SIO366: Learning Styles Are BS?!

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 367, or I don't know, maybe it's episode 1 of the reboot? Eh, eh, don't know, we'll keep 367. It's cool. But I hope you noticed the slight change to the artwork. Glorifying it a bit too much to call them Easter eggs, but if you look at it, it's different. There are different things. Things.

Today I have a really cool interview with an expert, learning styles and the fact that they might just be bullshit, are so many things we thought we knew. The era of the debunk, I guess. But I feel like it only is that way because, I don't know, the 80s and 90s and such were a lot of stuff we just decided we knew based based on really bad evidence. But I don't know, maybe we'll say that about now too. Who knows?

We get to that though, little housekeeping. Notice this was released Monday, the early AM, Sunday night for me, but Monday, Monday, early AM. The thing. For years, for years, I produced a billion podcasts, podcasts, largely by myself, and never missed a deadline. A while, while I was working a full -time job plus like overtime hours with that, I prided myself on that. Always released every time, never missed anything. Then we did OA and I never missed the deadline there virtually for the entire time, I think.

And then we switched to four episodes a week and I was making that work, even though it was kind of killing me, but it's getting all that done. And dann the stuff happened. And then I, you know, after a few months of being unreliable, I feel like I've completely decimated my reputation for being incredibly reliable in terms of content. And that sucks. I get it, but that sucks, but I'm here to tell you a fuck that I'm done with that.

I'm never missing a fucking deadline again, short of some sort of emergency, not doing it. And I'm going to tell you what that means, because it wouldn't be that big of a claim if I never told you what those did. I could just say whatever, I did was that a wizard is never late, nor is he early. He podcasts precisely what he means to. So Inquiries Only is back to its old twice a week schedule. That's Monday and Thursday.

So essentially, that's Monday first thing and Thursday first thing. That's that's all 100% set your watch to it. Although you always say that. And then it's like, what watch would you be setting? My watch says roughly Monday in the morning. I got it. So I'm ready. Time. Boop. Okay, good. Set. And there's Woke is going to be that. Now that's a deep research show for the most part. That is not going to be twice a week. No way.

That going to be a baseline of once a week and will be Tuesday, early a .m. Tuesday, first thing in the morning. Tell you more about where there is Woke on the actual release tomorrow, tomorrow, roughly 24 hours from now. Check that out. But this is July. The feeds are split. Are now cleft in twain. It's Serious Inquiries Only, expert interviews twice a week. Set your calendar to it.

Where There's Woke, baseline of once a week, might be some extras because I have so much stuff, but baseline of once a week, and that will be Tuesday, first thing in the the morning. So Monday and Thursday for SIO and Tuesday for Where There's Woke, hold me to it. Not going to miss a day. Never doing it again. I'm done. Hated that. I hate it. Missing releases. I went so many years, never missing anything, but this new format is really going to do it.

I swear to you, I know it may seem weird, but that is really gonna do it, I'll give you evidence of that. Today's interview was recorded in March. I know I wasn't full of shit when I kept saying I have great interviews for, I have great stuff, but it was, it's my ADHD brain. I know I say it all the time, but just, I many choices. And now I have no choice but to release the fantastic interviews I have banked.

I hope hope you'll enjoy it half as much as I've enjoyed it. One more quick thing on SIO. While for Where There's Woke bonus content is seems easy as could be. I have so much stuff, extra stuff. That's going to easy. Now with the split, the bonus content for Serious Inquiries Only seems a little trickier. Open to suggestions right now.

I'm thinking ideally the best thing would be if I could find some folks to do like like a science awful movies, you know, like if you're an expert in anything and you've seen a movie or like or a show, maybe episode of a show, and it's like, oh, the science is terrible, that would be fun. I love doing that format. I love kind of doing the God Awful Movies thing.

I just love doingthat with any movies, either on God awfulmovies or Law'd Awful Movies or Science League Awful Movies, it's just fun. I I really love doing it and having an expert, you or something to debunk the science or to tell us where it's right or wrong. That could be super cool too. I mean, we've kind of done that with Brian a little bit. So that's what I'm thinking, but that's a hard thing to do because I'm not the scientist.

So it's it's hard to just know what movie I could do, what science would, you know, what science is right or not. So that is what I am thinking, if there are any volunteers, please email thomasatseriespod .com, if that would be a thing you could do. There's no guarantees, obviously. That's thing. We'd have to see how it works and see if it's good. But that's what I'm thinking. Or I'll find something else. One way or the other, there is going to be good bonus content.

I am open to suggestions. If there's anything that you think would be good for the bonus content for the show, let me know. All I'm sure I'm forgetting 12 things, but that's good for now in terms of my housekeeping. I hope this house is properly kept. Now let's get to my interview, what the science actually says about learning styles. Oh, here and please support the show, pretty please, patreon.com/seriouspod. It means so much.

You will get access to that bonus content that I just mentioned and add free episodes, most please do so. I cannot tell you how important that support is on anything that I do right now. Vitally important. Seriously, look me in the eyeballs. Immensely important for lawyer reasons. Okay, here we go. I am now joined by Madeline Wilson -Fetro is how it looks like, but of course I forgot to ask you how to pronounce your name. So how are you doing today?

0:06:13 Madalyn: I'm good. You got it, surprisingly.

0:06:15 Thomas: All right. Cool. I didn't choke. All right, um, I am so excited. To speak to you today. Who was kind enough to fill out my dorky form. And I was really excited to talk about your topic. But why don't you introduce yourself a little bit to the audience and them your expertise and experience, experience, all that kind of stuff.

0:06:31 Madalyn: So I'm a learning science PhD student at the University of New Mexico. Not to be confused with regular Mexico, it is a United States. Time I travel, I get that.

0:06:40 Thomas: That's confusing to people, doesn't that mean people think there are two Mexicos then? Like they actually, Oh, there's another country of Mexico. Or do they think New Mexico is a city in Mexico? Is that what it is?

0:06:51 Madalyn: Don't know or they think it's a state in Mexico. Mexico, I got nothing.

0:06:54 Thomas: Oh, okay. Could be that. All Okay.

0:06:57 Madalyn: I So my research focuses on how people design in particular and how people learn while they design. So I mostly focus on how scientists and engineers design. That's stuff like power plants and chemical processes, that sort of thing. But I also do research looking at how things like artists design art and how instructors design lessons. Get you kind of meta there.

0:06:57 Thomas: So New Mexico.

0:07:24 Thomas: Yeah, that's interesting because the commonality there seems to be designed more than like learning per se.

0:07:31 Madalyn: So I look lot at design, but specifically how people learn as they go through that process.

0:07:37 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. Like if, the, if I think the example that threw me a little bit was like the, the art example. So what, what, studying? Who, who are you studying learning? What in that kind of example? Oh,

0:07:48 Madalyn: Often when I'm doing that, I'm looking at How people learn materials or processes as they they are making art. So I look at art students as they're figuring out how to do those things. Yeah, learning techniques, learning process, like how to process information, how to create different types of things.

0:08:03 Thomas: Okay, what you about mean learning like techniques or What about like an actor memorizing lines? Does that for qualify for what you're saying? Not exactly. Okay.

