this video is about learning styles what
kind of learner are you oh yeah i'm a
visual person so like accessing things
yeah i think visual learning
visual i mean like i remember formulas
like auditory
i need to be like interacting with the
material i like to learn by doing myself
very hands-on hands-on learner hands-on
so like if i have a model
i'd like to look at that and look it
over part of this video was sponsored by
google search
there is this idea in education that
everyone has their own preferred way of
learning their so-called
learning style if information is
presented in accordance with the
learning style
well then they'll learn better now there
are dozens of different learning style
theories
but the most common one identifies four
main learning styles
visual auditory reading writing and
kinesthetic
or vark for short visual learners learn
best from images demonstrations and
pictures
people may say things but i can't really
like take it in i just gotta see them
act it out or write it or something
auditory learners learn best from
listening to an explanation
like in school i was always engaged in a
lecture
and that was usually good enough to pass
a test reading writing learners learn
best from reading and writing
like i can get pretty much anything out
of reading a textbook or something
and kinesthetic learners learn best by
doing physically interacting with the
world
hands-on you have to touch things you
have to play with things
uh you know yeah it's a contact sport
you have to do it yourself
i want to try something with you a
little experiment i want to show you 10
pictures of things
and i don't want you to say anything
while you're looking at them and at the
end of the 10
you tell me how many you can remember
okay okay okay
okay now learning styles make
intuitive sense because we know everyone
is different
some people have better spatial
reasoning others have better
listening comprehension we know some
people are better readers while others
are good with their hands it's sort of
very much fits with
um a broad strain of thought in sort of
what the
recent western tradition is like we're
all unique we're all different and so
you don't want to say like everybody
learns the same way that sort of
conflicts with
our feelings about what it means to be
human so
doesn't it make sense that people should
learn better in their own preferred
learning style
well teachers certainly seem to think so
a survey of nearly 400 teachers from the
uk and the netherlands found that
over 90 percent believed that
individuals learn better when they
receive
information in their preferred learning
style just like every professor has a
different style of teaching
you have a different style of learning
but when his teacher starts using
visuals
jonathan finds it easier to focus and
understand the material so he might be
a visual learner can you tell me what
that means to you like what does it mean
to be a visual learner
to me it means that for me to learn
something sometimes i need to draw it
or i need to write it down or i need to
see a picture
or a movie for example science classes i
get bored easily just listening and i
think it
it's more interesting for me to actually
be able to do it how do you know that
you're a visual learner i don't
i just assume to take advantage of
learning styles then teachers
need to do two things first identify the
learning style of each of their students
and second teach each student in
accordance with their learning style
on the varc website it says once you
know about vark
its power to explain things will be a
revelation
but before you take an online learning
styles quiz it's a good idea to ask
do learning styles even exist i mean do
you have one
and if you're taught in accordance with
it would you learn better
well you could test this by running a
randomized control trial
where first you would identify learners
with at least two different learning
styles
say visual and auditory and then
randomly assign the learners to one of
two educational presentations
one visual one auditory so for half of
the students the experience will match
their learning style
and for the other half it won't and then
you give everyone the same test
if the learning style hypothesis is
correct the results should show
better performance when the presentation
matches the learning style
than when they're mismatched i tried a
very unscientific version of this
experiment on the street
for some people i matched their learning
style so i showed
visual learners pictures of 10 items
but for other visual learners i read out
the items instead
bell penguin
sun okay i'm maxed out how many can you
remember i don't know
hair uh knife duck
heart uh butterfly
apple bicycle guitar
there's a spider did i say eye already
trumpet pear butterfly knife knife
boat heart knife heart i couldn't tell
you the rest that's all i got
most people could remember only about
five or six
things yeah six yeah this is not bad all
right six
six out of ten which is not bad right oh
all right pass and score
handle but a few
could remember substantially more say
eight or nine items
bug i don't know if i said bug guitar
bike eye
bell spoon sun chair i'm forgetting the
last two
that's pretty good eight is really good
oh cool nine nine out of ten
nine very impressive but the reason
didn't seem to be because the
presentation matched their preferred
learning style
but because they employed a memory
strategy
so like as you were showing i was like
making an order in my head
so as i saw more i would just add it to
the list and i was repeating the list as
i was looking at them
so i could just say it out loud did you
try a strategy while you were
looking at those pictures yeah so i
guess uh
i tried like creating a story because
it's easier to remember a story than
just
individual objects so i try to like tie
it all into one story
this is obviously anecdotal evidence but
rigorous studies
like the one i outlined have been
conducted for example
one looked at visualizers versus
verbalizers instead of visual versus
auditory learners
the study was computer-based so first
students learning styles were assessed
using questions like
would you rather read a paragraph or see
a diagram describing an atom
the researchers also provided some
challenging explanations with
two buttons visual help or verbal help
the visual one played a short animation
whereas the verbal help
gave a written explanation from these
measures combined the researchers
categorized the students as either
visualizers or verbalizers and then the
students were randomly assigned
to go through a text-based or
picture-based
lesson on electronics when a student
hovered their mouse over keywords in the
lesson
in the text-based group a definition and
clarification came up
but in the picture group an annotated
diagram was shown instead
and after the lesson the students did a
test to assess their learning
the students whose preferred learning
style matched their instruction
performed no better on the tests than
those whose instruction was
mismatched the researchers ran the test
again with
61 non-college-educated adults and found
exactly the same result
but learning styles are a preference so
how strongly do learners stick to their
preference
