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First published in Polish by Piotr Maczuga

I recently came across an interesting article by Paul Kirschner (Open Universiteit Nederland) and Jeroen J. G. Van Merrienboern (Maastricht University) entitled: Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education.

The authors critically examine three pervasive urban legends about the nature of learners, learning and teaching. Obviously, we are talking about educational and psychological research here. The three legends can be seen as variations on one central theme, namely that it is the learner who knows best, and they should be the controlling force in their learning. The first legend is that learners who are digital natives know by their nature how to learn from new media and that, for them, the 'old' media and teaching/learning methods no longer work. The second legend is the widespread belief that learners have specific learning styles and that education should be individualised and tailored to learners' preferred styles. According to the third legend, learners should be seen as self-educators and be given full control over what they learn and their learning trajectory. 

^{Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash}

Digital natives

From the previous paragraph, it is clear that the authors adopt a critical stance towards these legends. This is because we tend to recognise certain phenomena as real by rationalising what we see. In 2001, Marc Prensky coined the term digital natives to refer to a group of young people immersed in technology all their lives. Prensky described this generation as having distinct and unique characteristics that differentiate them from previous ones, and in doing so, he created a myth of their advanced technical skills and learning preferences, for which traditional education is unprepared. However, the problem is that this was a casual observation by an American media researcher and computer game designer, not a result of any research. To make this notion more appealing, digital natives were compared with digital immigrants, a generation of people who had yet to learn technology. As a result, students (digital natives) have been confronted with teachers (digital immigrants), and any attempts to reconcile the two worlds have been presented as futile. 

However, there is a grain of truth at the heart of every myth. What Prensky wrote in 2001 still holds relevant twenty years on. The point is that since then, many studies have shown that digital natives are not that technologically savvy. Sure, they use technology more effortlessly, master new trends faster and adapt tools more efficiently. However, using TikTok efficiently and communicating almost exclusively in the virtual world does not give them an advantage. 

Twenty years ago, researchers believed that "different types of experiences shape different brain structures" (Dr Bruce D. Perry). Thus, you can assume that students who have grown up using the Internet from their early years are more prone to non-linear learning and exploring various topics independently. You can expect that their modus operandi resembles hypertext and that they would 'jump' between resources hidden behind hyperlinks. However, this is not the case, at least not on a scale that would separate the digitally native learners from immigrant teachers. 

Although it cannot be used as evidence in the case, the observation of some of my colleagues and mine is such that digital natives' learning style resembles the moves of a butterfly. "Perhaps we are witnessing a generation in which the learner at the computer flits like a butterfly from hyperlink to hyperlink without either processing the information in depth or developing a proper search strategy," write Kirschner and Van Merrienboer. Such fluttering of wings is different from the tactics adopted by digital immigrants. My observations from work with the 50+ generation show that once they have mastered the basics of technology and overcome their fear of it (if I click on something, I'll mess things up), they can handle an innovative tool like a search engine. They have more patience while searching and analysing results and are better at formulating and reformulating a query. In a nutshell, they get on with Mr Google much better than the youngsters do. 

Learners and their learning styles

Everyone is believed to have a learning style, and it is the teachers' job to identify and adapt their teaching. There are fundamental problems in this area, and the theory has been debunked many times, including in the articles published on EPALE. Learners have specific preferences regarding how they want and like to learn. The problem is that learning styles apply to groups of learners and assign individual learners to a given group, which is not prudent and does more harm than good. This is caused by the fact that many people fit into more than just one category. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of styles would have to be created to cater to everyone's needs. This contradicts the idea of adapting teaching to every learner's learning style. Such a typology of styles would be too complex and make no sense. For example, in negotiations, you can distinguish between the following styles: competitive, cooperative and factual. Moreover, the three categories can be understood and mastered. 

There is another problem: learner preferences, if one tries to measure and describe them, change gradually over time, and learning style theories do not consider this. According to the proponents of learning preferences, a visual learner cannot learn well by listening to a podcast, while learners with auditory preferences will make more spelling errors because the mistakes cannot be heard. 

