 Hi, my name is Tracy Tecajoma Spinoza and this is a video on the learning styles myth. It's meant to talk about neural myths as an opportunity for teachers' professional development. I'm a professor at the Harvard University Extension School. I teach a course called the Neural Science of Learning. It's an introduction to brain health and education. And I am associate editor at the Nature Partner Journal of Science of Learning. And I've also taught all levels of education from preschool through university and also an adult education. And today I want to do two basic things. I want to really encourage you to think about a way of using neural myths as a form of professional development, how this really should be a part of all teacher's basic knowledge. Then I want to use the learning styles myth as an example and leave you with a big reflection. Learning styles are not the same as the theory of multiple intelligences and I just want to make that big distinction using the evidence. So the learning styles myth is based on an idea that people are either visual learners, auditory learners, or kinesthetic learners. This learning style related to your sensory perception that you prefer either visual auditory or kinesthetic learning. Now this is not to say that you cannot develop a cognitive preference for one of these styles because if after all you know when you're in third grade and I tell you you're a visual learner you do nothing more than look for visual cues around your world right and so you can become a more visual learner. You can favor that kind of sensory input but it doesn't mean that's what your brain would like. Some other people have extended this idea to even go from you know visual auditory kinesthetic which sort of made a little bit of sense because it has to do with senses but then they've lopped on here this idea of reading and writing. Not sure exactly where that came from and other people have gone even further unfortunately to try to pretend like these things are associated with specific brain areas. I just want to say you know the things on the periphery here looking to include a lot more variety and novelty or have more active or physical activities in class or thinking very hard about how you create or design the learning environment all of those things are terrific and I really hope they do happen. The main problem here is that they're pretending that all of this is underscored by research that says that learning styles is a real thing and this becomes even more discouraging in education when we think about all the money that goes into promoting this idea of learning styles and even you know surveys or tests that think that in 20 questions they can tell you what kind of a learner you are and based on that teacher should craft teaching interventions based on that particular you know auditory visual or kinesthetic preference that's a little bit off and the main problem with this it gets to the heart of all learning myths all myths do harm I think that we share the first rule with physicians that above and beyond anything we just do no harm that means if the information does not have substantial evidence behind it we should not go in that direction the worst thing is that this also takes away resources from funding things that we know are actually better interventions and it also distracts from really learning how the brain actually does learn right in a very short response and I know we could go on for several years discussing how the brain really learns but in a very short answer basically you have to perceive your world Aristotle knew this thousands of years ago right you you perceive your world through all of your senses and basically your brain picks and chooses among the things that input that it receives and it tries to see if you have any kind of existing memory for the new sensory input or stimuli and if you do you can connect onto that memory and you can reinforce that memory or you can actually invest energy and truly learn something new this synaptic communication either because it's reinforced neural pathways or it's new neural pathways occurs between all the neurons in your brain and it's enhanced by familiarity practice and repetition and if there's enough repetition you can get a strengthening of the myelin sheath which speeds up the electrical and chemical signals in your brain so that you can actually retrieve information faster and be able to use it in new contexts and so all this is just to say that your brain is constantly trying to make sense of its world using all of its senses not just one or another and not just favoring one or another and so the main reason this is so sad is because all of these sensory inputs are indistinct neural pathways in the brain and basically by reinforcing multiple pathways you would give yourself the opportunity of being able to retrieve information in a greater variety of ways rather than just through a single sensory pathway so again not only is this myth wrong but it is damaging because it keeps people from perhaps living up to their potential for learning by shutting down the other pathways in the brain for creating important memories for new concepts in learning just step back for a second and think you know very very simply how is this true how could we ever get into believing that about kids I mean look at this little boy here getting hugged by his little sister what kind of learning style do you think he has impossible to say right this guy is taken in the whole world through all of his senses and so we just want to remind teachers that your brain adapts to what it does most and one of the saddest things about learning styles is that kids get locked into thinking that they are only meant to be able to learn through one of these sensory modalities and in doing that we deprive them of understanding their