Students work with a Learning Assistant (middle) in physics tutorials

I’m happy to announce that one of the fruits of my labors this summer — a module on Teaching with Learning Assistants at Carleton College’s Science Education Resource Center has now been published!

From the site:

Learning Assistants are talented undergraduate students, primarily in mathematics and the sciences, chosen for their broad interest in teaching and prepared to provide support for student learning in interactive classroom environments. Primarily used in group work, Learning Assistants are specifically prepared to focus on student ideas and facilitate group conversations and conceptual understanding. Learning Assistants are chosen from the top students who took the course in previous semesters, and receive a stipend or class credit for their assistance.

I give data to support the use of LAs, some information on how they are prepared to work with students, and detailed suggestions for what types of activities are best to use with LAs.  And even better, I interviewed faculty to write five detailed case-studies of the use of LAs in the classroom, so you can see how this really plays out in practice.

This is a valuable resource, and one that I’m proud of.  Check it out.

SERC has a lot of great modules on innovative teaching techniques.  If you don’t know of them, take a look around.

In her talk, she talked about her area of expertise – the middle division – and shared some of her insights about classroom norms, and how we can be more thoughtful and deliberate about showing students what we want them to do in our classes.  That description barely does justice to the gentle revolution that she advocated for our physics classrooms.  “I’m going to show you ways to implement things that you already know, in new ways,” she promised.

We have certain expectations of a situation, depending on what we see around us, she reminded us.  For instance, if we walk into a restaurant that has a menu on the wall, we know we’ll pay first, eat with our hands, and then leave.  If the restaurant has a printed menu, we know we’ll first get our food, eat with a knife and fork, and pay after we eat.

Similarly, we set up classroom norms from the start.  And it’s important that those classroom norms make everyone feel comfortable – women, minorities, shy white men, engineers – everyone!  In particular, when creating an interactive classroom, start out right.

1.  Don’t grade. If you want them to learn from an interactive technique, don’t grade it if you want them to learn from it.  This sets the stage that this is a low-stakes activity.

2.  Expect everyone to participate. If you’re not grading it, the expectation of participation still needs to be made clear, and made clear from the very first day.

3.  Don’t make them look foolish. Don’t expect them to do anything that you won’t model.  At some point early in the semester, she says, she gets up on the table during class.  In fact, she looks for any excuse to stand on a table, because it looks silly, and sets a new norm.

4.  Make it OK to make mistakes. She uses small whiteboards in her classes, where students can work through an answer to a question she poses.  These help get everyone involved, and nobody is left out.  However, students are a bit intimidated to begin with, not wanting to put something wrong on the whiteboard.  So, the first few times she does it, she doesn’t ask a student to explain why their answer is wrong to the entire class – that’s humiliating. Instead, what she does it to start with showing lots of student answers to the whole class, and talk as a group about which one is correct, and decide what’s productive about the different answers.  Later in the course, students are more comfortable and she asks students to stand up and show their answer, and defend it.  But early on, she clearly sets the norm that it’s OK to make mistakes, and that this is a classroom where ideas can be discussed productively.

What are our goals in the middle division, she asks?  We want students to move away from using problem templates, to use advanccorred notation, to break up complicated problems into smaller pieces, to be more confident in their problem solving ability and to reflect on their solutions and use their judgement as to their reasonableness.  In sum, we want them to move from being a novice to an expert.  And our teaching strategies have to reflect those goals.  Lecture isn’t a bad thing – it has value.  It paints the big picture, covers a lot of material, models good speaking and problem solving skills, and can control just what students get out of class and the questions that they ask.

But activities, like the ones on her wiki, have a different effect.  Students get to practice something, see how it works in depth, and control their own questions.

If they can get it from lecture, she says, then lecture.  If they can’t get it from the lecture, though, we often make the mistake of putting it into the homework instead.  Students work on it, and get stuck, and the good ones come to talk to you, and “you have a wonderful conversation about that difficulty, and they then share the answers with the next student, who shares it with the next one” and so on.  That doesn’t actually help them achieve your goals for class.  Instead, she does activities in class.

As an example, she showed us part of her Acting Out Current Densities activity.

She chose about 10 physicists from the audience and asked them to come to the front of the room.   In true form, she stood on the table at the front.

Corinne -- on the table -- doing a similar activity with students

“You are all charged particles,” she said.  “I have a magnetic field meter, make it fluctuate.” The physicists, smiling abashedly, started to move around near her.