0:08:21 Madalyn: Really surprisingly, but only because my sort of focus, my big understanding of what learning is doesn't include memorization. This I means, learning science is kind of really weird because it's not something that has a sort of agreed upon, like basic theory. Like there's no like theory of gravity in learning science, which makes it kind of weird to work in. I'm what is called a constructionist, which means that I believe that fundamentally learning happens as you sort of build on top of what else you already know in your brain. There

0:08:31 Thomas: Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense.

0:09:02 Madalyn: Are people that believe that learning happens through mimicry or that ability to recite back. Is some people's understanding of how learning works in learning science research, but that is not mine because I disagree with that, primarily because I can't do that. So yeah,

0:09:21 Thomas: Well, there's got to be some amount of learning that could be that, though, right? I mean, if you have a teacher say, hey, do you sing the song like this and then you learn the song, right.

0:09:30 Madalyn: Absolutely. Think that that that depends on whether or not your ability to recite it is learning or whether or not you internalizing the song is learning.

0:09:42 Madalyn: I could learn a string of words in a language I don't speak. Don't know what those are. I'm just spitting out.

0:09:48 Thomas: That's actually incredibly difficult to do.

0:09:50 Madalyn: Is. But I could do it. But I'm not learning anything.

0:09:52 Thomas: Yeah, hypothetically. Exactly. Yeah. But That's one of the things I found so interesting about, I don't know, I guess learning in general. I and I run into it when I'm trying to remember what the hilarious things my kids say, but I can't because they use nonsense words. They speak in a way that doesn't go into my logical brain because it's so weird. And then when I find myself trying to recite it, it's like, oh, it was nonsense and I can'T remember exactly what nonsense. Cause there's no framework in my brain for like which kind of nonsense they said or whatever.

0:10:24 Madalyn: Exactly. And so constructionism means that you learn by like frameworks and it on itself rather than just desperately trying to remember it one gibberish word at a time.

0:10:37 Thomas: Yeah, and did you decide to get into this area?

0:10:40 Madalyn: So my background is in engineering, weirdly enough. As I was doing my master's degree in engineering, I started wanting to help out with teaching, with the idea that I was going to be a professor or a teacher or something like that. I was introduced to my advisor, who had a pretty large grant that just ended to help change how the department I was in was teaching undergraduates.

0:11:05 Thomas: So it was a question of money.

0:11:08 Madalyn: Is pretty big or was pretty big. For me, I was suddenly more interested in what the mechanisms of learning were, then teaching per se, or my engineering research that I was supposed to be doing.

0:11:10 Thomas: Hmm.

0:11:25 Thomas: Interesting. Because when you start talking about it, it doesn't strike me as the kind of area where someone Someone asked you when you were seven, hey, what do you want to do? And you're like, so I construction is version of, you know, it's kind of an obscure thing, but it is super interesting. It's just not something that you come across every day.

0:11:38 Madalyn: No, no. And it's also distinct from education, there's definitely a lot of overlap. I mean, I teach and so education is part of that. It, I tend to look at the distinction being education is more about the sort of how you teach and learning science is more of the mechanisms of how learning happens.

0:12:05 Thomas: How you learn? Okay. It's like how you teach versus how you learned, but you would think I you think both of those things need both of those things, right?

0:12:07 Madalyn: Right. And they're definitely interrelated. I think mostly it's just a question of where your research is focused more it being like topics. I

0:12:21 Thomas: Imagine people already saw via the episode title, but if they hadn't, I that would be a funny way to start the episode. It's so abstract. But no, the thing you sent and you filled out in the form was so interesting to me because it's about learning styles. And allegedly, you know, we're going to, well, spoiler alert, learning styles might be, might be bullshit. And that is news to me. And it's maybe news to a lot of people. And I'm so excited to learn about this. So, and then you can tell me how I'm learning about it precisely, like exactly what mechanism. Ism.

0:12:54 Madalyn: Very meta. So did you ever have to take learning styles tests as a kid?

0:12:58 Thomas: Don't think I took any learning styles tests, but it would be a constant, you know, like thing teachers would say, you know? Like, oh, everybody has a different, maybe you're a such and such style of learner. But I don't know that it ever really made any impact on how my particular schooling went.

0:13:13 Madalyn: Is what I'm gonna say.

0:13:15 Thomas: So you, did you?

0:13:17 Madalyn: Ton of them. Like Like, constant. The

0:13:17 Thomas: Really? Apologies for the impertinent question, but how old are you?

0:13:22 Madalyn: 27.

0:13:23 Thomas: 27. And what state did you go to to school in?

0:13:25 Madalyn: New Mexico.

0:13:26 Thomas: Oh, you are from New York. Okay. Sorry. I didn't know.

0:13:28 Madalyn: I am from New Mexico!

0:13:29 Thomas: So, okay. I think that probably has a lot to do with at least people's different answer. Yeah.

0:13:32 Madalyn: It super duper does.

0:13:34 Thomas: Yeah, so I'm 36 and I am in California. So yeah, no, I don't. But you would have thought California would have been one of the states that's like, all right, learning styles. We're all about it. Let's do it. Who's more of an emotional learner over here? But no, yeah, I do not remember anything tangible related to learning styles. I just remember it referenced constantly.

0:13:34 Madalyn: Yeah, I basically every year had to take, like, surveys about find your learning style. Yeah,

0:13:59 Thomas: Okay. Now that you, now that you say that, I think I had, I did that at least like once, but I don't remember when or where or what, but yeah. Like a survey type thing, not like a test of,

0:14:09 Madalyn: So these surveys often have these really weird questions. Uh, what book do you like reading for fun? A book with pictures or a book with words? What

0:14:19 Thomas: Interesting. Okay, so it's trying to assess if you're a visual learner

0:14:24 Madalyn: That is, that's where we're headed here. Um, my favorite of these questions, I have such distinct memories of, what's your favorite class, art class, music class, or gym class? I'm a terrible artist, a terrible musician, like PE, had, I don't know how To answer that

0:14:40 Thomas: So just yeah just na for you yeah whereas I actually liked all those classes I'm kind of the opposite I love I love all that stuff so I guess I'm in everything I'm an ambi learner and

0:14:40 Madalyn: Yeah right just refuse nice there you go perfect yeah so these tests when you get to surveys when you gets to the end of it they they spit out a thing, you're a type of learner. What that means, learning styles is generally defined as cognitive, affective, or psychological traits that serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to learning environments, which

0:15:11 Thomas: Then What the teachers do with that survey is probably absolutely nothing, because it was, it's probably like them trying to take that extra step of like, "Oh, I'm gonna be a great teacher," and then reality of trying to teach kids sets, it settles in, and it's like, "Oh, I'm one person with, you know, 35 fucking kids animals to try to teach. I don't have time to teach everybody in a different, different way."

0:15:30 Madalyn: Just trying to make sure they don't light their hair on fire. I so you get sort of one of two options, one of which is you make them take the survey and then And don't do anything with it. Or you split people up by their learning style and try to teach them to their learning style.

0:15:32 Thomas: Yeah. Did happen to you?

0:15:46 Madalyn: A couple of times, actually, in

0:15:47 Thomas: Split up, like, does that mean at the level of like, oh, we're in a different classroom or just like in a Different group within a class?

0:15:54 Madalyn: A different group in the classroom with the teacher, poor teachers running around wildly to try to keep it organized.

