Learning Styles Don't Exist

Learning styles: real or imaginary? There have been many tests and studies performed on learning styles. Kinestheic, visual, and auditory are the different learning styles. There is also something called multiple intelligence, which is when you think more a certain way than the other. I definitely think there are different ways for thinking, but I do not believe that there is a better type of learning or teaching method over the other.

I think there are definitely different types of learning, but I agree with Daniel Willingham in his video, Learning Styles Don't Exist, and say that one person is not a certain type of learner over the other. All three styles of learning: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, all must be used in order to gain information. It's not helpful to test for learning styles, because the student is taking the information in for meaning, not auditory or visual aspect. The information you learn is not remembered by vocabulary terms, but by the quality of picture or sound the information comes from.

On the other hand, I do feel like different people find certain activities easier to learn from than others. This is where multiple intelligence comes into play. Some students prefer to listen to music, while others may prefer to look a the sheet of music. It all depends on their intelligence style. There are eight different intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, body-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, and naturalist. Many people use many of these intelligences in their learning, but some intelligences are stronger than the other. I am mainly body-kinesthetic, but I also am very strong in intrapersonal and musical. Every person uses multiple intelligence, but this doesn’t deal with anything in learning styles.

I definitely think teachers should use different types of teaching such as auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. An effective teacher is not one who stands in front of the classroom all day and lectures to his/her students. Teachers must include all the learning styles, because students need a variety of different approaches to s subject in order to fully wrap their head around the subject. Learning styles aren’t true in the way students are stronger in one than another, but they should be incorporated into everyday teaching styles.

Of course there are different ways of thinking, or else no person would be unique, but there are not better ways of learning over the other. All learning styles must be used in everyday teaching to improve the students understanding on a topic. Multiple intelligence is used to see how you think the best. Take the Multiple Intelligence Quiz for yourself and see how you think.

My strongest areas of multiple intelligence are kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and musical.