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Home » Tesia Marshik: Learning Styles & The Importance of Critical Self-Reflection at TEDxUWLaCrosse (Transcript)

Tesia Marshik: Learning Styles & The Importance of Critical Self-Reflection at TEDxUWLaCrosse (Transcript)

Tesia Marshik

Here is the full transcript and summary of psychology professor Tesia Marshik’s TEDx Talk: Learning Styles & The Importance of Critical Self-Reflection at TEDxUWLaCrosse Conference. Dr. Tesia Marshik is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

Listen to the MP3 Audio:

TRANSCRIPT: 

There’s a few different versions — actually, many different versions — of learning styles. But probably the most common ones, the one that you’ve heard of, is that some of us are auditory learners, where we learn best by listening to things; and that some of us are more visual learners, where we learn best by seeing things. And that some of us might be more tactile or kinesthetic learners, where we learn best by actually doing things or engaging in physical activities.

How many of you have heard of them before? Well, the good news and bad news: bad news is, if you believe in learning styles, you’re actually wrong. And I’ll explain that in just a minute.

But the good news is that it’s not entirely your fault. This belief in learning styles is incredibly pervasive. It’s so common that few people ever think to even question it, right? It sounds so logical. It sounds so real.

But when put to the test, we found that learning styles don’t exist. And again there are tons of people that believe this. When we survey, for example, students and teachers, we find that something like 90% of them or over 90% of people believe that they have a learning style.

And teachers today — many teachers are still told that part of their job, in order to be effective teachers, is to figure out what their students’ learning styles are, and then to accommodate them for the classroom.