Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Have you ever had someone try to explain something to you a dozen times with no luckbut,

  • then, when you see a picture, the idea finally clicks?

  • If that sounds familiar, maybe you might consider yourself a visual learner.

  • Or, if reading or listening does the trick, maybe you feel like you're a verbal learner.

  • We call these labels learning styles, but is there really a way to categorize different

  • types of students?

  • Well, it actually seems like multiple presentation formats, especially if one of them is visual,

  • help most people learn.

  • When psychologists and educators test for learning styles, they're trying to figure

  • out whether these are inherent traits that affect how well students learn, instead of

  • just a preference.

  • Usually, they start by giving a survey to figure out what style a student favors, like

  • visual or verbal learning.

  • Then, they try to teach the students something with a specific presentation style, like using

  • visual aids, and do a follow-up test to see how much they learned.

  • That way, the researchers can see if the self-identified verbal learners really learned better when

  • the information was just spoken aloud, for example.

  • But, according to a 2008 review, only one study that followed this design found that

  • students actually learned best with their preferred style

  • And it had some pretty big flaws.

  • The researchers excluded two-thirds of the original participants because they didn't

  • seem to have any clear learning style from the survey at the beginning.

  • Plus, they removed outliers from the data if they thought they wereextreme,” without

  • defining exactly what that meant.

  • And, they didn't even report the actual test scores in the final paper.

  • So ... it doesn't really seem like learning styles are an inherent trait that we all have.

  • But, that doesn't mean that all students will do amazingly if they just spend all their

  • time reading from a textbook.

  • Instead, most people seem to learn better if they're taught in several waysespecially

  • if one is visual.

  • In one study, researchers tested whether students remembered lists of words better if they heard

  • them, saw them, or both.

  • And everyone seemed to do better if they got to see the words in print, even the self-identified

  • auditory learners.

  • That preference didn't seem to matter.

  • Similar studies tested whether students learned basic physics and chemistry concepts better

  • by reading plain text or viewing pictures, too.

  • And everyone did better with the help of pictures.

  • So the question of whether or not you're a visual learner could best be answered with:

  • "Well, yeah, kinda.

  • But so are most people."

  • Thanks for asking, and thanks especially to all of our patrons on Patreon who keep these

  • answers coming.

  • If you'd like to submit questions to be answered, or get some videos a few days early,

  • go to patreon.com/scishow.

  • And don’t forget to go to youtube.com/scishow and subscribe!

Have you ever had someone try to explain something to you a dozen times with no luckbut,

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it