- This video is about learning styles. What kind of learner are you? - Oh yeah, I'm a visual person so I have to see things, yeah.
- Oh yeah, same. - I think visual learner. - Visual. - I mean, like, I remember
formulas like auditory. - I need to be like,
interacting with the material. - I like to learn by doing it myself. - Very hands-on. - Hands-on learner. - Hands-on? - So like, if I have a model,
I'd like to look at that and look it over. - Part of this video was
sponsored by Google Search. There is this idea in
education that everyone has their own preferred way of learning, their so-called learning style. If information is presented in accordance with the learning style, well,
then they'll learn better. Now, there are dozens of
different learning style theories, but the most common one identifies four main learning
styles, visual, auditory, reading-writing, and
kinesthetic or VARK for short. Visual learners learn best from images, demonstrations, and pictures. - People may say things, but
I can't really take it in. I just gotta see 'em act it
out or write it or something. - [Derek] Auditory learners learn best from listening to an explanation. - Like in school, I was
always engaged in the lecture and that was usually good
enough to pass a test. - [Derek] Reading-writing
learners learn best from reading and writing. - Like I can get pretty much anything out of reading a textbook or something. - [Derek] And kinesthetic
learners learn best by doing. Physically interacting with the world. - Hands-on. You have to touch things,
you have to play with things, you know, it's a contact sport. You have to do it yourself. - I want to try something
with you, a little experiment. I want to show you 10 pictures of things and I don't want you to say anything while you're looking at them,
and at the end of the 10 you tell me how many you can remember. - Okay. - Okay?
- Okay. - Okay. - Now, learning styles
make intuitive sense because we know everyone is different. Some people have better spacial reasoning. Others have better
listening comprehension. We know some people are better readers while others are good with their hands. - It's sort of very much
fits with a broad strain of thought in the recent
Western tradition is, we're all unique, we're all different. And so you don't want to say, like, everybody learns the same way. That sort of conflicts with our feelings about what it means to be human. - So doesn't it make sense
that people should learn better in their own preferred learning style? Well, teachers certainly seem to think so. A survey of nearly 400
teachers from the UK and the Netherlands found
that over 90% believed that individuals learn better
when they receive information in their preferred learning style. - [Instructor] Just like every professor has a different style of teaching, you have a different style of learning. - [Instructor] But when his
teacher starts using visuals, Johnathan finds it easier to focus and understand the material so he might be a visual learner. - [Derek] Can you tell me
what that means to you? Like, what does it mean
to be a visual learner? - To me it means that
for me to learn something sometimes you need to draw
it or I need to write it down or I need to see a picture or a movie. - For example, science
classes, I get bored easily just listening and I think
it's more interesting for me to actually be able to do it. - [Derek] How do you know
that you're a visual learner? - I don't, I just assumed. - To take advantage of learning styles then teachers need to do two things. First, identify the learning style of each of their students. And second, teach each student in accordance with their learning style. On the VARK website it says,
once you know about VARK, its power to explain things
will be a revelation. But before you take an
online learning styles quiz, it's a good idea to ask, do
learning styles even exist? I mean, do you have one? And if you're taught
in accordance with it, would you learn better?
(warm instrumental music) Well, you could test this by running a randomized control trial where first you would identify learners with at least two
different learning styles, say visual and auditory and
then randomly assign learners to one of two educational presentations, one visual, one auditory. So for half of the students the experience will match
their learning style and for the other half it won't. And then you give everyone the same test. If the learning style
hypothesis is correct, the results should show better performance when the presentation
matches the learning style than when they're mismatched. I tried a very unscientific version of this experiment on the street. For some people, I matched
their learning style so I showed visual learners
pictures of 10 items, but for other visual learners
I read out the items instead. Bell, penguin, sun. - Okay, I'm maxed out. - [Derek] How many can you remember? - I don't know. - Hair, knife, duck, heart, butterfly. - Apple, bicycle, guitar. - There was a spider. Did I say eye already? - Trumpet, pear.
- Pear. - Butterfly.
- Duck. - Knife.
- Boat. - Heart.
- Knife. - Heart. - I couldn't tell you the
rest, that's all I got. - [Derek] Most people could remember only about five or six things. - Yeah, yeah.
- Six, six is not bad. - All right. - Six.
- Six out of 10 which is not bad, right?
- Oh, all right, yeah. - That's a passing score. Candle.
- Oh. - Candle.
