"Other ways of knowing," aka Different Cognitive Styles

[Igel]

7. This is one of those areas where a suggestion in the scientific literature ...

Led to a lot of iron-clad conclusions in the educational and other communities.

Rather like a conversation I had with an English professor. I was a linguistics grad student. He was into Whorf. And said that everybody knew that Whorf was right, since his work with Navajo proved his point.

I said that pretty much nobody in mainstream linguistics thought Whorf had a leg to stand on, that his Navajo work was pretty much discredited, and that every study that showed that even the weakest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis failed the replicability test.

Same with things like "phonemic awareness." A meta-analysis of 300+ phonemic awareness studies showed that two passed methodological muster. Most claimed to teach phonemic awareness but taught phonics and tested phonics. Along the way they also failed to control for vocabulary growth, which is implicated in the view that phonemic awareness is an emergent phonological property once there's sufficient number of phonetic tokens of a large enough number of lexical items to be processed and draw conclusions. Two studies that remained standing dealt with Hebrew or English. One found some value in teaching phonemic awareness, but not a great amount. The other found that teaching phonemic awareness actually delayed student progress.

Same with "learning styles." Not a lot of cognitive work that supports it. Lots of educational research that assumes it, has shitty methodologies or research protocols and which manages to prove it. The little cognitive work tht supports learning styles essentially says everybody learns every way, but for some people there's a slight advantage in one modality or another. Usually a few percentage points difference. For a very small number there's a larger percentage. However, after years of training some people manage to shut out the learning styles that they're convinced can't work for them and don't even try--and then fall behind or let the use of that modality atrophy.

Had one student, literate and smart, proudly shut down because she was a "kinesthetic" learner and could only learn by doing. Then I watched as she memorized a bunch of dance moves she only saw once, without moving, and recited back all the contents of a popular magazine article that she had just read and hadn't acted out. "Self-deluded" isn't the right word. "Manipulative" was. Visual, aural, all the learning styles were there--until it was something she had to struggle with. PV = nRT in chemistry--the ideal gas law.

(Same kind of "stuff" about right/left brain. Do you know how much language, a "left-brain" process in most righties, occurs in the right brain? And what about lefties, with fairly well distributed language faculties? Then there's the fairly good research showing that musicians "hear" music much more "left-brain" than right brain, not that most people don't do both? Yeah. Pop science, popped science, pop corn, all pretty much the same. If it makes money for the seller.)

Seems I'm still cranky.