0:15:59 Thomas: You not feel like it helped you at all? What, First off, tell us your horoscope. Which kind of learner did you end up being? Do you remember?

0:16:05 Madalyn: I don't remember.

0:16:06 Thomas: Oh, you come on. This is the thing you do. And you're like, yeah, I don't really particularly remember what they said I was that fair oh

0:16:07 Madalyn: In part, I mean, I got annoyed by him pretty quick. And so I would try so hard to make all of them equal. They just couldn't do it.

0:16:22 Thomas: So they're like, here we're gonna split off into four groups and then, um, you're gonna stand exactly in between all the, do you remember any of the kind of like I don't know interventions or whatever like different techniques that this resulted in for

0:16:29 Madalyn: I'm just going to make their life hard. They don't have enough going on. I don't know.

0:16:38 Madalyn: Of them that I remember being pretty young, the visual group was like coloring pictures. The one was hidden musical instruments. I think the, like, kinesthetic one was doing jumping jacks. I

0:16:51 Thomas: Wait, what is the lesson in that, learning jumping jack? I don't understand. Okay.

0:16:55 Madalyn: They were trying to, like, if you're trying to memorize something, they were like, okay, you do it on the beat with the jumping jack. No.

0:17:01 Thomas: That makes no sense. What? Okay, that's even Stupider than I thought. I thought it was like, oh, you're visual, so if you, like, let's say I'm trying to memorize the, I donno, the capital of the states or something, and then if you're visual, you just look at the map or a word of the whatever and you memorize that way. If you're auditory, whatever, I dono what the types are actually, I have no idea. But if you're that, then maybe you listen to it and then that's how you remember. And if you, like, PE, then I don't know, what do you do, you go there? I don't know. But If it's just like you're going to do a task that's related to what your alleged learning style is, while the thing you're doing is pretty much the same, which is you're just trying to learn the thing, that seems weird to me.

0:17:05 Madalyn: I Mean.

0:17:44 Madalyn: It's super weird it's there's a whole bunch of learning styles, a bunch of them. So of the most common is this thing called VARC, which is visual auditory and kinesthetic is what we're talking about. Most people add an R to it. So they make VARP. So that's reading slash writing as fourth one. So the idea is that you learn best with your preferred sensory input, sort of your five senses. You'll notice that, exactly, no one ever says that they're a taste learner.

0:18:08 Thomas: Okay. A smell learner. Yeah. I bet I could learn some of the capitals based on smell though.

0:18:20 Madalyn: Or having to lick the capital, not awesome. And we're going to talk about a couple of them. Paper done in 2008 estimated that there are about 100 that you could, like, name. They think that there's only about 12 that are in any way close to being defined enough to think about. Of them is Vak and Vark. Another one that I will bring up here because most people have heard of it, which is Myers -Briggs, which ist technically a learning style.

0:18:45 Thomas: Oh, that's, oh, it is. Oh. I didn't know that.

0:18:47 Madalyn: Yeah, I mean, it's obviously like personality, too, but a lot of people use it as a way to understand if you need to learn with people or by yourself.

0:18:56 Thomas: You refresh me on the Myers -Briggs? I've probably done that a bunch of times, but what are the, is that the INTJ? IMDB, whatever. What are the variables again? I don't remember. What do you ever call those? Metrics or something?

0:19:03 Madalyn: Yep. So that is introvert, extrovert, then censor, intuitive, then thinker and feeler, then or perceiver is the last one.

0:19:12 Thomas: Okay. Well, that's solid. Interesting. Is that bullshit too? I've heard it's bullshit.

0:19:23 Madalyn: Is indeed bullshit.

0:19:24 Thomas: Okay. Gotcha. Mean, components of it, I'm sure, again, like introversion, extroversion or whatever, but right.

0:19:24 Madalyn: Bullshit what There's with a lot of these, the annoying thing is that there's a kernel in there, it's just all of the wrapping is bullshit, which so that's whether it's like if you're an extrovert you should learn in groups versus if you'RE an introvert you should learn by yourself.

0:19:37 Thomas: That's a learning style. How I mean, that's kind of fair. I did all my studying by myself, but also I think that was the ADHD because I couldn't pay attention class. So I don't know if that was related to introvert extrovert, but happens to hit both of those.

0:19:54 Madalyn: Mean, that's fair. Right, have preferences for being by yourself or being with people, but that doesn't turn out to be an implication on how you're learning. Just don't want to hang out with people. I don't know. I don't.

0:20:10 Thomas: I don'T it was a learn in a group setting. It was that there's no learning happening. It's just people just want an excuse to be together, right? There's no who who studying with anyone was just just an excuse to be with someone, right? Or is that just me?

0:20:23 Madalyn: Certainly learning and working together is a skill that nobody teaches.

0:20:29 Thomas: Guess I don't know. What is the point? Is there an advantage to learn together? I mean, I've I mean maybe it's just because of how I am and I always have to study for the test last minute by myself in the middle of the night, but I don't understand how learning together would really work short of going through a lecture from the teacher, which sometimes, you know, I guess, I would learn some stuff from that, but

0:20:46 Madalyn: I think it depends on how you define learning, Really right? Cramming for a test in the middle of the night. Of course, have never done that.

0:20:54 Thomas: All I do. I'm not even going to play coy. I suspect you're doing some sarcastic thing.

0:20:56 Madalyn: Me neither. Nope. Am indeed.

0:20:59 Thomas: That's literally all I've ever done is that.

0:20:59 Madalyn: I'm learning scientist and I cram. I'm not judging. And so it depends on what you're thinking about. So if I am looking at learning with design, Design is something that is often done the best with people. So you do design teams rather one person like working on design individually. Collaborative learning is what that's called. Actually has really good research to suggest that it works very well. Assuming that you don't just let rampant.

0:21:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:30 Thomas: Right. Well, now here's my next thought though. I kind of doubt, this is just my intuition. I kind of... the effectiveness of group learning in that way has anything to do with introversion or extroversion, or not much to do with it.

0:21:43 Madalyn: Exactly. Which is why Myers -Briggs is bullshit.

0:21:46 Thomas: Right? Yeah. Could see it going either way. I can see being like, if I like being by myself, just for forget learning, just in normal life, maybe being around people would put me more like alert or make me, you know, feel like more, I had to pay attention more and learn harder or something. I don't know. It I wouldn't like being with the people, but it could be more effective for teaching me stuff possibly.

0:22:07 Thomas: Myers -Briggs is kind of learning style thing and kind of bullshit, um, are a bunch of other kind of minor, varying levels of bullshit learning styles as well. Oh,

0:22:15 Madalyn: It's So there's... there's a bunch, um, is certainly the most common, um, the one that most people, if you get to take a survey in your class, that's probably what you're gonna have done, um, some other ones that are... are levels of relevant. Of them is... you may have heard this one too, which is the multiple, that's what that's called.

0:22:36 Thomas: Yeah well I do or wait is this emotional intelligence or no No.

0:22:41 Madalyn: So this is the like nature intelligence. That's the other one that I hit as a kid. Like do you like nature? Or is it, are you really want to kick a ball kind of learning?

0:22:47 Thomas: Why would that be two different? All right. That's fine.

0:22:54 Madalyn: I got nothing. I got nothing here.

0:22:56 Thomas: Yeah, it does strike me as like just putting things in arbitrary categories and then seeing if people have a preference for it doesn't really seem that like compelling. As okay, okay.