“Now make it nonzero, but not fluctuate,” she said.  After a bit of discussion, they moved in a circle around her.

“Make it read higher” she ordered.  They circled closer.

Now everybody’s on the same page, she said, and we’re all awake.  And this opens up the possibility for questions.  It changes the focus of the class, and allows you to really gauge what your students understand.

Why is an activity like this important for gauging understanding?  When we take the integral over knowledge, she said, we get the impression that everyone knows everything.  Socratic questioning lets us tap into the knowledge in the room.  On the other hand, when we take the integral over questions, as when people in the class ask questions during group work, we start to think that nobody knows anything.

So, I think the point that she was making was that we want to both use lecture (to frame) and activities (to involve), to tap students’ knowledge by asking them questions, and to tap their questions by providing them the space to do so.   That by setting the stage for both to happen productively, we can help many different students feel comfortable doing what is necessary for them to achieve the kinds of goals that we wish for them – a deeper understanding of physics, of problem solving, and of their own capacities.

We’ve put in a lot of magnificent effort, she said, to develop innovative teaching techniques that have proven effects on student learning.  Education researchers get frustrated, trying to tell faculty that their methods of teaching aren’t working, and showing the data to prove it.  Yet most instructors are still teaching by traditional lecture format.  Why?

Well, while we’ve done a lot of research on what constitutes good teaching practices, we’ve done very little research on effective dissemination techniques.  The intuitive technique, which doesn’t work very well, goes something like this:

1. We demonstrate that traditional lecture is ineffective
2. We show alternative approaches and data that shows that they’re more effective
3. We publish articles and give workshops to get the word out
4. We wait for change to happen.

But, it doesn’t.  Why not?

We often blame faculty — say they don’t care about their teaching.  Well, surveys show that’s not really true.  But faculty generally adopt new teaching strategies based on both personal and structural factors.  They modify them according to their tastes and situation.

Melissa, along with Charles Henderson and Chandra Turpen did surveys and interviews of 22 faculty to identify what it is that they want to do in their class. The good news is, education researchers’ dissemination efforts have indeed been effective.  Most faculty know about research based instruction methods:

• 87% know about at least one of the strategies on their list
• 50% know 6 or more strategies
• 48% use at least one
• 70% want to use more research based strategies

However, they aren’t always using these methods in ways that are consistent with what we know causes learning gains. For example, 41% of peer instruction users change something about the method, and only 28% of instructors have students discuss the answer during the question — a key feature of peer instruction!

Not surprisingly, most people cited lack of time as a reason for not using more research-based techniques.  The factors that were most predictive of using research based techniques were:

• Attending new faculty workshop
• Attended workshops related to teaching
• Satisfaction with instructional goals
• Reading journals related to teaching
• Being female (!)

But, people who had high reearch productivity or large class size were just as likely to use these research-based techniques, which flies in the face of some of our assumptions about hard-core researchers being less interested in teaching.

Let’s take peer instruction as an example.  Where did people find out about it?  They would usually find out about peer instruction from a colleague, and decide to try it.  They would then read materials to find out more.  However, we usually put out all these materials in the hopes that people will read them and decide to try it based on those materials, but it seems that most people go to the written materials as a second step.  Similarly, they use the effectiveness data as a second step — to  justify to others why they’re doing what they’re doing, and to bolster their own confidence that they’re making the right choice. They don’t use that data to convince themselves, however.

So, we might conclude:

• Dissemination should focus on methods that involve personal contact with faculty
• Written materials should be geared towards helping faculty learn more, rather than convincing them
• Data should be presented to bolster their decision, rather than to convince them

So, dissemination is a poor model of creating change. We can’t just lecture people about making more interactive teaching!

We have to move towards a more effective model of change:

• Building communities to create social connections.  For example, the Modeling curriculum has been very effective, in part because they built a community first — they give ownership to the teachers, who teach the modeling workshops.
• Provide materials in a modifiable form, and support instructors in making effective modifications
• Support instructors as they implement it, rather than just giving it to them at the start
• Do some research on the barriers that instructors face in implementation
• Get into policy to create institutional opportunities for change

In one talk on “epistemological priming” (Paul Hutchison, Grinnell), he made a compelling case for the fact that students aren’t using their everyday reasoning in physics class.  He asked them the question, “If you throw a ball horizontally, and a ball straight down, which will hit the ground first?”