well in a 2018 study during the first
week of semester
over 400 students at a university in
indiana completed the varc
questionnaire and they were classified
according to their learning style
then at the end of the semester the same
students completed a study strategy
questionnaire
so how did they actually study during
the term well an overwhelming majority
of students
used study strategies which were
supposedly incompatible with their
learning style
and the minority of students who did did
not perform significantly differently
on the assessments in the course the
visual auditory reading writing
kinesthetic or
vark model came about from neil fleming
a school inspector in new zealand
describing the origins of arc he says i
was puzzled when i observed excellent
teachers who did not reach some learners
and poor teachers who did i decided to
try to solve this puzzle
there are of course many reasons for
what i observed
but one topic that seemed to hold some
magic
some explanatory power was preferred
modes of learning
modal preferences and thus vark was born
there was no study that revealed
students naturally cluster into four
distinct groups
just some magic that might explain why
some teachers can reach students while
others can't
but how can this be if we accept that
some people
are more skilled at interpreting and
remembering certain kinds of stimuli
than others
like visual or auditory then why don't
we see differences in learning or recall
with
different presentations well it's
because what we actually want people to
recall
is not the precise nature of the images
or the pitch or quality of the sound
it's the meaning behind the
presentations there are some tasks that
obviously require the use of a
particular modality
learning about music for example should
have an auditory component
similarly learning about geography will
involve looking at maps
and some people will have greater
aptitude to learn one task over another
someone with perfect pitch for example
will be better able to recall certain
tones in music
someone with excellent visual spatial
reasoning will be better at learning the
locations of countries on a map
but the claim of learning style theories
is that these preferences will be
consistent across
learning domains the person with perfect
pitch
should learn everything better
auditorily but that is clearly not the
case
most people will learn geography better
with a map review articles of learning
styles consistently conclude
there is no credible evidence that
learning styles exist
in a 2009 review the researchers note
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
if classification of students learning
styles has practical utility
it remains to be demonstrated what we're
expecting is
if your style was honored you're going
to perform better than if
you had some experience that conflicted
with your style and this is where
we don't see any support for the
learning styles theory
one of the reasons many people find
learning styles so convincing
is because they already believe it to be
true for example
they may already think that they're a
visual learner and then when a teacher
shows them
a diagram of say a bike pump and
suddenly the concept clicks
well they interpret this as evidence for
their visual learning style if you
already believe that learning styles is
right
when you have an experience the first
thing you think is is that in some way
consistent with learning styles
and if it is you don't think further
when in reality that diagram might just
be a great diagram that would have
helped
anyone learn when we already believe the
world to be a certain way
then we interpret new experiences to fit
with those beliefs whether they actually
do
or not so if learning styles don't
improve learning
then what does well there's a large body
of literature that supports the claim
that
everyone learns better with multimodal
approaches where words and pictures are
presented together
rather than either words or pictures
alone now there's going to be words as
well as the picture
we're going to see if this is any better
this is known as the multimedia effect
and it explains in part at least why
videos can be such powerful tools for
learning
when the narration complements the
visuals duck
in my phd research i found explicit
discussion of misconceptions was
essential
in multimedia teaching for introductory
physics how many is that
six six okay that's good that is a whole
50 percent better
do you think that was easier that yeah
yeah
yeah 100 ultimately the most important
thing for learning
is not the way the information is
presented but what is happening
inside the learner's head people learn
best when they're
actively thinking about the material
solving problems or imagining what
happens if
different variables change i talked
about how and why we learn best in my
video
the science of thinking so check that
out now the truth is
there are many evidence-based teaching
methods that improve learning
learning styles is just not one of them
and it is likely given the prevalence of
the learning styles misconception that
it actually makes
learning worse i mean learning styles
give teachers
unnecessary things to worry about and
they may make some students reluctant to
engage with certain types of instruction
and all the time and money spent on
learning styles and related training
could be better spent on interventions
that
actually improve learning you are not a
visual learner
nor an auditory learner nor a
kinesthetic learner or
more accurately you are all these kinds
of learner
in one the best learning experiences are
those that involve
multiple different ways of understanding
the same thing
and best of all this strategy works not
just for one subset of people but
for everyone
this part of the video was sponsored by
google search now there are lots of
topics out there that are controversial
like learning styles for example most
people believe
learning styles are a thing whereas
educational researchers
find no robust evidence for them and if
you search for learning styles
you'll get lots of sites with resources
and quizzes but if you search for
learning styles debunked well then
you'll find articles about how there is
very little evidence for the learning
styles hypothesis
i think one of the most common traps
people fall into
is only searching for information that
confirms what they already believe
a common mistake is putting the answer
you're looking for right
in the search query a better idea is to
try another
search adding debunked or false at the
end and see what comes up
and google makes it easy to get more
detail about the source of the
information
just click the three dots next to any
search result and then you can judge for
yourself whether the information is
trustworthy and if you want to visit the
site
a google search is meant to surface the
most relevant information for your query
but it's up to you to formulate that
query try a few different searches
and assess whether the information is
reliable and the whole point of
veritasium is to get to the truth
so i'm excited to encourage everyone to
think more critically about how we get
information i want to thank google for
sponsoring this part of the video
and i want to thank you for watching