0:23:05 Madalyn: Overly compelling, but it turns out that it is super duper common. Just people in classes. A review done in 2014 by Paul Howard Jones looked at teachers in five countries, the UK, the Netherlands, Turkey, Turkey, Greece, and China, and found that 90 % believe that students learn better when instruction is tailored to their learning style. Right? I've checkmated myself.

0:23:29 Thomas: Well the checkmate you yeah yeah okay you came on here and just debunked your own debunk so anyway that's our show learning styles 90 amazing good stuff well

0:23:42 Madalyn: It's super, it's really, really common, but very few people have done actual good science on it, so it turns out it persists even though it is bullshit, so

0:23:53 Thomas: Then how do you know it's bullshit if people haven't done the good science on it, where, where you get that yeah

0:23:56 Madalyn: Summary Is that no, we know it's bullshit because nobody has shown evidence that it works, which is how we know things are bullshit generally, um, we say it's 100% real, I mean, I guess not, because it's sort of, you get to the the sort of Bertrand teapot thing. Like, I don't know, generally what we're looking for, if learning styles are real, what we would look for is at least one validated survey. We'll talk about that in then, a, we'd expect that survey to be used in multiple studies to find and find significant differences That if you were taught with the the method that matches your learning style versus the one that's not your learning style. Right. Welcome.

0:24:13 Thomas: Sure right Right this here okay yeah and Nobody, you're saying nobody's ever established that, or we going to get any bad science thingy debunking, or are we just going to look at the good science thing, he's telling us it doesn't work?

0:24:47 Madalyn: Going to look at both.

0:24:48 Thomas: Oh, OK, I love it. Learning style is science thingie based, so it should help. I'll never forget this lesson. Yeah.

0:24:54 Madalyn: You're the the multiple intelligence. Thinking first about the validated surveys, because if you want to do good science thingies, you're going to need validated surveys. Know you've talked about validated surveys a little bit in the past, but for those of us who have wiped that from our brain because math is annoying to do, every survey that you've ever taken has more than one question that measures the same thing.

Like I could, if I wanted to know your learning style, would be just to ask like, do you learn best when you learn through looking at things or sound or reading? You could just check which one was your favorite. Not a great survey. Survey. People instead ask multiple things that are trying to get at the same concept. So I can ask about that, like we were talking about, though, which book do you like better, or what's your favorite class?

And those are measuring the same thing, which is what your learning style is, right? In a validated survey, you expect to have the questions behave in a similar way. So if I checked that I like my class's art class, I would expect to also answer yes to, I like books with pictures. Identically, you expect people to be more likely, not

0:26:09 Thomas: So, I mean, it's just the process of trying to make sure your survey results are valid, because actually humans are incredibly annoying and difficult to find out stuff. They'll answer contradictory things, not even on purpose. Like, they might just answer contradictory depending on how you ask something or whatever. So it's about trying to making sure you're getting as accurate as you can in your responses, right?

0:26:32 Madalyn: And that we are measuring the thing we expect to measure. Like if you're measuring second graders, and you ask them what their favorite book is, and they all say pictures, that's measures how old they are, not what their learning style is so that's not measuring the thing we expect to measure yeah no that's that's fourth on the list perfect

0:26:36 Thomas: Mm -hmm.

0:26:51 Thomas: Yeah, my kids' learning styles is both Plus learning style. Is them? Yeah, there you go. Disney Plus Learning Style Kids. I guess they'll just have to watch Bluey forever.

0:27:00 Madalyn: Yeah no it's they're not allowed to read any books anymore process turns out to be really hard it's a statistical nightmare mayor. It's a people's jobs are just making and validating surveys. It's hard, but it's super important to do so can understand how seriously we can take data that comes out of surveys. So we expect validated surveys to exist for topics that that are really well studied, like, I don't know, off the top of my head, things that are popular, like learning styles, it

0:27:21 Thomas: Sure.

0:27:34 Thomas: Now, this is probably going to sound like an extremely dumb question to you. When you say validated, is that just the nature of the survey? Or is there actually some sort of, like, validating entity or something that stamps your survey and says this is validated?

0:27:50 Madalyn: Would be super awesome if they had a stamp person, because then I wouldn't have to do the statistics. That'd be good. But no, it's validated as a statistical process That tells people how good your survey is. To be fair, when people write learning style style, um, they're often not written in a way that makes it easy for them to validate, um, have like a really maximally effective measure, you want to go with Lickert scale, um, questions which so you get sort of five or seven levels between I hate this and I love this, those sorts of things.

0:28:01 Thomas: Okay.

0:28:22 Thomas: Strongly agree, somewhat agree stuff. I know. So you're saying that's a good way to do it? Because it's always so frustrating to me. Whatever the answer is, it's all in between two of them every single fucking time.

0:28:38 Madalyn: Not awesome. And it creates valid data, but they are very annoying to do. Out those are not the same ever. Good data and easy.

0:28:45 Thomas: Not the same as what? Oh, gotcha. Yeah.

0:28:48 Madalyn: Surveys are also 700 questions long, but I don't want to do that. I don't want to take a 700.

0:28:53 Thomas: Yeah. Who's going to sit through that? Yeah.

0:28:55 Madalyn: And so it's often a balancing act between are people going to finish it and can I I get good data, which is sort of the nature of studying people, right?

0:29:05 Thomas: Right. And how much money do I have to get a big sample and do blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.

0:29:10 Madalyn: Can I pay people to sit here and take 700 questions? That a much better way of doing it. You could go, how much do you like art class, say, and then go from love to hate, those sorts of things.

0:29:22 Thomas: All right.

0:29:23 Madalyn: These questions that are like, which class do you love, art class or music class or or whatever, those ones are harder to validate because it kind of garbles up the statistical data. Instead of having one question that goes to one construct, say, auditory learner, got to sort of parse it out from the one question. Solution to that would be to have these people that are writing surveys, write them in not terrible ways.

0:29:48 Thomas: Are you, are you trying to say that the only surveys that have shown this effect of learning styles are ones that were written badly?

0:29:54 Madalyn: Those are the only ones that exist, period. Validated or not. Thinking about that, VARC, we have a couple of came out of this. One in 2010 identified that their VARc survey was was congruent with the expected model. Their were pretty preliminary. Wasn't awesome. So they really were like, yeah, in their sections, not convinced that this was something that people should use on a wide scale. People tried in 2015 with a different type of analysis and found that there was some validity. The problem with that one being is that their sample size was

0:29:58 Thomas: Really? Well,

0:30:34 Madalyn: Teeny tiny for how complicated their analysis was and was also horrifyingly not representative. This was all British English marketing students, which is not a great place to go if you'd like to have this apply to anybody else.

0:30:35 Thomas: You go.

0:30:50 Thomas: I mean, assume I assume that like the theory of learning styles wouldn't would be such that it should be pretty randomly distributed throughout humanity, right? Or is there some reason that a given group of people would bias toward a type of learning style but

0:31:02 Madalyn: Issue with having non -representative when you're trying to validate the survey, is that there might be some things that about how you wrote your survey that impacts how people answer it.

0:31:16 Thomas: That makes sense so if that survey if it was like hello governor it'd

0:31:20 Madalyn: No, this seven -year -old in Louisiana is like, what?

