Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Articles
  • Op-eds
  • Videos
  • Learning Styles FAQ
  • Daniel Willingham: Science and Education Blog

Some new data on learning styles

6/18/2018

 
It’s been 13 years since I wrote about the lack of evidence supporting learning styles theories in American Educator. My editor thought it would be good to review the evidence published since 2005 and write an update. To be honest, I wasn’t that keen on the idea, as I’m pretty sick of writing on this topic. (I've written pieces for several other outlets since 2005.) But she was right—there are some new findings of interest.  The whole article is open access, and you can find it here. What follows is a brief summary.
  1. The best known review (that of Pashler et al in 2008) prompted a small rush of new studies. Like previous studies, many of these were poorly designed. I identified 16 studies that were interpretable. Three offered support for two different learning styles theories, which I suggested indicated these theories merit further investigation. Thirteen studies did not support styles theories. In short, this review leads to the same conclusion that previous reviews have. There are many theories, but none come close to the standard of evidence we'd want before advising teachers to revise their practice to align with the theory.
  2. What’s new: Previous reviews have consistently shown that people believe they have a learning style, but only recently has evidence emerged showing that people will act on that belief, recoding information to be consistent with their style, if given the chance. This conclusion is tentative (there are only a handful of studies showing it, but the studies were very tightly crafted) and it only applies to a couple of learning styles theories. Acting on your learning style does not bring any benefit—you don’t do the task any more efficiently.
  3. There are, however, substantial task effects. That is, you’re much more successful doing certain tasks verbally, and treating other tasks visually. The cost or benefit of using one or the other type of processing is the same, whether you’re a “verbalizer” or “visualizer.”
 
I close the article with some considerations for the classroom, focusing on these task effects.

The "Debunking" of Hart & Risley and How We Use Science

6/3/2018

 
The recent kerfuffle concerning Hart & Risley (1995) and the 30 million word gap offers an object lesson in science, the interpretation of science, and the relation of science and policy.

Let’s start with the new science. Douglas Sperry and colleagues sought to replicate Hart & Risley, who reported the 30 million word gap—that’s the projected difference in total number of words directed to a child by caregivers when comparing children of parents on public assistance and children of parents in professional positions.  Sperry and his team claim not to find a statistically reliable difference among parents of different social classes.
​
Twitter was quick to pounce:
Picture
Picture
Picture
​Coverage from NPR made it sound like Hart & Risley had been debunked, with the headline “Let’s stop talking about the 30 million word gap.”

But the Sperry report doesn’t really upend Hart & Risley.

First, Sperry et al. claim that the Hart & Risley finding has never been replicated. I am not sure what Sperry et al. mean by “replicate,” because the conceptual idea that socioeconomic status and volume of caregiver→child speech has been replicated. (The following list is not offered as complete—I stopped looking after I found five.)

Gilkerson et al (2017)
Hoff (2003)
Hoff-Ginsberg (1998)
Huttenlocher et al (2010)
Rowe (2008)

None of these is an exact replication---they have variations in methods, population, and analyses. The same is true of Sperry et al, and funnily enough that study has a fairly significant difference—they didn't include a group of professional parents which is key if your main concern is the size of the gap between professional and public assistance parents.

It’s also worth noting that Sperry et al speculated that their results may be more representative of how parents actually talk, because the researchers used an unobtrusive recording system. Hart and Risley (and most other researchers) had a researcher observing parents and children, so perhaps parents in different SES groups reacted differently in the presence of researcher, the guess being that poor people might clam up, or the wealthier might show off by talking more. I'll leave alone the assumptions underlying that speculation, but I will point out that, first, I doubt observer effects would count for much because the observations occurred over the course of years; people get used to being observed. Second, Gilkerson et al (2017) used the same unobtrusive system that Sperry did and observed the association of SES and caregiver speech.

Another odd thing about the Sperry et al paper is their emphasis on bystander speech (i.e., speech that is not directed to the child but happens in the child’s presence.) This is odd because multiple studies indicate that child *can* learn from such speech, but more often learn little or nothing (e.g., here and here).

Sperry points out that in some cultures children are seldom addressed directly, yet learn to talk. But maybe children in those cultures learn “if someone’s talking, I should listen, even if it’s not addressed to me because they may say something that’s important to me.” In most households in the US, if you’re not being addressed it’s less likely that the speech is important to you, so the child likely does not redirect attention from whatever he or she was doing to the speech.

