Writing Homework Help

I’m working on a writing discussion question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

Modern medicine owes much of its success and its reputation to the field’s reliance on evidence-based treatments.  Practices in education, however, have not been held to the same standard.  Only recently is there a push to measure educational practice with the same level of scrutiny as the medical field.  One extremely popular idea in education is that instruction should be tailored to a student’s learning style (kinesthetic, visual, auditory).  In fact, over 90% of educators adhere to the idea of learning styles.  Despite the ubiquitous belief in the aforementioned concept, the scientific literature provides zero evidence of the existence of learning styles.  In fact, scholars indicate that designing instruction based on different “learning styles” is a waste of precious instructional time. 

I know! I know! You might be thinking “What?!” right about now.  It’s true.  Despite the widely-held belief that we should be teaching and consuming content based on a pre-determined learning style is simply not true.  You’ve likely been told your entire career that we need to account for learning styles in order to maximize our students’ learning outcomes. 

Identifying inaccurate information in education is the first step to shaping the reputation of our field in a manner similar to that of medicine.  Also, it is your ethical responsibility as a teacher leader to halt the dissemination of inaccurate information and promote the use of evidence-based practices at every opportunity.  Today we are going to learn more about the science, or lack thereof, of learning styles.  Then, you will craft a written response describing how you would facilitate a conversation with your colleagues about the myth of learning styles (it’s a difficult conversation to have). 

Read the following article: Learning Styles: Where’s the Evidence? (Links to an external site.)

then watch the two videos below, research the topic on your own (for example – google “are learning styles valid?”), then generate a response to the discussion prompt below.

You have been tasked with debunking the myth of “learning styles” at your school.  In preparation for that discussion, provide a written response to each of the following questions:

1) How do we know that “learning styles” are a myth?

2) What is the distinction between “learning preferences” and “learning styles.”

3) If it is a waste of our student’s time to design instruction based on the mythological concept of learning styles, how should we be thinking about designing and deploying our lessons?