Willingham: Student “Learning Styles” Theory Is Bunk
September 23, 2009 — Lynne M Bailey
Sept 14, 2009: The Washington Post Blog: The Answer Sheet – Willingham: Student “Learning Styles” Theory Is Bunk.
Learning styles gets a lot of attention in current teacher education. Daniel Willingham, guest blogger. cognitive scientiest and author of Why Students Don’t Like School, “It doesn’t work–not only for the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory, but for many other learning styles theories that have been proposed and tested since the 1940s.” He goes on to state that, “Suggesting that teachers cater to learning styles—when teachers must already do some differentiation based on what students know—makes a teacher’s job much more difficult with no benefit to students.”
But the bottom line seems to be that categorizing students within the framework of auditory, visual and kinesthetic is meaningless. I would comment, however, that varying delivery methods can make for a more engaging classes. Learning often involves repeated exposure and actual use of information; doing that in different ways is certainly more interesting than doing it the same way all the time.
