VARK demonstrates how you like to communicate. He says nothing about the quality of this communication. ”
In other words, it can help you know yourself better, but not acquire new knowledge.