Tag: neuromyths

When you open your eyes, where do they focus?

Presumably, your eyes automatically turn to the part of the visual field that stands out the most: the bright red door, the tower jutting up from the cliff, the sharp angle against all the curves.

However, it’s also possible that your eyes naturally turn to the part of the visual field that means the most: the subtle-but-essential clue, the small-but-important face, the mundane-but-crucial key that unlocks the mystery.

In the first hypothesis, our visual systems immediately process information without taking meaning into account; in the second, those systems take enough time to include meaning in their guidance.

John Henderson‘s team developed quite an intricate system for testing these possibilities. (You can read the full description here.)

The short version is: they used images where the part that stood out was distinct from the part that meant the most. And, they used an eye-tracking gizmo to see where people looked first.

The answer: eyes focus first on meaning.

Even at the most basic level of processing, our brains prioritize meaningful information over flashy information.

What Henderson’s Research Means for Teachers

This study reminds me of Daniel Willingham’s response to learning styles theory.

In Why Don’t Students Like School, Willingham argues that–for example–visual processing differences don’t make much difference for most students because–most of the time–we don’t want our students to think about what something looks like, we want them to think about what that something means.

Henderson’s study suggests that, even at the moment of initial processing, our eyes prioritize meaning.

For this reason, it can be true that some people remember visuals better than others, but they still aren’t “visual learners.” All of us are “visual learners” because all of our eyes focus on meaning more than on purely visual salience.

Articles about learning styles theory–including my own–typically focus on debunking the theory.

This article, over at The Learning Scientists, takes a different approach: it chooses specific parts of learning styles theory, and shows how each small part derives from another–more useful–theory about learning.

The goal of this article, in other words, is not that you stop believing a false theory, but that you replace false beliefs with correct ones.

In my view, that’s a GREAT approach, and one that I plan to borrow.

This story offers both good and bad news: I’ll let you sort out whether there’s more good than bad…

The bad news: according to a just-published study, 58% of college professors in Britain believe in learning styles theory. This belief persists despite considerable evidence showing that…well…the theory just isn’t true.

(More precisely: considerable evidence showing that the many conflicting versions of the theory don’t have good evidence to support them.)

The good-ish news: although 58% is too high, it’s also lower than other numbers found in surveys of British K-12 teachers.

The oddly good news: although many profs believe in this theory, relatively few of them do anything about it. That is, only 33% report using any specific techniques that they ascribe to learning styles theory.

In my view, that’s good news (because relatively few people are doing anything with a potentially harmful theory), but also bad news (because we want teachers to use the (correct) conclusions of learning science that they believe in).

In other words: in our ideal world, we want all teachers to KNOW what psychology and neuroscience can accurately tell us about learning–and we want them to USE that knowledge.

Learning Styles vs. Individual Differences

Paradoxically, many people believe in learning styles theory because they misunderstand it.

The theory says that we can divide people up into different groups of learners (“visual, auditory, kinesthetic” is the best-known version of the theory), and then teach those groups in ways that match their style. If we do so, they’ll learn better.

(Here’s yet another article showing the falsity of the theory.)

However, I think most people understand learning styles theory this way: “all people learn differently, and therefore I should present my content in different ways to be sure that all people can get it in their unique way.”

This theory a) is absolutely true, and b) is NOT what learning styles theory says.

Learning styles theory, again, says that we can diagnose distinct categories of learners, and teach people within those subgroups the same way.

This second theory–called “individual differences”–says that we all learn somewhat differently from each other.

There is no group of people who learn exactly the same way I do. I’m a learning style of one.

For this reason, we could “teach to a student’s learning style” only if everyone were tutored individually. Because schools teach students in groups, teachers should indeed teach all content in many different ways–so that each of us with our individual learning styles can grok these new ideas.

If I truly believed in learning styles theory, I should–instead–test all of my students to determine their style, and then sort them into distinct groups. After that sorting has happened, I should then teach each group differently; all people in each subgroup learn the same way, so they’ll learn best when I teach in that one style only.

What to Do with this Research?

Are you already teaching your content in multiple different ways? If yes, then you’re already following an individual differences theory (not learning styles theory). Keep doing what you’re doing.

If no, try to do so as much as possible. If your students don’t understand when you explain a concept one way, try drawing a picture. Or, use several analogies. Or, have a hands-on demo. Or, give several examples, and have students abstract a principle from them. Or, have students explain it to each other. Or, find a song that enacts the concept you want to explain. Or…

If you’re still a learning styles enthusiast, I suggest that you click some of the links above and see why psychologists just don’t believe the theory. You might also check out Chapter 7 of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?; as always, he does an excellent job of clarifying a complex topic.

You should also keep asking questions when you get to the next Learning and the Brain conference.  You’ll meet plenty of wise and well informed people who can distinguish between “learning styles” and “individual differences,” and contrast the evidence behind both.