Learning style Essay Example for Free

Learning style Essay There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist. While we will elaborate on this assertion, it is important to counteract the real harm that may be done by equivocating on the matter. In what follows, we will begin by defining â€Å"learning styles†; then we will address the claims made by those who believe that they exist, in the process acknowledging what we consider the valid claims of learning-styles theorists. But in separating the wheat from the pseudoscientific chaff in learning-styles theory, we will make clear that the wheat is contained in other educational approaches as well. A belief in learning styles is not necessary to incorporating useful knowledge about learning into ones teaching. We will then discuss the reasons why learning styles beliefs are so prevalent. Finally, we will offer suggestions about collegiate pedagogy, given that we have no evidence learning styles do not exist. What is a Learning Style? The claim at the center of learning-styles theory is this: Different students have different modes of learning, and their learning could be improved by matching ones teaching with that preferred learning mode. The way theorists have defined â€Å"modes of learning† has changed over the more than 50 years that this concept has been in vogue. Proposed modes have included dichotomies such as linear vs. holistic, impulsive vs. reflective, reasoning vs. insight, and visual vs. verbal. The most popular current conception of learning styles equates style with the preferred bodily sense through which one receives information, whether it be visual, auditory, or kinesthetic (for some reason, no one claims that there are tactile or olfactory learners). We use this sensory definition of learning styles in the examples below, but our conclusions apply equally to other definitions. As you will see, the claim that the mode of presentation should match the preferred mode of learning subsumes several other claims, and it is worth unpacking the learning-styles concept in order to consider its constituent subclaims separately. Which Claims of Learning-Styles Theorists are Correct? We believe that some general assertions of learning-styles proponents have nearly universal consensus, based on a wealth of evidence. We begin by acknowledging the truth of these claims in order to differentiate them from other ones without support. The first claim is this: Learners are different from each other, these differences affect their performance, and teachers should take these differences into account. This is true and recognized by educators and cognitive scientists alike. While many of those scientists seek to discover general principles of learning, we all acknowledge that there are differences among students. Understanding these differences and applying that understanding in the classroom can improve everyones education. We can find further agreement on some of the differences that matter for learning. First, whether we call it talent, ability, or intelligence, people vary in their capacity to learn different areas of content. One of the authors (Riener) has fraternal twin sons, and despite having most of the same experiences, one has learned to read earlier and the other is a better basketball player. This is clearly due to genetic differences in talent rather than a bizarre experiment in which the parents decided that one would be a basketball player and the other a professor. With educators under 6 feet tall for both parents and grandparents, they are both probably doomed to proceed to graduate school rather than to the NBA. Second, and often intertwined with ability, students differ in their interests. If a student loves the piano, or basketball, or chess, or the biology of frogs, that student will no doubt learn material related to that subject faster than another one who does not share that fascination. We all agree that interest and attention are preconditions of learning and vary from student to student, depending on the subject. Third, students differ in their background knowledge, and that difference influences their learning. This is obviously true in the sense that a large vocabulary allows one to read a wider variety of books. And it is further true in fields such as history: One cant hope to learn much about the causes and consequences of the American Civil War without knowing facts about the growth and separation of the colonies, the history of economic differences between the North and the South, political facts about our three branches of government, etc. But background knowledge is also quite important in things we think of as skills. For example, learning basic math facts is critical to the acquisition of later math skills. Finally, some students have specific learning disabilities, and these affect their learning in specific ways. For example, there is considerable research on dyslexia and the strategies for addressing it. These strategies of course differ from those appropriate for those students on the autistic spectrum or those with hearing difficulties. In each of these cases, a specific difference in the student calls for individual diagnosis and attention. So in claiming that learning styles do not exist, we are not saying that all learners are the same. Rather, we assert that a certain number of dimensions (ability, background knowledge, interest) vary from person to person and are known to affect learning. The emphasis on learning styles, we think, often comes at the cost of attention to these other important dimensions. What Do Learning-Styles Theorists Get Wrong? The next claim is that learners have preferences about how to learn that are independent of both ability and content and have meaningful implications for their learning. These preferences are not â€Å"better† or â€Å"faster,† according to learning-styles proponents, but merely â€Å"styles. † In other words, just as our social selves have personalities, so do our memories. Students do have preferences about how they learn. Many students will report preferring to study visually and others through an auditory channel. However, when these tendencies are put to the test under controlled conditions, they make no difference—learning is equivalent whether students learn in the preferred mode or not. A favorite mode of presentation (e. g. , visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) often reveals itself to be instead a preference for tasks for which one has high ability and at which one feels successful. But even if we did identify preferences that were independent of ability, finding ones that are independent of content is a much trickier proposition. If I were to tell you â€Å"I want to teach you something. Would you rather learn it by seeing a slideshow, reading it as text, hearing it as a podcast, or enacting it in a series of movements,† do you think you could answer without first asking what you were to learn—a dance, a piece of music, or an equation? While it may seem like a silly example, the claim of the learning styles approach is that one could make such a choice and improve ones learning through that choice, independent of content. We all agree that some kids show more interest in math, some start their education more interested in poetry, and others are more interested in dodgeball. The proof that the learning-styles theorist must find is that for some sort of content—whether it be math, poetry, or dodgeball—changing the mode of presentation to match the learning styles helps people learn. That evidence has simply not been found. Finally, we arrive at the critical and specific claim of learning-styles proponents: Learning could be improved by matching the mode of instruction to the preferred learning style of the student. Learning-styles believers do not make the claim that students sort neatly into sensory categories: One need not be purely visual, auditory or kinesthetic. But according to the theory, an educator should be able to improve the performance of those who have a strong preference for one of these sensory styles by matching instruction to their preference. Failure to find any experimental support for matching the mode of instruction to a preferred learning style would simply leave us where we were at the end of the section above: Students have different interests, backgrounds, and abilities. And indeed, a recent review article in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest by a group of distinguished memory researchers sought to find evidence for this claim in particular. If you are visual, you should learn better with a visual presentation of information than with