0:31:25 Thomas: Exactly. What's tuppence? I don't know what that is.

0:31:28 Madalyn: And I don't know. And so that will really change what the results are. And done in 2015, which is not super recent. Nobody has opened till this point.

0:31:32 Thomas: Gotcha. Hold on. This learning style stuff is older than this. Like I experienced it in school and I'm apparently relative to you. An It's old shriveled man.

0:31:49 Thomas: Those nine years are key. Nine years. Let me tell you. Um, so in the nineties, I, I feel like, or at least early 2000. So like, what the hell was that based on? There wasn't a single study you're saying that before that, that even if it was a bad one, was the, wasthe cause of all this was the actual inciting incident of learning styles.

0:32:08 Madalyn: So learning styles have been around forever. I mean, there's some, like, Greek philosophy about people learning different. Um this really came to like a craze in learning circles with that vac with was first proposed in 1979, a couple of psychologists called Barb and Swassing, they wrote a book called Teaching Teaching Through Modality Strengths, like a communist propaganda book, but right.

0:32:17 Thomas: Sure.

0:32:37 Thomas: I was going to say, those are smart sounding words. It must be right.

0:32:41 Madalyn: Came up with those first three, the visual auditory and kinesthetic with they started that idea of like, if you make instruction different, people are going to learn better. Came up With this to try to explain why people learn different. Clearly not everybody in the same classroom or anything learns the same amount. Don't know about you, but I've been in classes that are like, everybody else is getting it and I'm so confused. Suck. One loves that.

0:33:07 Thomas: The kind of common man, every man response just be, well, some people are smarter than other people.

0:33:13 Madalyn: So this actually, in a lot of ways, is really good as a jump forward in the idea of learning, because before that, the idea was like, you're stupid if you don't learn as much. You failed this math test, you are an inferior. Not great.

0:33:27 Thomas: Yeah. Right. So if the learning styles thing ends up being bullshit, perhaps it was a, you nice attempt to, to come up with a better explanation than like, you're just dumb if you can't figure something out. Well, that's nice.

0:33:42 Madalyn: Exactly. It suggests that people can all learn. It's just we need to find out how they learn better. Yeah,

0:33:50 Thomas: Right. Okay. Well here's another question. I know we're, we're still in our debunking, but given that we've already spoiled that learning styles are bullshit, I guess exactly in what way are we talking? Is it that the the traditional learning styles proposed of auditory, visual, blah, blah is bullshit, but there are still different distinct ways that people learn, or is it that there's just no such thing as like any sort of categorizable differences in how people learn?

0:34:16 Madalyn: There is is there are learning preferences, which is I like to read more than I like to listen. But part of the debunking is people will say I learn more if I'm reading rather than listening. But if you do actual tests to figure out how much they're learning, there is no no difference.

0:34:36 Thomas: Gotcha. Yeah. Self -reporting is often not accurate.

0:34:40 Madalyn: So there are reasons that people learn differently for a whole bunch of reasons. And there's a bunch of learning theories about why that's the case. Generally, good practice, good teaching practice is good for everybody.

0:34:53 Thomas: Yeah, because like when classes in which I wouldn't learn and other people would. It's more, again, not to be a broken record, but it's more related to my focus problems than anything else that I could think of, I believe.

0:35:06 Madalyn: There's focusing issues, there is experience, There's, I don't care about this. This teacher is really boring. Are all sorts of reasons why you might learn differently. It's not just a, it's not because you have a static immutable style in which you learn. So

0:35:14 Thomas: Yeah, right. So you're answering that in terms of where did this all come from? So that wasn't, that thing you referenced, you mentioned the psychologist's name, I think it was. That wasn't a study or was it a badly done study? But it seemed like before you said the only studies that have been done where this like 2010 2015 or something right

0:35:44 Madalyn: And so the problem with a lot of this really early work is that they weren't studies, they were books proposing a theory, and so the book that they wrote, and books that people have written subsequently, including the guy that wrote the book about that added the R into VARK, all weren't studies. Those weren't really science. Those were looking at vibes.

0:36:10 Madalyn: And then writing a book about your vibes

0:36:10 Thomas: But well vibes are my learning style so

0:36:16 Madalyn: Right, it's the best learning style. Those aren't really studies.

0:36:21 Thomas: Yeah, uh, I'm scared and disappointed at how much of our quote-unquote knowledge as a, you know, society is probably just that. It's probably like some asshole with a book being like, you know, I stands to reason that, uh, and then they'll have like one or two anecdotes, and then that's like, like we've built a whole civilization on that somehow. I worry that that's too much. I'm not saying that's everything, but I worry that that is a lot of things.

0:36:44 Madalyn: Distressing. It's like, I'm a white, old white man, I definitely have a universal experience, science, as it turns out. So part of the problem is that most of the studies that are done that relate to learning styles are about what percentage of different things, like which learning styles, different percentages of the population are, with the conceit that learning styles are real. And so there's papers that read you that get published in reputable journals about what of nursing students are visual learners and so forth. That learning styles are a thing.

0:37:13 Thomas: Oh, right. Right, yeah. Would be called begging the question, I believe.

0:37:31 Madalyn: Is begging the question. Um if we actually want to look at our learning styles real you gotta test for our learning styles real shockingly I I

0:37:41 Thomas: Way. Get right out. I'm so glad we've got an expert on to tell us that if you want to know if a thing is true, do the study study about whether or not the thing is true. Mind blown. But no, I'm being sarcastic because that does seem to be an issue. You

0:37:47 Madalyn: Know you a lot of people that do research do not get over that bar, so gotta remember, so what that would kind of look like in the general sense would be, we measure people's learning styles, hopefully with a validated survey, and then we randomly assign them to a bunch of learning tasks. With different learning styles.

0:38:19 Thomas: There you go. Has this not been done? Come on. This hasn't been done. No one's done this. Why haven't you done this?

0:38:27 Madalyn: Just got here.

0:38:28 Thomas: I expect

0:38:28 Madalyn: I'll get right on it. So people have done a couple of those, but they all say that learning styles aren't real.

0:38:33 Thomas: Okay okay so they have been gotcha but in terms so that's so the ones you referenced in the 2010-2015, those were just the ones that seem to possibly establish that learning styles are real, and but they're bad, and but you're saying people have done this, but every time they've done it, it's been like, yeah, this is bullshit. Okay.

0:38:37 Madalyn: Yeah, right. Yeah.

0:38:53 Madalyn: The ones once from 2010, 2015, we're looking just at, can we get a survey about learning styles that doesn't suck? Having a survey that doesn't suck actually doesn't tell you anything about whether that thing is real. Just tells you that you can successfully measure something.

0:38:59 Thomas: Mm yeah the thing you could be measuring is, I mean, essentially nothing, but it could be related to like, okay, how do different people answer these questions about their preferences? And like some people would answer that they, oh yeah, I like to, you know, I Like reading better. Some people would say, I don't like PE better. And like, haven't done the thing of actually proving any sort of mechanism there. You're just collecting information about people's preferences. Differences,

0:39:20 Madalyn: Exactly.

