The Biggest Myth In Education

Veritasium has a very good video on the subject.[0] Sources are in the description but I might as well post them here. Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119. — [link] Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. — [link] Massa, L. J., & Mayer, R. E. (2006). Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?. Learning and Individual Differences, 16(4), 321-335. — [link] Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The magazine of higher learning, 42(5), 32-35.— [link] Husmann, P. R., & O'Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students’ study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles. Anatomical sciences education, 12(1), 6-19. — [link] Snider, V. E., & Roehl, R. (2007). Teachers’ beliefs about pedagogy and related issues. Psychology in the Schools, 44, 873–886. doi:10.1002/pits.20272 — [link] Fleming, N., & Baume, D. (2006). Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree!. Educational developments, 7(4), 4. — [link] Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of educational psycholo

I learn any way I can. Having a purpose to learn helps (I need this knowledge, I want this knowledge because I think it's cool, etc). I will try books, videos, whatever works. Like folded steel and alloys, I find that I learn things from lots of different angles, and appreciate the amalgamation. Veritasium did a whole video [ [this video] ] recently pointing out that it's really hard for us to self ascribe our best learning methods. I'll take whatever works and try as many as I can to keep the experience as rich as possible. If there's any unifying theme for me, it's "I learn by embracing Humility, and avoiding Lazy".

I would say it's worth debating because it is an inexact and unsound principle on which recent education is built on. More than that, in the Romanian Master's cycle, if you want to continue your pedagogical studies such that you become a high school teacher, there is an entire course dedicated to learning styles and there is one more dedicated on the other infamous inexact-semantics concept, the multiple intelligences theory. So I would argue that it has a similarly bad effect on the education domain to any other arbitrary first-principles that lead to sub-optimal research and lack of clarity of what is really going on in some domain, which lead again to sub-optimal methods. Regarding your observation about how some kids simply learn better after seeing some visual representation of the concepts, there could be many reasons for this (they start paying attention when you draw, they fall somewhere on the Bell curve such that they need that extra representation to get it, as the Veritasium video also presents with the memory experiment), but I would doubt that persistent learning styles of your students would be the differentiator, which is what the video discredits ( [this video] ).

Two counter-points: First, the point of a study is to be generalizeable - that is, to apply to as many people as possible, usually other than oneself. If a particular technique applies to you, that's great! However, most people aren't you. Starting with a known general principle/technique (most people can't multitask) will, on average, put you in a better position than randomly picking someone's anecdotal evidence. Second, there are many documented cases where self-assessment of one's own traits or capabilities is inaccurate. Performance while cognitively impaired (alcohol & sleep deprivation), assessment of skill as a novice (Dunning-Kruger), and the ability to multitask are all well-known cases of it, with many more lesser known (e.g. whether one is a "visual" or "verbal" learner[1]) - so, you should be wary about having too much self-confidence in your own capabilities, especially for something as poorly-understood as software engineering. [1] [this video]

Very insightful paper, thanks for sharing. Firstly, I'm surprised that having no garbage collection did not make to the list of the seven deadly sins. Secondly, someone here also mentioned about the very useful Turbo Pascal IDE and having an excellent IDE can really help in the visual learning approach that's required by all learners [1]. If any programming languages has the intuitive capability for real-time visual interactions as described by Brett Victor it will be great [2]. Thirdly, the paper failed to mention that beginner friendly programming language has a very high chance to be adopted by the industry and becoming extremely popular. This is self evident by the recent exponential popularity of Python. When the paper was written back in 1996, Python was just another scripting programming language with "Jack of all trades, master at none" language. At the time it's playing second fiddle to popular programming languages including Perl, PHP and TCL! The same can be said to D language now but as they've always said, time will certainly tell. Personally I think D language did not tick most of the seven dealy sins boxes and have made the most of the seven significant steps towards more teachable language mentioned in the paper. It has the most Pythonic feel to it compared to other compiled languages. It also the has default garbage collection that will make it an excellent introduction for programming. Of course you can exercise bit manipulation like a madman with D (also ca

This video about "learning styles" and the idea that there's no such thing as a "visual learner" is all over the thread: [this video] It's worth calling out that the video itself doesn't support some of the blunt arguments being made here. The point of the video is that it's likely that everyone does better with a multimodal approach. It thus remains reasonable to seek out books that do a good job with visual representations! No visual components, or, worse, bad diagrams are, according to the video, an impediment to everyone, not just people who have used a disfavored term in their Ask HN question. :) I like 3Blue1Brown as much as everyone else, it's an achievement and kind of a joy to watch, but my experience was that, after many go-rounds over the years, the thing that made any of this actually stick was doing exercises. I tend to bang the less abstract ones out in Sage: [link] (you have to do a little bit of extra work to make sure Sage isn't doing too much of the work for you. I'm a fan of Strang's approach. But I'm bad at linear algebra, so, grain of salt.