JA WestenbergThings that are fake:
- Alpha males (debunked by the original researcher)
- MSG causing headaches (never replicated)
- Learning styles (no evidence)
Things that are real:
- People will believe anything if it confirms their priors
Amoshias@Daojoan I'm not sure I follow the third one. Do you just mean that the commonly described types of learning styles are not reflective of reality? Because "people learn differently and have different results when they are presented with information in a way which best suits them" certainly matches my lived experience.
Matt Godden@Amoshias Learning Styles is a term of art within education as a profession, that is a little more technical than what people find more fun as a way to learn. One person may *like* learning from videos, rather than reading a textbook, but when it's tested under controlled conditions, Learning Styles as a methodology doesn't produce better outcomes, and carries negative overheads in terms of teacher workloads for lesson prep. (1/2)
The only variables that make a consistent measurable difference in educational outcomes are classroom discipline, and students per teacher. No other factor has any measurable effect outside the error bars. (2/2)
Pablo MartÃnez@metaning any sources? I'd love to read some, altough I'm already convinced.
@pablo_martan Nothing to hand, but it's readily available. There's a competing methodology to Learning Styles I read about a few years back, "multisourcing" or "multiheading" or similar, which focusses IIRC on deploying content in multiple reinforcing formats to all students at once, as distinct from LS's premise that each student responds to a specific format of material.
Like psychology, I suspect edu theory is going to turn out to have a lot of very bad, experimentally invalid research.
@metaning I'll look it up, thank you very much! I agree abput evidence. I think it's due to both being fileds where it's very difficult to come uo with solid theories, and which are prone to researcher bias.