I was sure I had blogged about this before, but apparently, I hadn't: the issue of whether learning styles are a myth. Veritasium put out an interesting video last year about the supposed myth of learning styles. I admit I found the video hard to swallow because, in my experience with kids, there's definitely something to the idea that kids learn differently.
In my new book, I talk about the case of one learning-disabled student I worked with. It quickly became evident that he needed a special approach to memorize certain historical facts—in this case, a specific sequence of three events—and I hit upon the idea of having him pantomime the three facts, thus allowing him to use muscle memory to aid his retention. And the strategy worked! He associated the events, A, B, and C, with particular postures, and when he was allowed to strike the three poses, he did so in sequence and was able to tell me what those three events were.
This was most decidedly a kinesthetic approach to learning, and while I contend in my book that we are all, to some extent, kinesthetic learners, some of us are more so than others, and the same is true for the other styles—auditory and visual (the Veritasium video below adds the literary learning style called reading/writing).
Anyway, while I still balk, somewhat, at what the video below is saying, I'm slapping it up here to let you decide for yourself. I don't think the video is entirely wrong, but I do think there may be some nuances lost in the discussion, e.g., dealing with learning-disabled kids. The student referenced above was, to me, a clear-cut case of a kinesthetic learning style.
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