Amazingly, a full 40% of his sample said that the one thrown horizontally will hit the ground first!  Any third grader, he said, will give the correct answer to this question (that the one thrown straight down will hit the ground first). So, the ones who give this “silly” answer, he says, are framing this task as an “answermaking” task – where their job is just to get the right answer and use whatever tricks they need to get there.  Since this question has some resemblance to the common physics demo, where a ball is thrown horizontally or dropped vertically, they try to make an answer from that previous information.  Those who answer correctly are in a “sensemaking” mode – they are reasoning through the question, in a variety of ways.  They think their task in physics class is to make sense of what is happening.  They found that they were able to prime students to answer in a certain way depending on how they led into the question.  Different types of initial questions primed the students to think about the thrown-ball question in one of those two ways.  This is good news, it means that if we want students to  engage in certain kinds of activities on the homework, perhaps we should make the first couple questions on the homework strongly leading in that direction.

A follow up talk by Mary McDonald, also at Grinnell, was cancelled, unfortunately, but she investigated what kinds of activities during groupwork can create an answermaking versus a sensemaking frame.  This would be helpful in determining what sorts of things we could emphasize when we’re watching students working together in groups, so that they engage more in making sense of what they’re doing.  My friend Sandy Martinuk (University of British Columbia) has created some interesting work in this area too – he found that students don’t connect what they’re learning to real-life when they’re doing a problem solving activity, even if it’s real-world (like context-rich problems).  They still seem to be engaged in answermaking in that task.  When they’re creating or inventing something by working together, however, they seem go to more into a sensemaking frame of mind.

Luckily, Sandy reads my blog, and hopefully can correct what I believe is a somewhat muddled description of his results!

Phew… end of Day 1… It’s been a very long day.  Stay tuned, tomorrow I’ll be presenting two talks — on clickers, and on social media in physics classrooms.  I’ll do my best to summarize those here!

The University of Maine PER group (Brian Frank and Adam Kaczynski) showed us a few  of their studies on how students reason in tutorials.

For one, in tutorials, we expect students to articulate their reasoning, and argue and debate ideas.  But this isn’t always easy to do, working in social groups.  Brian Frank showed us some results from one group of girls, which I think must be pretty common.  One student said that she thought that they would see one kind of result when they did the experiment later in the tutorial.  Another disagreed.  The first student sort of laughed uncomfortably and said, oh, “I don’t know.”  She tried several times during the tutorial to bring up her concerns and confusion about that part of the tutorial and the other students either changed the subject, said it didn’t matter whether they all got the same answer, and that student always sort of deflected the potential conflict or loss of face by turning away, playing with her hair, or laughing.  This was a lost opportunity for the students to discuss and articulate their ideas.  I bet this happens a lot.  If articulating and attending to peers’ ideas are important for tutorials, we need to find ways to make this happen in the classroom.  I know at the University of Colorado we have successfully addressed this problem, at least in part, by using undergraduate Learning Assistants to circulate, ask questions f students, and model the kind of reasoning and discussion that we want from our students.

Adam Kacyznski also showed us some data on the fact that students aren’t necessarily using the resources available to them to solve the tutorial problems.  They try to solve inconsistencies as they work through tutorials, but not necessarily between ideas in the tutorial, but rather between their own formulations of the question.  They don’t bring up alternative ideas until that’s modeled by the instructor.  So, students aren’t necessarily being independent learners in quite the way that we expect them to in the tutorials.

Both of these studies suggest what we already knew, but with some more precision – the deep thinking that we expect students to do is difficult, both intellectually and socially.  In the Q&A, it was mentioned that the structure of the tutorials can be complicit in creating this kind of direction – if the answers come later in the tutorial, then students might avoid spending the time to talk about their reasoning because they know it will be resolved later on.

This was particularly interesting to me because I’m a person with a strong early interest and aptitude for science, but in a way I left the fold, since I’m no longer a “traditional” bench scientist.  I’m still in science education, and loving it, but what urged me along the science path, what was that force that ended up driving my life in this direction?

People are generally very worried about the state of the scientific enterprise in the US.  We need more scientists in the workforce.  Most people are tackling that problem by addressing the piss-poor levels of scientific literacy — by improving science teaching, for example.  But there is an implied causality there:  If people understand science better, they’ll want to do it for a career.  This study went looking for other things than simply “doing well in science”  that affected whether kids went into science as a career.