world in a greater variety of ways so many of you might be saying but I am a visual learner I am an auditory learner I am kinesthetic it may very well be that you have become that because you've rehearsed that particular neural pathway more than others but that's not really what your brain would like right and it's really clear that in early childhood education we're actually pretty good about calling attention to using all the senses but um thank goodness for people like Costa and Calak who remind us in things like happen to mind that part of understanding your world part of being a critical thinker part of learning to maximize your own potential as a learner is gathering information through all of your senses and so we hope that you as teachers will begin to reject that myth and if you don't believe me let's look at the literature over the past dozen years there's been hundreds of articles that really refute the idea burn pastures spent a lot of time trying to determine what evidence is there for learning styles because it's so popular right then we started getting more pushback just stop propagating this learning styles myth there is no good scientific evidence behind it despite that though it is thriving even in higher education where some freshmen are actually told that they should take this learning styles inventory before selecting their majors that's really scary right what we really find out though is that a lot about learning styles has a lot to do with taking the little things that we do know about ourselves that we reflect on and sort of exploiting those to say that okay that categorizes you into a type of learner which is really unfortunate because it really does limit you right others aside from the original proponents of the idea began to try to test the theory and followed kids who had been blocked into being visual kinesthetic or auditory learners across learning trajectories to see exactly how they fared and being categorized in that way did nothing to benefit their eventual learning outcomes and the myth still persists even through the 2020s we still have people applying the learning styles myth despite the number of people that call for it to be tossed out and that money could be better used in other places perhaps one of the best summary articles comes from a passion learning colleagues that tried to summarize for the American science and public interest publication what evidence actually does exist for and against learning styles and what do we really know about this information and bottom line is that they could not understand this huge contrast between the enormous popularity of this particular intervention and the lack of credible evidence which they found to be striking and very disturbing and so on the whole of it there's a lot of better ways to invest resources and perhaps the first thing we have to do as teachers is appreciate the complexity of human variability there's a lot of different kinds of kids in our classrooms and we have to embrace that we have to embrace their differences and embrace the idea that they may be learning in very different ways so the second half of this is that I really want to call attention to the idea that learning styles are not the same as gardener's theory of multiple intelligences learning styles is a myth whereas Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is an incredibly useful psychological theory applied in education very successfully in my book on neuro myths I do call out the fact that Howard Gardner himself says the theory of multiple intelligences was never meant to be a neuroscientific theory and that's okay basically with an excellent psychological theory not everything in education has to be supported by neuroscience unfortunately he did contribute a little bit to this confusion because he listed eight criteria for creating those intelligences the first one being a little bit confusing to people the idea that there was a space in the brain for that particular intelligence that really kind of threw people off even though it was countered by point seven and eight where he said no really the evidence for this comes from experimental psychology and psychometric findings in education and so yes there was a little bit of confusion caused in the early years of multiple intelligences and in later years he made a big point of letting people know that he was not meaning that and intelligences in one part of the brain he really understood the complexities of understanding language in the brain or math or music he understood all of those things the problem was that he didn't think it was worth overburdening teachers to explain or disaggregate them into their smaller parts and in his research he really does point out that there's so many sub elements or sub processes that are part of each one of those intelligences and at least he numbers them at least 50 to 100 different micro modules of understanding for each of these different intelligences that he was labeling for example if a kid is particularly good at mathematics for example he has a really keen understanding of symbol to magnitude to be able to compare number quantities right but they also have an ability to understand the patterns of the way mathematical formulas are or organized or to see different types of categories of numbers that might be positive and negative or to understand how non-numerical symbols work in to formulas like for example or how parentheses work into different equations and things like that and so all of these sub elements which are distinct neural networks in the brain or in language how you might have this symbol to phoneme symbols to sound processing also have to incorporate working memory to know how to read through a whole sentence and not forget what happened at the beginning of the sentence by the end of the sentence