0:39:34 Madalyn: Exactly. Part of it is because it's self -reported. So if I like books more than TV, I'm going to say I learn more from books. I can, we can consistently measure that if you have a validated survey, that doesn't mean that my learning style is reading. That slows us down. Is such a pervasive problem. And I just found this hilarious that there is a educational researcher and consultant who has actually put out a bounty for evidence that learning styles are real oh

0:39:42 Thomas: Yeah, oh, is this, like, the James Randy prize, but for this, for learning styles? You're going to get that one guy who bends spoons and be like, OK, how can I use my spoon bending to show learning styles? Because I want to collect a check here.

0:40:15 Madalyn: This it's this one's not as good of payout as the James Rendy one. It's about five thousand dollars now. Um, he has really, really specific requirements for what evidence will look like, including how controlled you need to have the different learning tasks. Can't have one that's super easy and one that super hard, which makes sense. Have to provide similar information, all of those sorts of things that we're looking at to have a good study. He's never paid out, much like the the spoon bending. That doesn't say that learning styles aren't real, but I do think that indicates that there's a little bit of an evidence problem here.

0:40:51 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:52 Madalyn: A Couple of people have done reviews of the evidence generally. The scientist named Pashler did one in 2008 and one in 2012, where he looked at, did anyone find any evidence? And he was pretty fair in his assessment of the potential benefits of learning styles, but he looked at the evidence and was basically like, I'm going to need you to test if this is real, not just can we measure. Because of that, there have been some more recent research to try to determine if if learning styles are actually real. 2016, a by Knoll and colleagues did a study where they looked at visual, excuse reading slash writing learners and had participants try to remember either a list of words or a list of pictures. Had 52 female students recruited for the study, which is very funny to me because the reason that they only recruited female students was to increase the likelihood of recruiting participants with a preference verbal, because they thought that women had more verbal learning.

0:40:52 Thomas: Oh, OK. Why did they want to increase that likelihood?

0:42:00 Madalyn: Were looking so that you kind of had an even amount, with their assumption being that men are visual, learners.

0:42:03 Thomas: OK. From Mars. Sure.

0:42:09 Madalyn: Exactly. Which tells you sort of where they were coming from here, that were also going into this with the assumption that they were real, but they found that the to do that recall, either words or pictures, didn't correlate with what their learning style was. No another study by Hussman and Lerolin published a paper in 2018 where they studied 426 anatomy students from 2015 through 2016, where they surveyed students about their learning style, looked at their study styles, and the outcomes of their anatomy class. Found that study styles didn't match their learning lifestyle, and that learning styles didn't correlate with success in the class, despite everyone being in that class together, which is interesting in part because that says that their learningstyle isn't even necessarily their preference in studying, But case, that actually didn't turn out to matter.

0:42:12 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:43:05 Thomas: Wait, how would we know it wasn't their preference of studying? If learning styles are bullshit, then their preference for studying wouldn't necessarily be how well,

0:43:14 Madalyn: The part that's interesting is that their learning style, visual learners or whatever, doesn't match their study style. Visual learners didn't study with diagrams or pictures. No and so that isn't even predictive of how they study it

0:43:18 Thomas: Oh, it didn't. Oh, okay. I guess I mixed it up. So it wasn't, I was expecting, and maybe my brain was autofilling and I'm getting trouble in my brain autofill sometimes. So I was expect that it's like, sure, these people may all study with pictures, but they didn't do any better when they were studying with pictures versus not. And you're saying that, no, we didn't even really get that because even though they should Should have been picture study people based on the survey results or whatever. They actually weren't even necessarily either of those. OK, cool.

0:43:59 Madalyn: Predict either of those things yeah Intuitively, I feel like a lot of people kind of get this, that learning styles aren't real. Like if I wanted to ask you, like, I want to teach you something, would you like words? Do you want to hear it in a podcast? Or do you want to do it as a dance? First question you're going to ask is, what's thing I'm learning? If it's a dance, I probably want to do It's a dance. If it's music, I don't really want to read words about the music.

0:44:23 Thomas: Yeah. A dance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, that's why when you set up the first thing and you're like the jumping jacks, I'm like, well, what are they learning? Are they learning how to jumping jack? Because then, yeah, OK, let's jumping jack.

0:44:43 Madalyn: Best kind of learning how to do jumping jacks is not looking at a picture of a jumping jack.

0:44:48 Thomas: It could be. I guess you'd want to study that. Like in theory, it could be, I guess.

0:44:52 Madalyn: Often the answer to that is that how should happen and in what context it works well is sort of based on the task you're learning.

0:45:02 Thomas: So And are you saying that basically, and everybody's not the same, of course, and humans are weird and funky and all that, but like, as far as we know, whether or not learning jumping jacks is easier from a picture of jumping jackS or from actually doing them, there is a fact of that matter, possibly, and there could be differences in what's better, but it won't really vary by person in a systematic way. It'll be more based on the nature of the thing you're teaching.

0:45:29 Madalyn: I mean, there's a lot of factors that go into that, but one of the largest factors is does this make sense in context context of the thing that you're learning. With the more complicated the task, the more sort of different ways you're getting information you need. So, like, I could maybe learn jumping jacks from pictures of jumping jackS.

0:45:44 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. Hmm.

0:45:50 Madalyn: But if I'm trying to learn how to build a computer, probably aren't going to cut it. I probably want to have someone explain it to me and also mess with it with my hands and

0:45:55 Thomas: Okay. Also do jumping. No, you wouldn't want to jump.

0:46:02 Madalyn: All hopping on one foot. Perfect. So you need, as things become more complicated, to have more ways that information comes to you than just, I'm a visual learner, therefore pictures are going to be fine. That sort of idea of matching the style to the topics is what we call situated learning, which really grounds it in sort of the context of the learning, rather some sort of external understanding of learning should look like. So that is one of the ways that we know that learning styles doesn't work, but also how learning actually does work.

People do learn things, shockingly and so if learning styles Aren't real. Something has to be real, right? Because learning does happen, despite the fact that no one's been able to figure out that learning styles work. And so situated learning is one of the ways that people learn, and one of the reasons people might learn differently depending on the context, or depending on how, how you present it. If you're a teacher who's trying to explain a human anatomy to somebody and they go, well, not they're learning it if I explain it. So what if I do it as a diagram and

0:46:46 Thomas: Prove it. Yeah.

0:47:15 Thomas: Hmm.

0:47:16 Madalyn: It works better? That's because that task was a visual task, theoretically, rather than those people that you're teaching.

0:47:21 Thomas: Hmm. People were visual learners. Yeah.

0:47:26 Madalyn: So that's much more general than just one person's, like, style.

0:47:26 Thomas: Okay. You saying this science, these surveys, these studies, whatever, those are pretty established link that between the of the thing you're trying to teach and how is the best way to teach it?

0:47:41 Madalyn: So that's a really well -studied and well -evidenced theory of learning.

0:47:46 Thomas: Okay. Let's focus on that then. Damn God it. Maybe that would be the thing to look at.

0:47:51 Madalyn: If only I could convince people to do that. That. A couple of other really common theories that help us explain how learning happens and how learning happens differently. Of them that's also really foundational and really well researched is called funds of knowledge. And funds, like having money in the the bank.

0:48:08 Thomas: What of knowledge? Funds. Oh, OK.

0:48:12 Madalyn: Was originally conceived as a way to think about how marginalized students come into the classroom with unique experiences that they then connect to what they're learning in the classroom, sort of fostering those connections helps people learn better. Like, for instance, a child like in their home life does a lot of cooking with their family, and then they come to class and they're learning fractions, that kid who's got a lot more experience with quarters of a cup can connect that to their home life and an easier time learning fractions. It

0:48:20 Thomas: Hmm.

