“In summary, experienced educators take learning styles into account by
using a variety of instructional modalities.”

Whether or not there are specific, inherent styles or styles that change or styles that are different for different types of learning, the key is that a good educator will present material in several different ways and will note which are most successful, either for individuals or for the class as a whole.

A variety of instructional modalities. Not an all visual or an all anything classroom.

I’ve followed this issue to some degree because my nephew has Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism), including some hyperlexic patterns. He learns exceptionally well via words but needed special classes to learn how to interpret faces. He did well in high school — except when asked to write about himself — and aced his SATs. He’s now at a UC majoring in computer science.

Special ed enrollments in Silicon Valley don’t reflect an estimate that 10 to 30 percent of students are on the autism spectrum. If you mean that quite a few Silicon Valley kids are nerds with poor social skills, well, that’s true.

Neuroscience does support differentiated learning patterns, and has done so for about a decade. In The Telegraph’s typical sensationalist style, the emphasis is not on research findings but rather on opinions. It is painted with a broad and inflamatory brushstroke. The “learning styles” noted are not the “learning styles” that emerge from neuroscience.

The Baroness is a brilliant scientist, and has a fantastic gift for putting complex ideas into comprehensible explanations. The Telegraph’s reporting of her observations, however, lacks context. Asking a kid if he prefers to listen, draw, or act out a scene is not the same thing as using established cognitive learning patterns to help teach a kid. The Baroness is known to be in favor of the latter, and wrote extensively on the subject in her book.

There is a big difference between “learning styles” picked by a kid and “learning styles” based on observing a kid.

Here in Silicon Valley, the number of students exhibiting the Austism spectrum has been variously predicted to range from 1 in 10 to 3 in ten. The spectrum includes Asperger’s as well as a variety of autistic expressions. Some people with this genetic pattern demonstrate hyperlexia. Many think in pictures rather than words. Often, these people focus on a single aspect of something rather than comprehending the big picture. With a classroom containing 30 students, you may have 9 kids who understanding something more readily if it is first shown in a graphic format. Similarly, these kids can often express an idea through a graphic form more quickly than they can through spoken or written words. That goes along with thinking in pictures. They may work best by looking at an image, reading silently, and then ending with an oral discussion (their weakest area). They benefit from “picture notes” during lectures. Interactive Notebooks work well for them.

In contrast, one of the recent reading patterns that is emerging is that students with violent home environments often suppress visualization as a survival mechanism (similar to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome survivors). These kids train themselves to rely on auditory input. They shut out visuals. They also forcibly reduce active engagement with the external world (not unlike Autism’s pattern). The bottom line is that they can read words on a page, but they do not make mental movies of what they read. They avoid that visualization process, and have conditioned themselves to do that. Frequently, low socioeconomic backgrounds and visualization suppression go hand in hand.

These kids have to be taught to mentally picture what they read. Lindamood-Bell strategies help there. These kids have a terrible time with reading comprehension, as you may well imagine. In inner city schools with high poverty levels, as many as two thirds of a class may suffer from this problem. These kids may need to hear the story read aloud to them while they wrestle with drawing pictures of the events in the story. They then follow that with reading the story for themselves. Finally, they may be ready to write about the story after a third silent reading. That sequence plays to their strengths.
It also means the class moves MUCH more slowly than a class where the students do not have this issue.

There is then a third situation here in the Valley that overlaps with both of the above conditions. A kid may be wrestling with a second language, and he or she may have a very weak command of his or her first language. It is pretty common to find city kids here who don’t know a wide range of adjectives and verbs in either their native languages or in English. Up to seventy percent of my classroom has fallen into this category at times. Often, these kids also suffer from a lack of visualization skills as mentioned above. Some of them may have never been outside of the downtown area. They may never have smelled the ocean, even though it is a twenty minute drive away.

Their oral vocabularies are very limited, but even those are more extensive than their written vocabularies. It is not uncommon to find that the parents of these kids are functionally illiterate in both English and the native language that is spoken in the home. When working with new vocabulary terms with these kids, it is often best to begin by having them “act out” or watch a dramatization of a term. They see it first, then they hear it, then they write about it. The cycle is repeated several times. A month later, these kids will have a far better recall of the term than their peers. That is kinesthetic learning.

Unfortunately, it is also as slow as molasses. The biggest things holding these kids back are a lack of vocabulary and the inability to retain information through visualization. They may be five or six grade levels behind in reading.

Teachers have to see beyond the surface level to perceive what might be happening when the kid thinks. If “visual learning” or “auditory learning” or “tactile learning” surfaces as the best way to help a kid get an idea, then it should be used. It isn’t selected because the kid likes to draw pictures. It is used to help the kid get the information into his or her brain through a style that “sticks”.

Has anyone tried administering them to the parents instead?

i.e. “Your child understands best when…..”
or “Your child understands instructions best when…”

In the elementary grades, parents may actually have a better idea of what their child is like than their child does……

Why?

And even if everyone agreed that learning styles exist and have an effect on learning what difference would that make?

If you think so then you’ve got a hypothesis. Go forth and construct an experiment or make some predictions that your hypothesis informs. If your hypothesis does some nice predicting then, huzzah! you won’t have to bother with consensim. You’ll have the juice.

The beef is that the proponents of learning styles prefer to build consensus to determining the truth. That may be fine if you believe that the consensus is the truth but not everyone is that willing to surrender their credulity. Believing, as highly regarded as it is in some circles, doesn’t make the tide rise.