There’s a great book called “Talking about Leaving:  Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences” by Seymour and Hewitt.  In interviews, they found that a lot of students — male and female — were turned off by the abstract nature of science classes in college, and the competitive edge.  That seems to be echoed in the general literature — kids often leave science because it doesn’t seem to be a vibrant, interesting field, but rather a boring and autocratically-taught subject.  People who stay in the sciences, on the other hand, have a deep intrinsic interest in the subject that transcends the drill-and-kill that often happens in the school.  They have a spark.

So, what is that spark makes people want to be a scientist?

To answer the question, these researchers interviewed scientists and graduate students in physics and chemistry, and looked for some general themes.  For giggles, I’ll share where I fit into these data.

1.  The Timing of the Spark

The vast majority of people wanted to be a scientist before middle school – though this was more true for the physicists than for the chemists.  About a third had their interest sparked in middle or high school.  A surprising number said that they were “always” interested in science.   Women and men responded roughly the same.

I think that I might fall in that 30% of “in middle school”.  I remember finding out what a physicist was in 8^th grade – someone who “figures out how the world works” and I said that I wanted to do that.  Though my father was a chemist, I don’t recall a lot of interest in science in elementary school.   On the other hand, one respondent’s quote, “I don’t know, my father’s a biologist so I was kind of raised in a house with I guess scientific influence” kind of struck a bell.  So maybe I’m an “always” girl.

What about you, dear reader – when did you become interested in science?

2.  Who instilled the spark?

So, who was responsible for creating that spark?  Most people (45%) said that it was self-generated:

I liked toys like tinker toys and building blocks and taking things apart and seeing how they worked from early on. Science play was kind of more my inclination rather than physical play. (Female, Professor, Chemistry)

Another 40% said that their interest came from school activities, and another 15% from family.  Some said that their families had pressured them into science. But these results were very different for men and women!  More men said that they were motivated by self-interest (57%) whereas most women said they were motivated by school (52%).

I’m pretty sure that I fall into the “school” category, with some small influence of family.  I liked science in school, I was good at it, I was influenced by a few special teachers.  The fact that Dad was a chemist was more of a background support rather than a strong initial factor in my interest.

3.  What was the type of interest?

For about 50% of people interviewed, they were intrinsically interested in science to start with.  So, they tinkered at home with electronics, did experiments at home, and read science or science fiction.  I know I read science fiction, but I was never much of a tinkerer.  I wish that I had been.  I feel I’d be a better scientist now.

Many others (38%) mentioned school activities as sparking their interest, like classes, science projects, and teachers.  Unsurprisingly, teachers really left a mark on several students — either through encouragement or through disparaging words.

Fewer people mentioned family as an important source of interest, but all mentioned them as an important source of support.

Here is the story that sparked the title of the article, indicating the importance of school activities in encouraging a love of science:

When I was in third grade, my teacher did something you couldn’t do in class  anymore—we dissected cow eyes. And I thought it was so cool and so much fun that he sent a bunch of extras home in a paper bag, and reminded me to put them in the fridge  when I got home. And so I did. [When my mom came home she] said, “Hey, how was your day?” I said, “Great!” and I just went about my business and forgot the eyeballs in the fridge. She thought it was leftover lunch and went to open it up, and there were, like, four or five eyes looking back at her. And so all of a sudden I heard this screaming, and I realized what I had done … then from that point I started to really love science.
(Female, PhD student, Chemistry)

So, the take-home messages here are:

• Both men and women get interested in science early.  SO…. efforts to improve secondary level education and interest in science may be misguided!  We need to catch kids younger.
• School experiences are important to many (40%).  Teachers’ support can encourage interest that’s already there, but it can also foster a new love for science.
• Men more often find their initial spark of interest in science within themselves; Women more often find it in school activities.

So, something that we in the museum community have known for a long time — giving kids engaging activities is just as important as teaching them the content they’ll need to know on the test.

The paper concludes:

We used to believe that improving science education meant better training for teachers and increasing student understanding of scientific principles. We assumed that improving instruction and performance would lead to greater numbers of scientists in the pipeline. The results of this analysis make us believe that there are other factors that play a more significant role in getting students to consider careers in science. From the teaching perspective, it seems that including a variety of content and activities to engage students with different interests, providing an engaging classroom environment, and allowing students to feel comfortable asking questions about their understanding are all important factors that can improve student interest in science.

I was smiling along as I read jokes like:

Peer Instruction: What is happening when 5 workers are at a construction site and only 1 has a shovel.

or

inquiry-based activity :  What instructors have the students do when they didn’t have time to fully prepare their notes.