- Everyone forgets the candle. But a few could remember
substantially more, say, eight or nine items. - Bug, I don't know if I said bug. Guitar, bike, eye,
bell, spoon, sun, chair. I'm forgetting the last two. - That's pretty good.
- Eight is really good. - Oh, cool. - Nine?
- Nine out of 10. - Nine, very impressive. But the reason didn't seem to
be because the presentation matched their preferred learning style but because they employed
a memory strategy. - So as you were showing I was
making an order in my head. So as I saw more I would
just add it to the list and I was repeating the list
as I was looking at them so I could just say it out loud. - Did you try a strategy
while you were looking at those pictures?
- Yeah, yeah. So I guess I tried creating a story 'cause it's easier to remember a story than just individual objects. So I tried to tie it all into one story. - This is all obviously
anecdotal evidence, but rigorous studies
like the one I outlined have been conducted. For example, one looked at
visualizers versus verbalizers instead of visual versus
auditory learners. The study was computer-based, so first students' learning
styles were assessed using questions like, would
you rather read a paragraph or see a diagram describing an atom? The researchers also provided
some challenging explanations with two buttons, visual
help or verbal help. The visual one played a short animation whereas the verbal help
gave a written explanation. From these measures combined,
the researchers categorized the students as either
visualizers or verbalizers and then the students
were randomly assigned to go through a text-based or picture-based lesson on electronics. When a student hovered
their mouse over key words in the lesson in the text-based group, a definition and clarification came up. But in the picture group, an annotated diagram was shown instead. And after the lesson,
the students did a test to assess their learning. The students whose
preferred learning style matched their instruction
performed no better on the tests than those whose
instruction was mismatched. The researchers ran the test again with 61 non-college-educated adults and found exactly the same result. But learning styles are a preference so how strongly do learners
stick to their preference? Well, in a 2018 study during
the first week of semester, over 400 students at a
university in Indiana completed the VARK questionnaire
and they were classified according to their learning style. Then at the end of the semester the same students completed a
study strategy questionnaire. So how did they actually
study during the term? Well, an overwhelming majority of students used study strategies which
were supposedly incompatible with their learning style, and the minority of students who did did not perform significantly differently on the assessments in the course. The visual auditory
reading-writing, kinesthetic or VARK model came
about from Neil Fleming, a school inspector in New Zealand. Describing the origins of VARK he says, I was puzzled when I
observed excellent teachers who did not reach some learners
and poor teachers who did. I decided to try to solve this puzzle. There are, of course, many
reasons for what I observed. But one topic that seemed
to hold some magic, some explanatory power, was preferred modes of
learning, modal preferences. And thus, VARK was born. There was no study that revealed students naturally cluster
into four distinct groups. Just some magic that might explain why some teachers can reach
students while others can't. But how can this be? If we accept that some
people are more skilled at interpreting and remembering
certain kinds of stimuli than others like visual or auditory, then why don't we see
differences in learning or recall with different presentations? Well, it's because what we
actually want people to recall is not the precise nature of the images or the pitch or quality of the sound. It's the meaning behind the presentations. There are some tasks that
obviously require the use of a particular modality. Learning about music, for example, should have an auditory component. Similarly, learning about geography will involve looking at maps. And some people will have greater aptitude to learn one task over another. Someone with perfect pitch, for example, will be better able to recall
certain tones in music. Someone with excellent
visual-spatial reasoning will be better at learning the locations of countries on a map. But the claim of learning style theories is that these preferences will be consistent
across learning domains. The person with perfect pitch should learn everything better auditorily but that is clearly not the case. Most people will learn
geography better with a map. Review articles of learning
styles consistently conclude there is no credible evidence
that learning styles exist. In a 2009 review, the
researchers note, the contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning styles
approach within education and the lack of credible
evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing. If classification of
students' learning styles has practical utility, it
remains to be demonstrated. - What we're expecting is,
if your style was honored you're going to perform better than if you had some experience that
conflicted with your style. And this is where we don't see any support for the learning styles theory. - One of the reasons many
people find learning styles so convincing is because they
already believe it to be true. For example, they might already think that they're a visual learner,
and then when a teacher shows them a diagram of, say, a bike pump and suddenly the concept clicks, well, they interpret this as evidence for their visual learning style. - You already believe that
learning styles is right. When you have an experience
the first think you think is, is that in some way consistent
with learning styles? And if it is, you don't think further. - When in reality that diagram
might just be a great diagram that would have helped anyone learn. When we already believe the
world to be a certain way, then we interpret new experiences
to fit with those beliefs whether they actually do or not. So if learning styles don't improve learning, then what does? Well, there's a large body of literature that supports the claim
that everyone learns better with multimodal approaches where words and pictures
are presented together rather than either
words or pictures alone. Now there's gonna be words
as well as the picture. We're gonna see if this is any better. This is known as the multimedia effect, and it explains in part, at least, why videos can be such
powerful tools for learning when the narration
complements the visuals. Duck.