0:48:50 Thomas: Mean, is that just kind of a fancy way of saying if have more experience with something in a certain way, it's easier to learn it?

0:48:57 Madalyn: Is, but it's not always a direct link. Sometimes it's, I have an experience experience with something that's important to me. If I'm talking about water, cycle, and I can connect that to the fact that my family grows food, I understand mechanics of the water cycle better because I connect it to something that is important tome. General, that was sort of how it started. The way that it's more generalized is through the idea basically that if you can connect things to other things you'll learn better, right?

0:49:33 Thomas: Yeah, that seems like obviously true, right?

0:49:37 Madalyn: Exactly and so one of the ways that people could learn differently is I don't have anything to connect this to and The person next to me has something that like related that they also know, which and that's one ofthe ways that that explains it it.

0:49:43 Thomas: Mm hmm. So that explains the difference in the ability to learn in a class. Class. Right. Not the fact that like, oh, this kid's just dumb, then it might be OK. They don't have the context to put it in necessarily.

0:49:59 Madalyn: Yeah. And so it's not that the kid is dumb. It's not that you really needed them to have jumping jacks. Of those things. It could just be you need to better connect what you're trying to teach them to the experiences that they have.

0:50:02 Thomas: Yeah.

0:50:15 Thomas: Just something they already know. Yeah, yeah. OK. Makes sense.

0:50:20 Madalyn: Really important theory of learning that helps to explain some of this is called distributed practice, which is one of the most well -studied mechanisms of learning, is basically, and we we mentioned this at the beginning, that you have to to learn something and learn something long term, you need to practice it in little bursts over time, which is why you cram for a test, you forget it 17 seconds later, no I I'm not I'm not arguing that mine I'm speaking from experience and so if you have more opportunities to practice than the person next to you you will also retain that information better

0:50:49 Thomas: Yeah, I never pretended that my cramming method was a good for for long-term learning. No, not at all. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:51:08 Thomas: Right, right. Is does this apply to, because I've, I've read some books just along the lines of, you know, music and stuff of, you know how, like the best ways to, you get better at an instrument. Does that apply to that too? Like those kinds of, is that anything you study? Cause that would be another very interesting topic to me, but I don't know if that's your area.

0:51:26 Madalyn: Not my area but there are people that do study that um other example is I don't know if you've ever been on Duolingo.

0:51:32 Thomas: Duolingo, but the other, I was on the other one for a little bit, but I didn't stick with it. What is that other one? Rosetta Stone, I think. I think I was on that one.

0:51:35 Madalyn: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes. There you go. Way that both of those work is asking you to go, okay, can you spend five minutes every day rather than for four hours one day? And It's

0:51:49 Thomas: Oh, and that's better. Oh, All right. Well, that's a cool bit of takeaway from this. It sounds like if you stick to those, then that might be a good way to learn a language. Okay.

0:52:06 Madalyn: A good way to learn anything, actually. If

0:52:08 Thomas: Shoot. I mean, you never know with apps and crap. I never, you know, like I, for all I knew, it was a terrible way to learn, but they wanted you to just log in every day for, I don't know, cause they make money or something.

0:52:18 Madalyn: I mean that could be the reason but turns out it also works yay depends

0:52:20 Thomas: Yeah. It's a happy coincidence. Yeah. What's the important time? Do you know if there's like an established time interval? I mean, obviously if I learned something for one second a day, every day, it's going to be stupid. But if I, you Know, there, is there diminishing returns? Turns? Um, there a sweet spot of time or does it just depend too much on what you're learning?

0:52:40 Madalyn: A lot on the content, um, and how complicated the content is. Um, you can't learn anything in a two-minute interval. Maybe that's probably not the best way to do it doing it one second at a time is probably probably not helpful. Generally sort of, sort of even at the, at the maximum, sort of once a week for months, that helps too.

0:52:50 Thomas: Right. But For how much time, though? Like, what I'm wondering. Like, is it, is it? Guess I'm, I know you can't get really give specifics because it depends a lot, but should I, in generalities, and when I don't worry, I won't hold you to it or anything, but should I feel like, oh, if I want to learn something and I have five minutes a day, that'll be good, or is it like, no, it's just not enough time, like you got to do like a half hour a day, but it's still true that you need the like overtime thing, you know, does, can you give us any generalities there? Is it just too hard to to generalize? Mm.

0:53:35 Madalyn: It's getting silly, like one, once per second, every two minutes, shorter amounts of time more frequently is better than longer time with more longer intervals. I

0:53:39 Thomas: -hmm oh Interesting. So even if you had an hour a day, let's say you've got an hour to a day to learn something somehow, which seems impossible in my life, but let's see, um, would would you then be like, oh, maybe I should do a half hour twice in the day or 15 minutes, four times in the day. Like, is there any sense of where that math makes the most sense for learning?

0:54:10 Madalyn: Know if I have a specific sense but often it is okay if I I could spend 15 minutes once a day or 45 minutes once every three days. Minutes once a is better.

0:54:12 Thomas: Good To know, that's like a genuinely useful thing, you know, because sometimes I could imagine it going either way. And again, maybe it could depend on the subject, but I do feel like for a given thing you're learning, there may be a threshold of time to really dig into it. You know, like if I spend minutes, but the thing I'm learning is so complicated that I actually can't really get through, for lack of a better thing, like one unit of knowledge, you know, like I can't really, maybe it's an elaborate proof or something, of a mathematics or something, like if you can't, get you have to at least be learning something in that interval of time, I imagine.

0:55:04 Madalyn: That is certainly the limit. It's difficult to learn things one second intervals at a time.

0:55:10 Thomas: Yeah if you were doing something like I don't know vocabulary it's not that crazy easy to be like, yeah, one word a day could work. And that could be a very short thing, right? It just kind of depends on what you're learning. If you're learned calculus, it's going to be like, you're going to need to dig in for a while to have learned something.

0:55:27 Madalyn: I mean, part of it is the repetition. So if I'm trying to learn one word, it, practicing that one word multiple times a day is better than sitting for half an hour repeating the word to myself. That turns Turns out the, like, word learning with little baby portions of a time on things like Duolingo is actually supported by science.

0:55:52 Thomas: That's super cool. I didn't know that. I love that. It's not always about debunking for my show or for any amount of learning. It is actually kind of important, especially because because when you've been debunked a few too many times, when, when treasured beliefs of that you might have have been debunkt too many days, then you get really addicted to the debunk, but it's actually just important. The bunk part, I don't know the, uh, no, the re -bunk just learning like, oh, you know, this kind of like well -established thing or not well -established, but like this well -known thing. Yeah. Turns out that's actually true. That's very useful knowledge as well.

0:55:53 Madalyn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:56:25 Madalyn: No, it turns out to be one of the things that people often get right, whether or not they do it because it's right or because it'S easy or get more ad money. I don't know.

