A “Revisited” blog post indicates that I reread the original and used AI-assisted tools (e.g., Grammarly) to improve grammar and word choice.
I’m puzzled. I just opened up today’s mail and read a special issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest with interest. This particular topic deals with “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence.”
The relatively short but lucidly written article by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork thoughtfully and fairly examines the empirical evidence addressing the proposal that instructional methods should be aligned with students’ learning styles to maximize student learning. The authors provide an overview of learning styles doctrines and industries, address how learning style approaches became embedded in education, propose the kinds of evidence needed to validate interventions based on learning styles and evaluate the learning styles literature. They conclude that there is a lack and poverty of strong evidence adequate for applying learning style assessments in school settings.
For visual learners, here is a report with similar conclusions.
Here the same psychological scientists’ views on “brain-based” education.
What puzzles me are two things:
1) Why did I receive today, January 7, 2010, Volume 9 Number 3 December 2008 of Psychological Science in the Public Interest?!
2) Why is there such a disconnect between what is taught to teachers and what empirical evidence shows?
Curious. I welcome your thoughts.
