What a day for ed news! Bye bye learning style!
('learning styles' debunked)
As a public schools attorney in matters of special education, I, too, have questioned 'learning styles.' I included these concerens in my new book, Fixing Special Education--12 Steps to Transform a Broken System.
But I'm just a lawyer--not an expert in these matters. Now more psychologists have jumped in. That's great! It's hard enough to educate kids these days. Saddling teachers and parents with bad science and ideology is not helpful.
As a public schools attorney in matters of special education, I, too, have questioned 'learning styles.' I included these concerens in my new book, Fixing Special Education--12 Steps to Transform a Broken System.
But I'm just a lawyer--not an expert in these matters. Now more psychologists have jumped in. That's great! It's hard enough to educate kids these days. Saddling teachers and parents with bad science and ideology is not helpful.
posted by Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, M.A., J.D. at
8:24 AM
2 Comments:
There is no doubt that the notion of "learning styles" is overly simplistic and lacks any practical, educational utility. At its worst, the notion is enshrined in the practice of SLD identification, under the paradigm of "aptitude-achievement interaction." The idea is that we can use "aptitude tests," i.e., IQ tests, to determine patterns of "strengths and weaknesses" that can be used to guide instructional practices. There are many studies to suggest that ATI, as it is known, is nothing but an illusion. At worst, weaknesses in cognitive abilities as measured on IQ tests are assumed to lie at the cause of SLDs. However, research has shown that the amount of variance in performance on tests of academic achievement that can be attributed to performance on a specific measure of cognitive ability is negligible at best (with very few, very specific exceptions). basically, "weakness" in "short-term memory" might explain 14% of the variance in the best case, depending on the age of the person and the academic weakness in question. Other cognitive abilities, such as "visual processing" and "long-term retrieval" contribute almost nothing at all. This means that, for each of the tens-of-thousands of children identified as SLD due to deficits in "important" cognitive abilities such as "short-term memory" or "long-term retrieval," that determination is nothing but a big lie.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. It is certainly refreshing to question underlying and unproved assumptions about how to educate all types of learners.
I first heard of this questioning of 'learning styles' in Oxford, England--at the Center for the Future of the Mind. As an attorney, not a diagnostician or teacher, I'm glad to see that this apparently unproven but widely held theory--along with others--is becoming unraveled.
Let's face it, the only way to improve teaching and learning is to focus on teaching and learning--not all the tangentials that get in the way.
Thank you again!
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home