The Biggest Myth In Education

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