So all in all, I don’t think this failure to replicate overturns Hart & Risley, coming as it does in the face of several successful replications. As to whether the gap is 30 million or some other figure…I don’t know, maybe somebody thought the absolute value mattered. I doubt any psychologists did. We would care about the predictive power of the caregiver speech. On the whole, there’s still pretty good reason to think there’s an association between SES and child-directed speech from parents. (For more on this issue, see the recent blog by Roberta Golinkoff and her colleagues.)

BUT thinking that there’s pretty good evidence for the association is not AT ALL the same as thinking it ought to influence policy. There are two issues here.

First, do we understand this phenomenon well enough to intervene? Second, should we?

In answer to “do we understand enough?” I’d say “no.” The volume of words is the variable you hear about most, but it may not be the most important. It may be the conversational back and forth that matters. Or the diversity of speech. Or the gestures that go with speech. And oral language is only one contributor to vocabulary size and syntactic complexity. Maybe we should intervene to get more parents reading to their children, or better, using dialogic reading strategies. At the very least, I’d like to see a small-scale intervention study (not just a correlational study) showing positive results of asking caregivers to talk their children more, before I would be ready to draw a strong conclusion that volume of caregiver talk is causal to children’s language capabilities.

The second question—if we were pretty sure we knew that a factor is causal, should we intervene?—is much more fraught. As I have considered  at length elsewhere, questions like this are outside of the realm of science. You’re contemplating using science, but whether or not to intervene is not a scientific question. It’s a question of values. You are seeking to change the world. That brings costs and the promise of benefits. Will it be worth it? It depends on what you value.

That’s what people on Twitter were responding to on this issue (some explicitly, some implicitly)—the assumption that parents in poverty ought to parent more like middle-class parents. Then their kids would be successful…according to middle class values.  That conclusion entails the obvious corollary that parents can eliminate any disadvantage their child has, so if they don’t, well, it’s no one’s fault but their own.

I agree with this argument to a point. The prospect of using science to tell people how to parent makes me very uneasy.

On the other hand, should we fiercely defend parenting practices in the name of cultural equality or because we don’t want to let powerful institutions off the hook if we know those practices put children at a disadvantage in school, and later, in the job market? (Reminder, I don’t think that such evidence currently exists on parental speech volume.) Wealthy parents keep pace with what researchers suggest will help children flourish, and then defend the right of parents living in poverty to use parenting practices that put poor children at a disadvantage? In a long series of tweets (in which she raises many of the criticisms of the Sperry et al study that I raised above) Twitter user @kimmaytube closed with this pointed comment
Picture
What is the role of a scientist in these difficult application issues? For better or worse, I have come to what seems the obvious resolution: give people the fullest information you can and let them decide. 

People who are concerned about the impact of proposed applications of science will have on low-income communities and individuals raise valid points, which they sometimes undercut with rash claims about the invalidity of the scientific studies.

I’ve seen this repeatedly on the subject of grit and self-control. Again, there are very legitimate questions to ask about the values that underlie the assumption that we should make kids more self-controlled and/or more gritty, and questions about the costs to children and institutions should we try to intervene that way. These are separate issues than questions about the scientific standing of grit and self-control as explanatory constructs.

​Twitter notwithstanding, I encourage you to bear the distinction in mind. 

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    RSS Feed


    Purpose

    The goal of this blog is to provide pointers to scientific findings that are applicable to education that I think ought to receive more attention.

    Archives

    April 2022
    July 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    December 2015
    July 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012

    Categories

    All
    21st Century Skills
    Academic Achievement
    Academic Achievement
    Achievement Gap
    Adhd
    Aera
    Animal Subjects
    Attention
    Book Review
    Charter Schools
    Child Development
    Classroom Time
    College
    Consciousness
    Curriculum
    Data Trustworthiness
    Education Schools
    Emotion
    Equality
    Exercise
    Expertise
    Forfun
    Gaming
    Gender
    Grades
    Higher Ed
    Homework
    Instructional Materials
    Intelligence
    International Comparisons
    Interventions
    Low Achievement
    Math
    Memory
    Meta Analysis
    Meta-analysis
    Metacognition
    Morality
    Motor Skill
    Multitasking
    Music
    Neuroscience
    Obituaries
    Parents
    Perception
    Phonological Awareness
    Plagiarism
    Politics
    Poverty
    Preschool
    Principals
    Prior Knowledge
    Problem-solving
    Reading
    Research
    Science
    Self-concept
    Self Control
    Self-control
    Sleep
    Socioeconomic Status
    Spatial Skills
    Standardized Tests
    Stereotypes
    Stress
    Teacher Evaluation
    Teaching
    Technology
    Value-added
    Vocabulary
    Working Memory