the_skine t1_iurfm3o wrote on November 2, 2022 at 2:09 PM

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Does Science Need History? A Conversation with Lorraine Daston by Maxwellsdemon17

A big problem is intuition, and the inability for people to accept that what seems obvious isn't always true.

Learning styles is a great example of this. The idea is that people in general, and students in particular, have different ways of learning.

Some people are visual learners (graphs, charts, diagrams), auditory learners (listening to information being presented), kinesthetic learners (learn through physical activity or handling objects), textual learners (reading and writing information), social learners (work best in teams/groups of peers), solitary learners (prefer independent, self-directed work), nature learners (learn best in natural environments or when lessons are tied to nature/natural phenomenon), logical learners (focus on patterns, relationships, cause/effect), and many other labels that add other attributes or group these learning styles together.

The problem is that teaching according to learning styles doesn't work.

That is, if you go through the trouble of determining students' learning styles, separating the students into different classrooms, and have each classroom teach the same material based on that learning style, then, in the more favorable studies, the students will average about 1-3 points of improvement out of 100 in 1-2 subjects. So a solid C student studying six subjects will get a C+ in two subjects, making them a C student overall.

This isn't talking about one or two studies, but hundreds of studies done over the last 70 years.

But still, learning styles is something you will hear about all the time if you or someone you know is involved in education. Teachers love to incorporate it into their curriculum, and talk about how they're "reaching more students" by presenting information using several different methods.

The most probable explanation seems to be that people don't have learning styles. They've just had a positive experience that they extrapolate into self-identity, based on assumptions about the reason for that positive experience.

But it's intuitive, so people will keep studying and incorporate learning styles into classrooms, trying to find a way to force reality to comply.

[deleted] t1_iurrpd9 wrote on November 2, 2022 at 3:32 PM

It took me a minute to realize that you are talking about 'education science', not education.

If I understand correctly, your point is that there is a hypothesis that kids respond to a particular teaching style because they have preferred learning styles.

Then this hypothesis was tested and shown to be false. Kids don't perform significantly better in response to teaching styles tailored to their supposed learning style.

But, because people are unaware of the history and want to push the narrative to suit their assumptions and intuition, they insist that learning styles must be incorporated into teaching, ignoring the science that was done.

This is very interesting and is to me is more like willful ignorance of a body of research than history of science per se. It reminds of how they tried to get rid of Phonics in Oakland schools because it was supposedly racist and then realized that the new political way of teaching reading resulted in delayed reading comprehension compared to Phonics. Phonics worked well for me and the kids I went to school with.

But all good science depends on high quality review articles in scientific journals to keep the field up to date. This is part of science itself. When people start publishing reviews that are incomplete and inaccurate, the science inevitably suffers.

So in that sense, each field has a history that must be maintained for progress to occur. I see this as separate from history of science written for general consumption. But it's a great point.

It's also true that science is subjective at first, and people try things based on hunches and intuition. But good science is always tested and assessed dispassionately before it enters the textbooks. So it is set apart from other things that way.