Top 10 Reasons to Write a Blog Post Debunking the Learning Styles Myth
To honor David Letterman soon after his sign off, I’ll use his inverted top-10 design.
The following represent the Top 10 Reasons to Write a Blog Post Debunking the Learning Styles Myth:
10. Several scientific review articles have been published showing that using learning styles to design learning produces no appreciable benefits. See The Debunker Club resource page on learning styles.
9. If you want to help your readers create the most effective learning interventions, you’d do better focusing on other design principles, for example those put forth in the Serious eLearning Manifesto, the Decisive Dozen Research, the Training Maximizers Model, or the books Make It Stick, How We Learn, or Design for How People Learn.
8. There are already great videos debunking the learning-styles myth (Tesia Marshik, Daniel Willingham), so you’re better off spreading the word through your own blog network; through Twitter, Hangouts, and LinkedIn; and with your colleagues at work.
7. The learning styles myth is so pervasive that the first 17 search topics on Google (as of June 1, 2015) continue to encourage the learning styles idea — even though it is harmful to learners and wasteful as a learning method. Just imagine how many lives you would touch if your blog post jumped into the top searches.
6. It’s a total embarrassment to the learning fields (the K-12 education field, the workplace training field, higher education). We as members of those fields need to get off our asses and do something. Haven’t teachers suffered enough blows to their reputation than to have to absorb a pummeling from articles like those in The New York Times and Wired Magazine? Haven’t instructional designers and trainers been buffeted enough by calls for their inability to maximize learning results?
5. Isn’t it about time that we professionals took back our field from vendors and those in the commercial industrial complex who only want to make a buck, who don’t care about the learners, who don’t care about the science, who don’t care about anything but their own special interests? Do what is right! Get off the mat and put a fist in the mouth of the learning-styles industrial complex!
4. Write a blog post on the learning-styles myth because you can have a blast with over-the-top calls to action, like one I just wrote in #5 above. Boy that was fun!
3. There’s some evidence that directly confronting advocates of strong ideas — like learning-styles true believers — will only make them more resistant in their unfounded beliefs. See the Debunkers Handbook for details. Therefore, our best efforts may be to focus not on the true believers, but on the general population. In this, our goal should be to create a climate of skepticism in terms of learning styles. You can directly help in this effort by writing a blog post, by taking to Twitter and LinkedIn, by sharing with your colleagues and friends.
2. Because you’re a professional.
1. Because the learning-styles idea is a myth.
Insert uplifting music here…