- Duck. - Heart.
- Heart. - [Derek] In my PhD research,
I found explicit discussion of misconceptions was essential in multimedia teaching
for introductory physics. - How many is that?
- Six. - Six, okay, that's good. - That is a whole 50% better. Do you think that was easier? - Yeah, yeah, 100%, 100%.
- Yeah, with the words, yeah. - Ultimately, the most
important thing for learning is not the way the
information is presented but what is happening
inside the learner's head. People learn best when
they're actively thinking about the material, solving problems or imagining what happens if
different variables change. I talked about how and why we learn best in my video, "The Science of
Thinking" so check that out. Now, the truth is, there
are many evidence-based teaching methods that improve learning. Learning styles is just not one of them. And it is likely, given the prevalence of the learning styles misconception that it actually makes learning worse. I mean, learning styles give
teachers unnecessary things to worry about, and they
make some students reluctant to engage with certain
types of instruction. And all the time and money
spent on learning styles and related training could be
better spent on interventions that actually improve learning. You are not a visual learner
nor an auditory learner nor a kinesthetic learner,
or more accurately, you are all these kinds of learner in one. The best learning experiences are those that involve multiple different ways of understanding the same thing. And best of all, this strategy works not just for one subset of
people but for everyone. (radio tuner chirping) This part of the video was
sponsored by Google Search. Now, there are lots of topics out there that are controversial like
learning styles, for example. Most people believe
learning styles are a thing whereas educational researchers find no robust evidence for them. And if you search for learning styles, you'll get lots of sites
with resources and quizzes. But if you search for
learning styles debunked, well, then you'll find articles about how there is very little evidence for the learning styles hypothesis. I think one of the most
common traps people fall into is only searching for information that confirms what they already believe. A common mistake is putting
the answer you're looking for right in the search query. A better idea is to try another search, adding debunked or false at
the end and see what comes up. And Google makes it
easy to get more detail about the source of the information. Just click the three dots
next to any search result and then you can judge for yourself whether the information is trustworthy and if you want to visit the site. A Google Search is meant to surface the most relevant
information for your query. But it's up to you to
formulate that query, try a few different searches, and assess whether the
information is reliable. And the whole point of Veritasium
is to get to the truth. So I'm excited to encourage everyone to think more critically
about how we get information. I want to thank Google for
sponsoring this part of the video and I want to thank you for watching.
His videos are top notch. I really liked this one
Read "Make it Stick" for more
As a vet high school physics teacher I'll just say you can present the information in class however you feel most comfortable and then give students the tools to process that information however they feel most comfortable. I use 5 representational tools. Sketches of graphs, verbal/written, algebraic, diagrams, flow chart/concept map.
I like lecturing and demo-ing as an instructor, but that's like 15% of what we do in class. The rest is modeling what I presented with one of the above tools. Once kids can use one of those 5 tools to model the physical behavior, I coach groups of students to translate between representations. Once there is a number of students who can represent their understanding well in at least 2 modes, I group accordingly so they teach each other how to translate.
Anecdotal but lots of success and enthusiastic students the last ~3 years since I've really gotten comfortable working like this.
This is one of those things so ingrained in our culture that even if you tell someone there's actual scientific evidence contradicting the "learning styles," they'll argue their "well, actually" statements ad nauseum.
It's always funny how people csn swear up and down about some group X being anti-science, then when you question their position Y, it's all hands on deck to fight science.
Edit: wait wtf is this doing on this sub?
The only place's I've seen modal learning style preferences work is when there is some kind of processing disability. So some kids can't process auditory information, but they can process visual information. These disabilities aren't common though, and you can usually tell who has one (they are more likely to be Special Needs kids).
Loved it
Hes a gem!
I saw this earlier and not only do I learn, I also just feel better after watching his videos
Having math verbally explained is terrible, though.