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.
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Multiple intelligences ain’t
Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences seems to occupy a special place in the pantheon of education memes. I was reminded of this when I read “Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius” by Christopher Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson’s essay—it appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the news source of record for higher educators—politely explains that sustaining Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory is not a good idea.
Rational analyses of the MI evidence by Dan Willingham and Lynn Waterhouse have shown that there are problems with both the theory itself (e.g., most of the eight intelligences are highly correlated, meaning that they are likely measuring the same “thing” for the most part) and its application in education (e.g., methods based on MI do not lead to better outcomes).
Mr. Ferguson’s essay continues in that same tradition. He makes a strong case for his conclusion that “Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences was a great idea and worth investigating. It’s just not panning out.”
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