Learning Styles

In a recent Higher Ed piece Robert J. Sternberg claimed that Learning Styles exist.

When I received my first test score – a 3 out of 10 -- in college introductory psychology, I realized that I had some hard slogging ahead, especially after the professor told me that "there is a famous Sternberg in psychology and it is obvious there won’t be another one." I eventually pulled a C in the course, which the professor referred to as a "gift." That professor was probably as surprised as I was when I earned an A in his upper-level course, and I certainly was grateful to him when, as chair of the search committee, he hired me back to my alma mater (Yale University) as an assistant professor, where I would remain as a professor for 30 years. My instructor probably wondered, as did I, how I could have done so poorly in the introductory course and so much better in the upper-level course.

There may have been multiple contributing causes to the difference in performance, but one was almost certainly a difference in the styles of learning and thinking that were rewarded in the two courses. The lower-level course was pretty much a straight, memorize-the-book kind of course, whereas the upper-level course was one that encouraged students to formulate their own research studies and to analyze the research studies of others.

Psychologists and educators differ as to whether they believe in the existence of different styles of learning and thinking. Harold Pashler and his colleagues have claimed that the evidence for their existence is weak, but a number of scholars, whose work is summarized in a 2006 book I wrote with Li-fang Zhang entitled The Nature of Intellectual Styles, and in a forthcoming edited Handbook of Intellectual Styles, have provided what we believe to be compelling evidence for the existence and importance of diverse styles of learning and thinking. I have often felt that anyone who has raised two or more children will be aware, at an experiential level, that children learn and think in different ways.

I think he is confused about learning styles versus skills. Or at least he isn’t articulating it as clearly as I would like. I still like Willingham's short video on this. 

Let me offer an analogy.

No one says we have metabolic styles. Some people have higher metabolisms, and others lower. Should one want to lose weight, it may be easier for some then others, as some may have better self-control over food intake, and other may have better ability to commit to an exercise regime. But we wouldn’t say they have different metabolic styles. The metabolic process is the same.

Learning styles confuse the issues. Yes people have different skills, some have better ability to write, others do math, and others have better memories. I never forget a face, but have lots of trouble remembering names. That’s a skill, but that doesn’t mean I’m a visual learner. The cognitive process is the same in everybody, even if it works better, or faster in some than others, and even if its performance varies by task. The process is the same.

Assessing their “learning” involves requiring them to use their skills and their cognitive process. But we often assess the skill more than the cognitive process that goes on. Much like the metabolic explanation, it would be akin to asking them to run for 30 minutes as a demonstration of the metabolic improvement. Some students are better runners than others, even though there is a correlation between running and metabolism - as in increasing running, should increase metabolism – their metabolic improvement would be poorly measured by the distance they run in 30 minutes.

Changing Memory

The internet is changing us:

A more telling experiment provided a stream of facts to participants, with half told to file them away in a number of "folders" on a computer, and half told that the facts would be erased.

When asked to remember the facts, those who knew the information would not be available later performed significantly better than those who filed the information away.

But those who expected the information would be available were remarkably good at remembering in which folder they had stored the information.

"This suggests that for the things we can find online, we tend keep it online as far as memory is concerned - we keep it externally stored," Dr Sparrow said.

So what? I think in the end it makes us better. Rather than remembering things, we merely have to remember where we put them, thus freeing up our minds to remember more. As the article points out:

I don't think Google is making us stupid - we're just changing the way that we're remembering things... If you can find stuff online even while you're walking down the street these days, then the skill to have, the thing to remember, is where to go to find the information. It's just like it would be with people - the skill to have is to remember who to go see about [particular topics]."

Now I just need to figure out how to remember those things I forgot, but don't remember that I forgot them. There are things we know, things we don't know, and things we don't know that we don't know.

Learning

On my recent drive back from Madison I was listening to a show entitled "Healthy Minds" as part of the "On Being" program from NPR. At that moment I really missed my co-pilot. I once knew a girl who would have loved to listen to that episode, and I would have loved to hear her opinion. The focus of the hour was on Richard Davidson, and in part his work teaching kindergarteners in Madison how to meditate. I know, sounds wacky. But if you think about it, much of our modern education concerns stuff we want students to know. Yet very little time - if any - is spent on how we might make it easier for students to know and learn the stuff we want them too. For example, I was recently sent this paper: Social-Psychological Interventions in Education:They’re Not Magic: 

Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” socialpsychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later. These interventions do not teach students academic content but instead target students’ psychology, such as their beliefs that they have the potential to improve their intelligence or that they belong and are valued in school. When social-psychological interventions have lasting effects, it can seem surprising and even “magical,” leading people either to think of them as quick fixes to complicated problems or to consider them unworthy of serious consideration. The present article discourages both responses. It reviews the theoretical basis of several prominent social-psychological interventions and emphasizes that they have lasting effects because they target students’ subjective experiences in school, because they use persuasive yet stealthy methods for conveying psychological ideas, and because they tap into recursive processes present in educational environments. By understanding psychological interventions as powerful but context-dependent tools, educational researchers will be better equipped to take them to scale. This review concludes by discussing challenges to scaling psychological interventions and how these challenges may be overcome.

Some examples include having students who demonstrate test anxiety, write the fears on paper, before taking the exam. It has the effect of helping them reduce their anxiety - let it go - and improves their test scores dramatically. Richard Davidson also talked about how people can make themselves happy. The brain as it turns out has a great deal of plasticity. And it is within our capacity to alter it.

Cities

Ed Glaeser talks about his new book Triumph of the City. He makes a few important points. Actually many, but two i want to focus on. Living in cities now improves life expectancy rather than making it worse. And he also makes a point about how technology such as facebook makes living closer together ever more valuable. It is a paradox I've mentioned before. But its also why we will not see the end of Universities as we know them. All the new technology is still just a complement to face to face learning and sharing, not a substitute for it.

The Daily Show - Edward Glaeser
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Bribing Kids

Economists are fond of saying incentives matter. We believe grades are incentives, yet they often fail to achieve the ends we seek. Alfie Kohn is famous for his book Punished by Rewards in which he advocates the abolition of grades. But it always struck me as a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Just because a set of incentives does not achieved the desired outcomes, doesn't mean the incentives are intrinsically bad, they are possibly just misaligned. Roland Fryer has been finding out how difficult it is do properly align them.

The results from using incentives are mixed. In some cases, incentives have been very cost effective: paying elementary school children in Dallas $2 for each book they read leads to substantial test score gains. On the other hand, a number of other programs aimed at older kids have been less effective. A lot of things change across the various experiments, but one hypothesis Roland puts forth in his academic paper is that better results will be obtained when focusing on inputs that the student can directly control (e.g. turning in homework, showing up for school, wearing a uniform), instead of outcomes (test scores, grades, etc.).

I imagine part of the reason is that students haven't learned the connection between inputs --> outputs. Giving them a goal of improving outputs doesn't help them discover that connection. We'd like to think it offers enough of a motivation that the discover it on their own, but clearly that is one of the important parts of learning, and it needs to be taught and encouraged.

Study Habits

From the NYT:

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “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,” the researchers concluded.

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.