Teach Effectively!

Dan Willingham’s video about the lunchmeat “learning styles” (LS) has generated lots of discussion in the proverbial blogosphere. Matthew Tabor has a post with links to six sources. It’s pretty interesting that so much of the buzz about the video has focused on the putative auditory-visual LS. Dan pretty expressly aimed at an extended list of the things early in the video. But, A-V’s the one he used to make the points, and that’s probably good, because it’s probably the most popular of the bologna approaches.

Over on Ken’s D-Ed Reckoning, I dropped a comment on his post (and his post provides a good exposition on the subject of LS. In my comment, I promised to post an image showing the relative benefits of basing reading instruction on auditory-vs-visual LS. styles. It’s at the right. The yellow columns are standards for (left to right) weak effects (0.2), modest effects (0.3), pretty good effects (0.5), and outstanding effects (0.7). The purple bar is the effect size (0.144) that Kavale and Forness (1987) found when they analyzed 39 studies (205 effect sizes) of modality-based reading instruction.

For comparison, here’s another graph using the same format. Once again, the yellow columns show high one has to go to get weak through outstanding effects. The purple bar is the effect size (0.70) that Fuchs and Fuchs found when they compared conditions in which teachers used formative assessment (e.g., curriculum-based assessment) to guide instruction vs. not using formative assessment. They examined 21 studies (96 effect sizes). By the way, the green bar shows the effect size when teachers used a combination of formative assessment and behavior modification techniques (e.g., reinforcement); the blue bar is for formative assessment without behavior mod.

If you had a child in school, would you rather have the teacher using LS or formative assessment? (I’d take formative assessment plus b. mod.)

By the way, the standards shown by the yellow bars are just suggestive. They’re not consensus cut-points. There are issues with how high or large an effect size should be for it to be important, issues that are complex enough to deserve a post of their own. For now, just see the yellow bars as loose guidelines.

Link to Mr. Tabor’s post for more links. Link to the D-Ed Reckoning post. Link to the old “office” subsite from which I snagged the image shown here. Link to the post about Dan’s LS video.

Fuchs, L. A., & Fuchs, D. (1986). Effects of systematic formative evaluation: A meta-analysis. Exceptional Children, 53, 199-208.

Kavale, K. A., & Forness, S. R. (1987). Substance over style: A quantitative synthesis assessing the efficacy of modality testing and teaching. Exceptional Children, 54, 228-234.