0:56:33 Thomas: Convenient or something. Yeah, just to recap where we are, learning styles like, I don't know, jumping jack physical learning style, auditory thing, that seems like bullshit. But you're now kind of taking us through the ones that they're not those kind of learning styles, but they are sort of learning files, I guess. Or they're things about learning that are actually real. And so, we've got the, you sure to tailor it to the thing you're learning, sounds like is one important point, right? Like if you're teaching music, you're going to want to do that by hearing. It's, you know, that's a broad statement. And then the second one was what of distributed practice, meaning multiple times a day or a week or whatever is better than one long chunk. Okay, that'S cool. Any other useful learning styles or tips you got for us?

0:57:20 Madalyn: So there's this one other learning style that is the most evidence -based kind of it's that bar is pretty low, um this is a learning style that both has some validated measures and some amount of evidence. And we'll talk about why learning styles are still bullshit. I've not suckered you, this is not a long con. This one is called the Kolb learning style, name after someone named David Kolb, because that's not inventive. He has some, right,

0:57:50 Thomas: Look, at this point, he deserves it. If he's the first person, hey, I actually found a learning style and like you fucking amateurs, so give him his name. I'll take it.

0:57:59 Madalyn: It seems fair. He came up with it. This learning style comes from a 1984 book. Those styles were originally accommodator, converger, diverger, and assimilator, which is a very different kind of learning style. It's very different.

0:58:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:58:13 Thomas: Which kind are the Borg? Assimilators. Yeah.

0:58:18 Madalyn: You go. Perfect. So there's some really, like, theory -based concerns about this one. A lot of the foundation is left brain, right brain theory, which is also bullshit.

0:58:18 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. That's a whole thing.

0:58:31 Thomas: I People, hear that way more than the learning styles. People are very convinced that left brain right brain is a thing oh

0:58:37 Madalyn: Are, which is very funny to me. Very much the same idea as the, like... We only use 10% of our brains.

0:58:43 Thomas: God don't get me started on that oh

0:58:45 Madalyn: They really struggled to get the measure, the survey for this learning style system validated. But they eventually did. They have some validations of their third and fourth versions of this survey. And those are from 2005 and 2009, respectively. Last one has nine types. So, they're growing. It's like the Borg. They did find these ones that are statistically, statistically validated. A reminder, that does not mean they're real. Do. They have a genuinely validated survey. So there is some evidence, if they use that, that some of the learning styles do better on assessment, which is wild. Researchers using that validated measure found that people who think abstractly or with practical applications do better on exams in their classes, which is interesting until you recognize that those people had abstract and practical instruction given to them. And we just talked about how abstract and practicable might go into the category of you have to connect to things to to learn better, so

0:59:06 Thomas: Hmm Wait, are you telling us this is a not good science thingy, or I guess it's a mixed

0:59:54 Madalyn: It's actually turns out to not be um in That the learning styles is some evidence, but what they found that they're calling evidence of learning styles is just evidence of more general knowledge about how learning works. No,

0:59:57 Thomas: Oh Shoot, you shouldn't have let me intro it that way, I thought you were still telling us the stuff that was real. My fault.

1:00:15 Madalyn: Sorry.

1:00:15 Thomas: Okay I'll so this is more learning styles that are bullshit well

1:00:15 Madalyn: Sorry sorry correct there are no not bullshit ones

1:00:22 Thomas: Sorry mr what's his name what was his name sorry colb I tried to credit you earlier but now then take and rescind it well

1:00:25 Madalyn: Nope nope nope Yeah, this one still doesn't work, but ironically it looks like it works because it matches other types of learning theory that are actually more generally applicable, yeah.

1:00:39 Thomas: So it sounded like with that one they were statistically significant, but why were they still bullshit? Hmm.

1:00:45 Madalyn: They're survey is validated and two out of the nine are found to do better it

1:00:47 Thomas: Do does do better mean do better at what okay

1:00:54 Madalyn: Learn better on assessment, and this one was for whatever reason, these are all like medical ones, and so I think that this was nurses, they better on their tests in their nursing class, so

1:01:05 Thomas: Do, okay, so but what was the experiment, was it that you've divided people into different learning styles, we're just talking about a different set than before, and match their learning styles to something? Or are you saying they that if you studied a certain way, you did better?

1:01:21 Madalyn: They found people into their distributed them into their nine learning styles based on their survey and then matched their instruction to those learning styles and

1:01:33 Thomas: Is similar to how want to evaluate the visual auditory, blah, blah. I wasn't sure if we were doing that again, but just different things, or if it was like more general learning styles or just learning strategies that you were testing if they work for everyone, regardless of a personal kind of preference.

1:01:53 Madalyn: What they found was was that it was two out of those nine, if you match their learning styles, they did better. It turns out that those two learning styles are matched. The instruction that those people in those two Learning Styles got matched universal good practices for teaching.

1:02:01 Thomas: Okay, I see. Gotcha. So when they were trying to tailor the teaching, thinking, all right, we got to test if these learners learn this way, and we'll do that by tailoring the lesson to their thing. Turns out for two of them, they just struck on like universally good ways of teaching. Gotcha. That makes perfect sense. And it makes sense that you would do that. Like two out of nine actually seems low to me. It feels like you would stumble on better teaching methods with more than that. But OK, gotcha. So that's another BS one.

1:02:43 Madalyn: It Yeah. And just learning things about how generally learning happens.

1:02:51 Thomas: Gotcha. Well, wouldn't you? OK, call me crazy, but to do a good science thingy, wouldn'T you also have wanted to teach people the wrong learning style and see what happened?

1:03:03 Madalyn: Are correct. They did not do that, making it still a bad learning thingy.

1:03:05 Thomas: Ah, there you go. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right. Well, what's our overall takeaway? This has been very fascinating. It sounds like, again, as I already mentioned, the Duolingo method of learning stuff or whatever, a little bit at a time, seems validated. Let's see. Teaching based on the kind of the nature of the subject was good. There was also, let's see if I remember, there was also using a lot of different ways of teaching seemed good. Like a lot like, oh, let us do, let us tell you about it. Let us show you it. Whatever. That seemed good, right? Right. OK. Any other any other takeaways for us from this that I've missed?

1:03:39 Madalyn: So the other takeaway is that is hard, which Seems intuitive, but all of these sort of methods of trying to get people to fit into even boxes and make learning something that is just a matter of tailoring it to a type is never going to work because humans are hard and learning is complicated.

1:03:45 Thomas: Sure.

1:04:06 Thomas: There's also the takeaway of if you teach it based on something that a kid or whoever has more of a tangible knowledge of, like the cooking example you gave. Right. There's also that one. Sorry, I forgot that one making

1:04:15 Madalyn: Yeah. Yeah. Making it relevant to people.

1:04:18 Thomas: It relevant. There you go. Well, this has been very fascinating. Learning styles or bullshit. I don't want to hear that you're an auditory or visual learner, I guess. OK. Well, this has been delightful. Hey, is there anything you are wanting to plug at all? Any social media, any anything? Or were you just here to teach us?

1:04:19 Madalyn: Yeah, plug my advisor's grant. If people want to look it up, it's the frame project, like FRAME. It's a career award grant from the NSF. So if you look it up, my advisor's name is Vanessa Sevilla. We have a lot of our research about the types of research we do on her website.

1:04:52 Thomas: Right. Well, thank you so much. I guess I can't call you doctor yet, but hopefully sometime soon. And thank you. Thank you so so much, Madeline Wilson -Fetro, for coming on.

1:04:56 Madalyn: Not quite. You.