Learning styles (don't exist)

We can be short about this. There is no evidence that personal learning styles exist. There is, however, evidence that it helps to present information in all possible ways.

To understand what I mean with that, we first need to define passive and active learning. These are trivial definitions, don’t worry. But they help analyze a situation and how effective it will be for learning.

Passive vs Active

Learning is passive if you’re not actively doing something to receive the information. Learning is active when you are.

Examples of passive learning are …

• Lectures
• Podcasts
• Watching a video

Examples of active learning are …

• Reading (though not the best)
• Writing
• Giving your own presentation or lecture
• Doing exercises
• Playing games

As expected, you want to be on the active side as much as possible. Why do you think I wrote all these tutorials? Yes, I want to share knowledge and help people. But writing these articles was usually just my way of learning something new.

It’s one of the great paradoxes. To learn something well, you need to teach it to others. But those others won’t learn much from it—as it’s passive for them.

Now you see some of the reasons why school is so ineffective. It’s focused on lectures. In recent years, the only “change” to the system is that they started modernizing. What did they do? Give all kids a tablet! More screens! Explain everything with video! It’s sad to see, as it just makes the learning even more passive.

It’s not “terrible” to do some passive learning. It takes less energy, there’s more of it (especially if you’re in school), it gives people the false sense that they’re doing great. Don’t be too harsh on yourself, but the majority of learning should come through active methods.

In the ideal world, we’d have lots of great games around any topic :) But until then, passive learning is sometimes the only way.

How to communicate information?

When people have a personal “learning style”, they often mention a specific way of information transfer. Like,

• Speaking
• Text
• Pictures
• Video/Animation
• Sound

Humans have many ways to convey information. The most suitable method depends on the information. Teaching someone how to write through sound is unwise. If you want to teach what a molecular structure looks like, use a picture, not some wall of text describing it.

That’s the first step: don’t stick to one style for everything, pick the best thing for the topic.

But, if possible, take the second step: supply information in all possible ways.

This accelerates learning. You associate the same information in many different ways. You automatically repeat the information, creating a stronger memory of it. One method might click for you this time, another might not.

This also works the other way around. If you’re a graphic designer, chances are you have more neurons in your brain about visual stuff. So, seeing a picture of something will generally help you understand it faster. But if there’s text besides the picture as well, you also improve your understanding of information through text. Because now you’ve seen the same thing in both ways and can connect them.

What’s the lesson? Don’t stick to one technique or information channel. Try to include them all and pick the best one for the job.