But as I kept reading, I started to feel offended.  Almost all the phrases that he was “translating” had to do with education-research-based techniques, and most were poking fun at the technique.  For example:

physics education research: Double-counting teaching as research on your annual faculty activity report.

A quick google of the guy (Carl Mungan) suggests that he’s an insider making jokes about his own topic, since his own publications seem to be in physics education research journals.  But I’m still not so keen on this “let’s make fun of physics education research (PER)” piece.  It seems dangerous.  Many of these jokes are indeed what people think of PER, and making fun of it could suggest that someone else lends creedence to those objections.  I think I wouldn’t be so annoyed if this list were more balanced between general teaching terms and PER terms, but it’s maybe 75% PER.

Guess I’m getting grumpy in my old age.

1. Testing helps you learn

I’ve blogged about this before (here and here).  The act of taking a test can be a learning experience, not just a way to assess you on what you already know.  One of the main reasons, they hypothesize, is that the act of retrieval strengthens the neuronal connections.  That seems to fit with the fact that multiple choice tests aren’t as strong of a learning experience as are short-answer tests (McDaniel et al, 2007).  Another concern of multiple choice tests is that there is some evidence that getting the wrong answer can introduce wrong information (Roediger and Marsh, 2005).   So, Elizabeth Bjork said, this suggests that we have to construct our alternatives to our multiple-choice tests carefully – so that the alternative, “wrong” answers require students to recall information in order to reject them.  This has obvious implications for both the use of clickers, and the construction of the alternative answers on clicker questions.

2.  Spaced studying

A ton of evidence shows that you remember things longer if you space out your study sessions.  That means studying for the exam for a week or so, in multiple sessions, rather than cramming the night before.  But how long of a gap is optimal between study sessions, to increase how long you remember the information?  The current research seems to suggest that the longer you want to remember something, the longer the study gap should be.  So, if you want to remember something for a few years, you probably need a few months’ gap between study sessions.  This suggests that cumulative finals are probably a great thing, since you have to study for the midterm, and then for the final, with a gap of several months.

But there must be a point of diminishing returns – spaced testing/studying helps you learn, but at what point does this testing take up more time than it’s worth in terms of how much more you’re learning?  As Kathryn Rawson told us, “More is better, but more is increasingly less better.”  So, to be efficient, you don’t want to over-study.  If she had to give tentative quantitative numbers, she suggested that students should study until they’d been able to correctly recall the answer three times in their initial study session, and then follow this with three more spaced sessions over time.

3.  Desireable difficulties

The idea of “desireable difficulties” is that you don’t learn if something is too easy.  Certain difficulties help you learn.  For example, if you study in the same place all the time, then your learning might be highly contextualized, and thus you won’t do as well on the test.  A desireable difficulty is to study in multiple places.  Another desireable difficulty would be spacing out your study sessions, instead of cramming.  However, a lot of these strategies don’t produce quick learning, so people don’t use them.  We cram for a test because it does work, at least to be able to recall the information in the short-term.  But these “easy” strategies (like massed practice/”cramming”) don’t create long-term learning.

When the screen lights up, students take it as a cue to tune out.  We’ve all had this experience — we scan the slide, and while we wait for the presenter to read through their bulleted list, we daydream about what we’re having for dinner tonight.

We can combine the best of traditional chalk with Powerpoint, and use programs that allow you to ink up your Powerpoint interactively. This digital+interactive blend is the driver behind Smartboards and other interactive whiteboards, and with a tablet PC you can also add drawings and other annotations to slides.  I wanted to highlight one particularly  useful (free!)  tool that was designed by science education researchers, specifically for educators.    Ubiquitous Presenter is a free tool designed for use with a Tablet PC, to interactively ink slides, AND allow students to add their own ink from their seats.

Check out the whole post for more.

My fellow bloggers have got some good articles too, about how to use technology to add life to your lecture.  One recent post by SidneyEve Matrix suggests using the short 5-minute snazzy Ignite presentation style to jazz up your lectures and student presentation.  As an Ignite fan, I love it!

Got some topics or questions you think I should cover on that blog?  Please, let me know!

We all learn differently, right? I might be an auditory learner, so I should receive information mostly through the spoken word. My classmate is a visual learner, so she needs to see graphs, pictures, and written text. Well, not so fast. Though this is a popular idea, it’s been extensively criticized — so much so, that even the Wikipedia article suggests that the idea has questionable merit.

Auditory learners???

