Daily Bookmarks 01/28/2009
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Mind Hacks: The Straight Dope on Learning Styles
Interesting perspective on learning style theories, arguing that they may be useful because they help teachers become more aware of how they’re teaching, even if the research support for any given theory is lacking
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Learning styles seem intuitively sensible. Having thought about learning styles helps teachers improve their teaching and also helps increase their confidence and motivation. But there is no strong evidence that any one theory of learning styles is the best, or most true, compared to the others. Learning style theories can be useful without being true, and it isn’t clear that knowing the truth about the differences in how people learn will be immediately useful or produce a more useful theory of learning styles. This difference between truth and utility is a typical dilemma of psychology.
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Using a learning style theory is great, but you lose a lot of flexibility and potential for change if you start to believe that the theory is based on proven facts about the way the world is, rather than just being a useful set of habits and suggestions which might, sometimes, help guide us through the maze of teaching and learning.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.