Incorporating learning styles (visual learning, in particular) has been a growing trend in the academic and scientific worlds for years now but what brought about its burst in popularity and is there more to the idea than we’ve all been thinking?
In 1988, Dr. Richard M. Felder of North Carolina State University and Dr. Linda K. Silverman of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development published a paper which changed the way people looked at learning. Learning and Teaching Styles in Engineering Education delved into the idea that different people have different ways of successfully learning new information. “Well, of course they do” you might say now, but at the time this thought was fairly new and the researchers who were beginning to work on it (including Barbe and Dunn, just to name two) found themselves on a whole new frontier of educational thought without much of a leg to stand on in either the scientific or the academic community.
The work that Drs. Felder and Silverman not only lent some backing to the idea of different learning styles but also threw a spotlight on the mismatches between how professors were teaching and how their students would best learn the information being taught.
Our Educational Era
That was in the 80’s though, right? A lot of things have changed since then. Yet, these educational mismatches are nearly as common today as they were in 1988.
Sure, today teachers and professors have a much wider array of teaching tools at their disposal but at a certain point in a student’s academic career they eventually reach a point where the only way to continue their learning is through the same lecture and textbook routine which has always been a part of the educational experience. This naturally raises the question: “How can educators support better learning?” the answer to which now seems to be through a multi-modal approach with a particular focus on visual learning.
Visual Learning
Visual learning has been growing in popularity and usage for a few years now as more and more research suggests that a majority of people (65% according to Professor Bradford’s paper Reaching the Visual Learner: Teaching Property Through Art) display the best learning and comprehension when presented with visual prompts. This thought has driven educators to augment their work with content that’s much more “visual learner optimized” and has even led to the rise of visually based resources themselves (including this one named JoVE, which you might have heard of).
Everyone from psychologists to EFL teachers to physicists have started instituting more visually dynamic teaching techniques in their classes and labs in an attempt to provide better learning and student success for all their classes. But, does it actually provide for such a substantial improvement? Well, as with many scientific theories the debate continues whether Felder’s “Index of Learning Styles” or the related field of learning style-based education is good science and a good guide for educational trends in the years to come.
What is more certainly known though, is this: integrating more ways for students to learn new information allows for more students to successfully learn new information. Whether that’s the result of different learning styles, different levels of interest and enthusiasm, or a combination of a number of different factors is yet to be determined. But, through this one idea, we should find enough motivation to start rethinking how the education system works and start taking strides to make it as effective as possible for as many students as possible.