an auditory one. If you are auditory, you should learn better with auditory materials than with visual ones. Each of this pair of results is necessary to support this element of learning-styles theory. But experiments that tested this prediction with a variety of content material have not found support for it. While such evidence of learning styles would serve as a proof that they exist, the lack of evidence does not prove definitively that they do not exist. However, in order to persuade us to devote the time and energy to adopt a certain kind of differentiated teaching, the burden of proof is on those who argue for the existence of that description of students cognitive strategies. In other words, a good rule of thumb is that we should only bring ideas from the laboratory into our teaching if (1) we are sure that the laboratory phenomena exist under at least some conditions and (2) we understand how to usefully apply these laboratory phenomena to instruction. The first of these two conditions is not met for learning styles, and the first is obviously a precondition for the second. Why Does the Belief in Learning Styles Persevere? What are the reasons for this myths perseverance? First, we think that a belief in learning styles persists because the more general claims (the ones we addressed above) are true. Learners do differ from one another. But many who believe in the myth do not consider the critical differences between styles and abilities. Teachers should take into account the differences in learners abilities. And adjusting a lesson not just to be appropriately pitched at the students level of ability but to take into account their background knowledge and interests is surely an important first step in fostering learning. Second, a belief in learning styles fits into an egalitarian view of education: Everyone has value, according to the theory, and everyone has strengths. The corollary for some learning-styles theorists is that if you think that the theory is wrong, you must think that all students are identical—which is obviously untrue. Again, we agree that students differ and all students have value, but we do not need learning-styles theory to convince us of that. Third, learning-styles theory has succeeded in becoming â€Å"common knowledge. † Its widespread acceptance serves as an unfortunately compelling reason to believe it. This is accompanied by a well-known cognitive phenomenon called the confirmation bias. When evaluating our own beliefs, we tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore contrary information, even when we encounter it repeatedly. When we see someone who professes to be a visual learner excel at geography and an auditory learner excel at music, we do not seek out the information which would disprove our interpretation of these events (can the auditory learner learn geography through hearing it? Can the visual learner become better at music by seeing it? ) Why Should College Educators Care? We have addressed the direct costs of the learning-styles myth above, but there are considerable opportunity costs as well. The same research in cognitive science and education that has failed to find evidence for learning styles has offered many insights into how memory does work. Mindset (2006) by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck is an excellent summary of the interesting ways that incentives—both carrots and sticks—as well as internal drives influence learning. And Henry L. Roediger and his associates at Washington University in St. Louis have demonstrated the value of testing for learning. Even the act of taking a test when one does not know the answers can support learning the correct answers faster and more effectively. Of course learning is an enormously complex activity, and this is not the place to outline all of the basic research on learning. We seek only to emphasize that attention to learning styles, for which evidence has not been found, may lead educators to neglect research on learning for which there is solid scientific support. Even though the belief in learning styles has influenced pedagogy in the schools far more than it has in higher education, we believe that there are several other reasons faculty might pay attention to the fact that researchers have failed to find evidence of learning styles, reasons that have important implications for the college classroom. First, when we poll our undergraduate classes on the belief in a number of myths of popular psychology, the one that â€Å"people have their own learning styles† is typically endorsed by more than 90 percent of our students. This belief has the potential to shape and constrain the experience that students have in the college classroom. For example, if a student believes she is a visual learner and therefore disengages and daydreams when a lecturer turns off the PowerPoint and tells a story, this will prevent her from learning the concept through a compelling narrative. And while these beliefs may not have as direct an impact on performance reviews as they do in K-12 settings, a belief in learning styles occasionally shows up in student evaluations of teaching: â€Å"I am a visual learner, so the visual examples were good,† or â€Å"I am an auditory learner, so more auditory content would have helped. † Second, learning-styles theory is sometimes offered as a reason to include digital media in the classroom. While including multimedia may be a good idea in general (variety in modes of presentation can hold students attention and interest, for example), it is not necessary to tailor your media to different learning styles. We shouldnt congratulate ourselves for showing a video to engage the visual learners or offering podcasts to the auditory learners. Rather, we should realize that the value of the video or audio will be determined by how it suits the content that we are asking students to learn and the background knowledge, interests, and abilities that they bring to it. Instead of asking whether we engaged the right sense (or learning mode), we should be asking, what did students think about while they were in class? Finally, when one has the opportunity in a smaller class to collect information about students and more specifically to tailor a lesson to that particular group of students, it is a waste of time to assess learning styles rather than, for instance, background knowledge. The latter can obviously be extremely useful. We often use prerequisites to ensure common background knowledge of students in a given class, but assessment at the beginning of a class can be an excellent reminder of how little of the prerequisite course content is easily recalled. Assessment of student interest can also be a useful tool for deciding how to approach the material in a given class. Some indication can be gained by what majors are represented in the class, but more specific interests assessed through a brief questionnaire or class discussion can also be useful in certain situations, such as small or homogeneous classes. So here is the punch line: Students differ in their abilities, interests, and background knowledge, but not in their learning styles. Students may have preferences about how to learn, but no evidence suggests that catering to those preferences will lead to better learning. As college educators, we should apply this to the classroom by continuing to present information in the most appropriate manner for our content and for the level of prior knowledge, ability, and interests of that particular set of students. Resources 1. Dweck, C. (2006) Mindset: The new psychology of success, Random House, New York, NY. 2. Paschler, H. , McDaniel, M. , Rohrer, D. and Bjork, R. (2010) Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9, pp. 105-119. 3. Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006) The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science 1, pp. 181-210. Cedar Riener is an assistant professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College. Daniel Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He blogs at the Washington Post and is the author of Why Dont Students Like School? (Jossey-Bass, 2009). Related Notes Change Magazine September-October 2010The Myth of Learning Styles by Cedar Riener and Daniel Willingham There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist. While we will elaborate on this assertion, it is important to counteract the Learning with es: A convenient untruthThursday, 24 November 2011 A convenient untruth What do you think is the teachers worst enemy? Some would say lack of time. Others would say unsupportive leadership, or the dreaded government inspect