or how you order words and subject verb object and that kind of a structure all of that understanding those are different neural networks in the brain and so he knew this he understood this and he did call this out in his publications as being sub processes or micro modules of things that are occurring in these areas he also saw a benefit in not overburning teachers with a lot of the neuroscientific evidence because he didn't think that that was what was really important and the evidence bears out his 1999 2000 articles that really call out the great differences in different types of language subsystems or mathematical subsystems in order to understand how these distinct neural networks in the brain comprise each of these different intelligences another error related to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is unfortunately some people have taken this idea to be there's eight intelligences now if I don't have one I can substitute one for another and Gardner never said that he basically said that it's really important to understand and value these distinct types of intelligences and we can all get better at all of them but it's not like if you don't have music you can just get extra good at interpersonal you know intelligences that's not what he was saying at all and what he did say though is that all of them independent of your starting point could get better and so it's important to accept and to understand that intelligences in Gardner's theory are not fungible you cannot replace one with the other I just want to end by just saying there is a need to really celebrate this idea of multiple intelligences because the initial motivation if I would have to guess um that Gardner had for actually putting this out there is to take away this focus from a binary perception of intelligence you know you're either smart or not smart or you're intelligent or not intelligent because we have these single measures of intelligence tests that tell us that he wanted to actually celebrate the idea that maybe there are multiple ways of becoming smart or being intelligent or having value in society as opposed to these one-off binary measures that we had back in the 60s 70s and 80s so all of this is just to say that the theory of multiple intelligences is not backed by neuroscientific research but that's okay it's a great psychological theory and it has nothing to do with learning styles I hope if nothing else you guys take that away from this talk today the learning styles myths along with other types of myths have really begun to be displaced thank goodness thanks to new kinds of research that we have out there we now finally have longitudinal studies I've only had formal education since around the 1870s 1880s so we finally are now looking at people across their entire lifespans and what happened in their schooling and and what worked and what didn't work for which groups of people right we also have international comparative studies and that's allowing us to separate out what are human types of things that are involved in learning and what are things that are highly influenced by your cultural context we also have a methodologically comparative scales thanks to the work of john haddy where we can now look at things that are quantitative and qualitative and put them on a similar scale to measure their effect sizes and really choose what are the things that really have a great or better impact on changing learning outcomes learning styles is not on there by the way and finally we also have better information about the brain thanks to this growing area of new technology and so we are able to finally take this innate curiosity that many teachers have a few asked teachers across the board everybody wants to know a bit more about the brain but unfortunately many of the things that we've adopted are neuromythical at their foundations they do not have evidence behind them and oftentimes people will believe them simply because they've been around for so long but we really feel that designing educational experiences without an understanding of the brain is like designing a glove without an understanding of the hand this is leslie hart saying nearly 40 years ago trying to pull our attention towards this idea that your brain is the organ of all learning and teachers need to know a bit more about it so we believe in this process of getting rid of the neuromyths sharing the handful of things that are actually true for all human brains for example neuroplasticity or the fact that all new learning passes through this filter of prior experience there's only six things that are principles and 21 things that are tenants tenants are things that are also supported by a lot of evidence but there's a huge range of human variation for example we all know that sleeping and dreaming are really important for learning but how much sleep is needed by each individual can have a huge range of human variability so we have to know our students well before we can make recommendations there similar to motivation motivation is vital to learning but what motivates you doesn't necessarily motivate me right so we have to understand each individual kid and then we have to put all of that within our cultural context the context of our countries our societies our schools before we can actually come up with instructional guidelines so we hope that you'll follow through and try to get rid of some of these other neuromists that might exist we just want to point out the final challenge here and that is the energy that's involved in learning something new there's something called heuristics which are kind of shortcuts in your brain and your brain is the most energy hungry organ you have in your body and so basically it's very natural for your brain to try to save energy so when you perceive the world through all of your senses