Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction?
How does the mind work—and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such gut knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?
Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this regular American Educator column, we consider findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application.
By Daniel T. Willingham
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Question: What does cognitive science tell us about the existence of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners and the best way to teach them?
The idea that people may differ in their ability to learn new material depending on its modality—that is, whether the child hears it, sees it, or touches it—has been tested for over 100 years. And the idea that these differences might prove useful in the classroom has been around for at least 40 years.
What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality. In this column, I will describe some of the research on matching modality strength to the modality of instruction. I will also address why the idea of tailoring instruction to a student’s best modality is so enduring—despite substantial evidence that it is wrong.
article continues at link:
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/summer2005/cogsci.htm
Re: Ask the Cognitive Scientist
He’s got many excellent points (and of course I wish he’d brought up my favorite soapbox - that absurd idea that if you have trouble with processing sounds, you should pretend that the alphabet isn’t phonetic).
It really does make sense to be aware of a person’s strengths and work from those, especially if the weaknesses are significant; not how “most of teh time” it doesn’t matter. LD kids are exactly the ones who youcan’t apply “most of the time” to.
There’s also a huge benefit to just thinking about how you learn and applying what you know - though hte benefits disappear if it turns into “I won’t be able to learn here because I’m a visual learner and the teacher talks to us.”
Re: Ask the Cognitive Scientist
One point that we can’t overlook is how does the student best demonstrate what they have learned? That is when the options for various “modalities” need to be considered. Does the student do best with an oral presentation, a quality powerpoint presentation, an artistic representation, etc.? This is when an understanding of different learning styles is important as there is no one best method for communicating what students know and demonstrating that knowledge.
It is important to remember that learning is both input and output. Just my 2 cents.
Excellent article!
Everyone here should read this and take note. Another myth busted.