Oedipus - Why Didnt His Foster Parents Tell Him The Truth :: essays research papers

Oedipus the King Why Didn't His Foster Parents Tell Him The Truth? Oedipus the King is the story of a man who was betrayed. Betrayed by the very people who gave him life and the very people who raised him. Oedipus was born to Laius and Jocasta the king and queen of Thebes. When Oedipus was born, they consulted an oracle that told them that he would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Fearing for their safety and the safety of their kingdom they had a servant take the infant to the mountains and leave him on the mountain to die. The servant felt sorry for the infant and gave him to a shepherd who in turn gave him to Polybus and Merope the king and queen of Corinth, who raised him as their own. When Oedipus was older, some men at a banquet who were drunk told him that "I am not my fathers' son". (860) Oedipus confronted Polybus and Merope and they were enraged by these accusations. They convinced Oedipus that the accusations weren't true, "so as for my parents I was satisfied (865). However, something was still gnawing at him. He consulted an oracle for himself and the oracle told Oedipus what the oracle told Laius and Jocasta. After he heard that prediction, he left Corinth never to return. If Polybus and Merope had told him the truth when Oedipus came to them he wouldn't have left Corinth and have set into motion this tragic chain of events. What were Polybus and Merope afraid of? Where they afraid of how Oedipus would have reacted if he knew that they weren't his birth parents, did they think that he wouldn't have understood and wouldn't have appreciated what they did for him. I think that Polybus and Merope have to share some of the blame for this mess, because they were not truthful. Oedipus thought he had avoided the curse by going the Thebes. By defeating the sphinx, he was the hero of the town. He was doing a noble thing by wanting to help his country by trying to find out who or what was causing this plague. When Oedipus finds out the truth he resists it, but he was relentless in his pursuit of it, He wanted to discover the truth in order to help his people but he refuses to believe that he's the cause of it, "What are you saying - Polybus was not my father?

