- This video is about learning styles.
What kind of learner are you?
- Oh yeah, I'm a visual person
so I have to see things, yeah. - Oh yeah, same.
- I think visual learner.
- Visual.
- I mean, like, I remember formulas like auditory.
- I need to be like, interacting with the material.
- I like to learn by doing it 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 take it in.
I just gotta see 'em act it out or write it or something.
- [Derek] Auditory learners learn best
from listening to an explanation.
- Like in school, I was always engaged in the lecture
and that was usually good enough to pass a test.
- [Derek] Reading-writing learners learn best
from reading and writing.
- Like I can get pretty much anything
out of reading a textbook or something.
- [Derek] 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,
you know, 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 spacial 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 a broad strain
of thought in the recent Western tradition is,
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% believed
that individuals learn better when they receive information
in their preferred learning style.
- [Instructor] Just like every professor
has a different style of teaching,
you have a different style of learning.
- [Instructor] But when his teacher starts using visuals,
Johnathan finds it easier to focus
and understand the material
so he might be a visual learner.
- [Derek] 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 you 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's more interesting for me
to actually be able to do it.
- [Derek] How do you know that you're a visual learner?
- I don't, I just assumed.
- 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 VARK 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? (warm instrumental music)
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 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.
- [Derek] How many can you remember?
- I don't know.
- Hair, knife, duck, heart, butterfly.
- Apple, bicycle, guitar.
- There was a spider.
Did I say eye already?
- Trumpet, pear. - Pear.
- Butterfly. - Duck.
- Knife. - Boat.
- Heart. - Knife.
- Heart.
- I couldn't tell you the rest, that's all I got.
- [Derek] Most people could remember
only about five or six things.
- Yeah, yeah. - Six, six is not bad.
- All right.
- Six. - Six out of 10
which is not bad, right? - Oh, all right, yeah.
- That's a passing score.
Candle. - Oh.
- Candle. - Everyone forgets the candle.
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 10.
- 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 as you were showing I was 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, yeah.
So I guess I tried creating a story
'cause it's easier to remember a story
than just individual objects.
So I tried to tie it all into one story.
- This is all 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 key words
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 VARK 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 VARK 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 might 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.
- You already believe that learning styles is right.
When you have an experience the first think 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 gonna be words as well as the picture.
We're gonna 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. - Duck.
- Heart. - Heart.
- [Derek] 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% better.
Do you think that was easier?
- Yeah, yeah, 100%, 100%. - Yeah, with the words, yeah.
- 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 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.
(radio tuner chirping)
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.