First, what are learning styles? The Kolb Learning Style Inventory is a well-known assessment, which assesses how a learner prefers to learn. Kolb’s model is based on something called experiential learning theory, which isn’t based on the more familiar auditory/visual/reading/kinesthetic division lines (called the VARK model). Rather, Kolb’s styles are called Concrete Experience (someone who prefers an experience based approach to learning), Reflective Observation (an observatory, passive, introverted approach), Abstract Conceptualization (an analytic, conceptual, logical learner), and Active Experimentation (active, rather than passive, learning, such as projects and group discussions). Based on the scores on these different dimensions, learners can be grouped into different categorizations, similar to the Myers’ Briggs test (which also rates people on different dimensions and gives them a personality type based on those dimensions).

The problem is, there’s no real evidence that you learn better if a teacher presents information in a way that matches your purported learning style on such a measure. A recent review article (by Harold Pashler et al, including Robert Bjork, a longtime critic of learning styles) makes this case strongly. From the abstract:

A large number of studies have purported to show that different kinds of learners (such as “auditory learners” and “visual learners”) learn best when taught in their preferred modality; but the majority of such studies have not used the type of randomized research designs (e.g., classify learners into categories, then randomly assign the learners to use one of several different learning methods and assess effectiveness of the learning methods with a test given to all participants) that would make their findings credible. What psychological evidence does show is that people are inclined to hold false beliefs about how they learn and that they tend to learn and teach others in nonoptimal ways. Among other things, the report has significant implications for instructional approaches, and underscores the need to ensure that teaching methods are informed by sound scientific research, not fad educational theories or intuition.

This article is summarized very well in the Chronicle of Higher Education (here, along with a plethora of comments). They find that, although a student might enjoy a lesson more when presented in their preferred learning style, they might actually learn better from a task more suited to the particular content. For example in a lesson on molecular structure, all learners benefit from using hands-on models, even though a verbal learner would prefer to receive a lecture.

What this means for instructors, Mr. Pashler says, is that they should not waste any time or energy trying to determine the composition of learning styles in their classrooms. (Are 50 percent of my students visual learners? Are 20 percent of them kinesthetic learners?)

Instead, teachers should worry about matching their instruction to the content they are teaching. Some concepts are best taught through hands-on work, some are best taught through lectures, and some are best taught through group discussions.

The good thing about learning styles, of course, is that it has opened our eyes to the idea that there are different ways to teach content, and so instructors have moved towards using a wide range of instructional techniques. That’s a good thing for everyone, regardless of their individual learning style. Turns out that even Kolb agrees — he never advocated that teachers should match their instruction to students’ learning styles, though he does argue that students should think about their own learning style when choosing their major. This kind of metacognition, I would argue, can benefit us all.

But where it can be really detrimental is when parents or students say that they didn’t do well in a class because the teacher didn’t match their learning styles (see Parents of Nasal Learners Demand Odor-Based Curriculum for a parody of this effect). Learning styles can be a crutch or an excuse for a student to avoid doing the work necessary to learn. And because students often report more satisfaction with teaching when a teacher matches their learning style, a student’s belief in learning styles can actually harm their own learning, by pressuring a teacher to change their teaching approach. Course evaluations can be a powerful force!

On the other hand, a cognitive psychologist (Daniel Willingham) argues here that learning styles don’t even exist.

He argues that learning styles are a moot point. If we’re better at processing auditory information than visual information, that just means that we’re better at processing through that route (like hearing the tone of a word), not that we’re better at learning that way. Hearing the sound of a word doesn’t actually help us learn the meaning of that word.

I’ll close with a nice quote from Louis Schmier

There is a Zen saying that in the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true. How true. It’s not much different on our campuses, is it. We love to herd students into boxes and slap labels on them out of our own minds, believe them to be true, and then act as if they are true. [We] have to go beyond the idea of a student to the real student. And, we can only do that if we teach outside the box and go beyond the labels.

There are some other strong critiques of learning styles, such as Stahl (1999), who relates the enduring interest in learning styles with our tendency to see the vague statements and predictions of fortune tellers. You can also see a great review of the topic, with some additional references, over at the Occams Donkey blog.

The take-home message: Don’t bother to try to match your teaching style to your students’ learning styles. If they complain, cite these studies, and tell them that how we like to get information isn’t necessarily how we learn best. Instead, the research suggests that all students benefit from receiving information in multiple modes, with a mixture of chalk-and-talk and active learning methods.