Raisin in the Sun Play Response Essay

I thought the play â€Å"A Raisin in The Sun† was very good because it accurately displayed so many aspects of what life would be like in the 1950’s for African Americans. Full of conflict and racial tension, Hansberry creates a strong distinction between her different and unique characters. The main theme of dreams creates conflicts that are evident in the play because the family is aiming for an individual dream that seems to never happen; however, in the end, they get away form the individual dream and finally reach a common ground. Almost every character in Raisin in the Sun had a dream or goal, and it seemed like their dreams dictated their happiness or value in life. Walter is obsessed with becoming successful and rich in order to afford things for his family, why his sister Beneatha’s original dream to become a doctor ends up directing the choices she will make when she realizes that Walter has wasted the money to be put aside for her. Throughout everyone’s dreams and aspirations, it seems to me that Mama’s dream is probably the most important. For Mama, all she desires is to keep the family together. She realizes the importance of a strong and close family, and struggles to keep them together despite all of the failings and mishaps that the characters experience. To Mama, a strong and close family is the most important aspect of her life, and something she will constantly struggle to protect. I also found it very uplifting when the family is able to overcome all of the struggles and adversity, and still manage to reject Mr. Lindner’s offers to move out of the all-white neighborhood. In my opinion, this is the perfect conclusion to the play, as I believe it shows that Mama’s dream of having a strong and cohesive family is directly connected to the rest of the family’s goals as well. Despite the offers by Mr.  Lindner to help the individuals of the family in exchange for leaving the neighborhood, the family is able to put Mama’s dream in front of their own, which enabled the family to become a closer, happier family in the end, despite their individual struggles. While it seemed like the Youngers’ dreams were going to fester up and die, they were able to understand the importance of family that helped them to keep their dreams alive and achievable.

Fracking An Imminent Danger From Big Oil - 1439 Words

California faces an imminent danger from Big Oil. Big Oil wants to use millions of gallons of water and frack oil from Sacramento, my hometown, to Los Angeles. Fracking, also known as Hydraulic Fracturing, is a method of obtaining natural gas by drilling a hole into the ground and than injecting â€Å"water, sand, and a proprietary mix of chemicals into the shale fracturing the rock and releasing the natural gas, which is captured when it flows up and out of the hole (Mitka).† In the process millions of gallons of water are polluted and large amounts of air pollutants are released into the atmosphere. The ramifications on human health as a result of fracking is what causes most to worry. In the next four decades, fracking possesses dangers that directly affect human and animal health, the land, and our ecosystems. Fracking poses a lot of dangers to human and animal health. When I discovered that Big Oil is attempting to establish drilling locations near my hometown of Sacramen to I was a bit disturbed. The negative effects of fracking on humans were even observed in a study done in Pennsylvania. The study showed that of the 41 products used in fracturing operations, â€Å"73% had between 6 and 14 different adverse health effects† (Mitka 2012). The adverse effects on humans included skin, eye and sensory organ damage, Respiratory distress, gastrointestinal tract and liver disease, brain and nervous system harms, cancers, and problems with reproduction. Many of these adverse effects areShow MoreRelatedThe On Fossil Fuels And The Amish1594 Words   |  7 PagesAs we continue to consume fossil fuels on a scale never seen in human history, we are faced with the nagging but not imminent question: what is going to happen when we run out? It’s the same question any addict asks themselves, and the way they respond can affect the rest of their life. It is impossible to forget 2008: gasoline rose to nearly $4 a gallon, the stock market plummeted, mill ions lost their jobs, and Americans and foreigners alike responded in a way that only the fear of spending moreRead MoreShift From Fossil Fuel Should Be Made Mandatory1632 Words   |  7 Pages Shift from fossil fuel should be made mandatory Imagine waking up everyday looking for an umbrella to protect you from the scorching sun and a breathing mask to put over your face to support you in breath clean air. Not only for a period of time but forever, because the air is heavily polluted and the sun is always super hot, that people only ventured out during night hours. These are some of the warning the environmental activist fear could be were we are heading as inhabitants of this planet earth