Val, my DD was actually directed by a nationally known virtual schooling organization to "complete the VARK survey about learning styles"
every one of the nine years that she was enrolled with them.
It was complete nonsense.
For an unpacking of that beastly "tool", please see Kevin Smith's blog posts which pick apart some of the more specious claims about "learning modalities and styles."
http://learningstylesevidence.blogspot.com/2012/02/paper-review-sensory-modality-used-for.htmlThe main problem, as Kevin notes
in this post is that;
As with the previous paper I reviewed by this author, he is not examining the existence of learning styles. The assumption has been made that they exist. His goal is to link learning styles to class performance. In his introduction, he makes the following statement:
“…when teaching physiology to a diverse group of students, the most thorough and successful strategy is to present information using multiple learning styles.”
Notice the choice of words here. He does not say that the most successful strategy is to present information via multiple sensory modalities or in multiple ways (which there is some research to support). Instead, the wording includes the term “learning styles.” This is a pretty strong statement to make. Is there any evidence provided for this statement?
This is the major problem with a
lot of work published in this area. As a scientist, this sort of thing drives me positively batty when I try to read papers written by behavioral science and education experts (er-- or so-called experts, perhaps).
I've only got Princess Bride quotes to fall back upon at that point. "Associated."
This word...My favorite of Kevin's posts is this one:
http://learningstylesevidence.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-meta-analysis-of-vak-pre-vark.htmlto which I can only add--
Let me introduce a little thing that I'd like to call, ohhhhh, just for fun, say-- "Null Hypothesis." Because
every puzzling thing EVER in this field is nicely summed by assuming that it might be that the null hypothesis is actually correct.
Too bad that nobody publishing in this field ever considered that their basic assumptions (that learning styles even EXIST, or that they might make any difference in terms of learning) might simply be bogus.