your brain has to decide am I going to spend a lot of energy and learn something new with this new information or am I just going to use what I already know low cognitive load and just go to my go-to place of prior knowledge instead of thinking that it could actually be something new and different if you decide to invest that energy you'll spend it paying attention and creating new memories so that you can actually turn that in to learning in the long run but even that new learning is subjective to bias right we have to be really clear that all of us are born with very innate biases about how we think individuals learn what intelligence is made of and so we tend to lean into those things instead of review the evidence and so I invite you to please take the time to look at the evidence and to think very hard you know where does intelligence come from and how does the brain really learn before you jump to conclusions about the interventions in your classroom I point out a couple of reasons that neuromists exist and if you feel that you're culpable of one of these things try to get around it okay this really will improve our teaching profession a lot of times people just want simplicity you know teaching for dummies tell me to do x and I know why will happen we just know as great teachers all of you guys know that that's just not true we have to appreciate the complexity of the human brain another group of problems that cause neuromists is the lack of scientific literacy teachers don't get enough research skills in their formation to be able to sort out the good information from the bad we spend a lot of time in the area of confirmation bias the way we think humans learn is what we apply to our choice of interventions in the classroom when some of those ideas might not be supported by the evidence there's also a very evil group of reasons that we believe in neuromists and these have to deal with commercial ventures people selling you the idea that this is a brain based something or other or that this particular type of music or this type of gamification will improve your intelligence be very very wary of those things anything that sounds too good to be true is usually too good to be true perhaps the biggest area of problems for teachers is that the popular press the general television the magazines newspapers flash a lot of really clever headlines at us that make us think some things might be true about the brain when they're really not supported by evidence either they're conducted on animals or they're based on old technology or maybe one study showed something I just saw something last week where they happen to be doing a brain scan of a guy as he died and they gives a little bit of insight about how your life flashes through for your eyes while they have one study and I've seen a dozen articles already written about it which is pretty interesting so you know is there enough evidence to really say this is how all humans experience death for example right there's another large group of problems that occurs by correlation versus causation just because two things happen at the same time or together doesn't mean one caused the other so we have to be really careful about that and this idea of absence versus existence you know we do something in the classroom and we say hey he stopped doing that so you know the the behavior is now absent therefore there's an existence of a good theory my intervention work well how do you know that I mean there's a whole lot of variables that go on in all of student learning so we have to learn to isolate variables and really see what is really having an impact on what right there's also a lot of over generalization of findings as we mentioned before but it might not be true for the kids in your class right so you have to really compare studies that look at similar populations there's also far more studies that are conducted on adults than on children and so we have to be really careful about over generalizing the information we have about adults does it really match to kids right and finally the biggest problem we have is that things can be true in a lab and maybe with rats but maybe they're not the same and true in our classrooms there's only recently been new technology where people can actually wear have these wearables which can measure electricity as well as blood flow and and we can get a sense of when people get into sync during certain learning interventions and real-life classrooms that's very very new 2018 so we are just now beginning to have this information the last and really unforgivable reason that people believe in neuromus is simply because everybody else around them is believing them and they don't dare to question they think if a lot of people believe in learning styles or if the whole school purchased this package of learning styles there's got to be something to it question question authority question whether or not that was really the right decision okay just because everybody's doing it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do we have this handout if you'd like to see it on the learningsciences.com under the resources on steps that we can guide basic research on the part of teachers to choose information to make sure that it's on their type of student population that it is a match that it is high quality evidence we hope that basic research becomes a part of all teacher formation in the future so and a thank you for listening and as a final reflection to sort of make this stick think to yourself if there were three things we mentioned today that you didn't know before and if there's two things that you really want to continue researching you're curious about now and maybe one thing you'll do differently in your practice thanks for doing that and if you have any questions don't hesitate to get in contact take care