Let us divert for a moment and refer to David and Alice Kolb and their Nine Learning Styles, further correlated with Kolb's Learning Cycle, which we all know very well and do not practice with much success. However, even the authors put it bluntly: 'Just as a Learning Style without dialectical dynamics that drive it and the impact of individual differences resulting from a Learning Style, is oversimplified, so the concept of Learning Style is distorted by its lack of connection with the Theory of Experiential Learning and the Learning Cycle' (Kolb A., Kolb D. Uczenie się na podstawie doświadczenia. Wyd. Dialogi i Zmysły 2022). So, we have a solid scientific foundation built on decades of experience and knowledge that, over the fifty years, has developed more than a hundred concepts of learning styles. None of them settles the matter, and as a result, one can conclude that there are more learning styles than people on the planet. Therefore, learning styles seem to serve researchers more to anchor their theories (some even use Capital Letters to authoritatively seed their terrain) than learners and coaches themselves.

So, it should be made clear: there are fundamental problems with measuring learning styles (no matter how many) and the theoretical basis for assumed interaction between learning styles and teaching methods. Last but not least, substantial empirical evidence favouring the learning styles hypothesis is lacking. Giving the learners autonomy to learn simply because they have been assigned to a particular learning style is counterproductive because they can be assigned to the wrong group, to mention just one of the reasons.

Learners as online self-educators

Anything you need to know is already on the Internet, so the educator's role is most limited to guiding the process. So you can risk claiming that you can replace teaching with searching information because "seek and you will find". 

Here, we come back to myth number one. Self-education as an antidote to educational shortages requires high learner competence. It is hardly surprising that younger generations gain knowledge from sources that scare us. Furthermore, this is not age-related, by the way. Those who learn economics from TikTok and TVP Info can live under the same roof. 

Meanwhile, the growth of information is exponential, and the half-life of new knowledge is steadily decreasing. The new is replacing the old at a growing speed. Even before graduation, many future engineers can expect that some knowledge they gained in their first year will need updating. Therefore, self-education is necessary, but it is not an alternative to education. 

Proper curation of digital content and the learning process is of unprecedented significance. Teaching is no longer a purely creative process. "Record your online course" may make sense in business terms, but it does not necessarily profit students much. A lot of 'old knowledge' is of great value and, even more so, should not be forgotten. And this is not always the case. I once read Tomasz Michniewicz's book entitled Gorączka. W świecie poszukiwaczy skarbów (Fever. In the world of treasure hunters) how many unique ways and methods our ancestors had for hiding valuables. Some hiding places and their mechanisms could have prevented Indiana Jones himself from finding the hidden treasures. Today, if they were presented in a documentary, most viewers would probably accuse the authors of deception and exaggeration. Moreover, here, the thing is that this knowledge has disappeared, and there are no longer any carpenters who could reproduce specific mechanisms. This is also the case with contemporary attempts to reproduce Leonardo da Vinci's designs. We pride ourselves on recreating a design dating back to the 15th or 16th century as if it were an extraordinary feat. And yet, people were able to do that hundreds of years ago. But apparently, both new and old knowledge becomes redundant. 

Giving learners complete control over learning often makes them focus on what they are interested in and already know. After all, everyone wants to have fun and does not want to waste it. So you won't necessarily choose the right course or book. On top of this, you have the paradox of choice, saying that the more options you have, the harder it is for you to choose. For this very reason, you need a teacher. A learner is not a spaceship drifting in the dark space that only needs to be pushed in the right direction. Without it, the learning and development departments would not have been needed. At the beginning of a year, it would be sufficient to set development goals for each employee and then provide some financial bonus for the time spent on self-education. This solution is so simple that it's a wonder no one has come up with it before.

Piotr Maczuga – he writes, records, trains and makes public appearances, introducing the topic of new technologies in adult education. Daily, he produces educational content and digital events and builds and upgrades multimedia studios. Co-founder of the Digital Creators Foundation.

Further reading:

The elephant’s dilemma: the effectiveness or flashiness

Checklists, a strong and simple development method oriented at implementation

New technologies for intergenerational dialogue

ChatGPT – educator's first impression

Moving to the Metaverse. What does the new virtual world really mean?

Three technological changes in on-line adult education that are still underappreciated

Mistakes made when running educational webinars

Education in the Time of …COVID-19

How to make students interested in just three seconds

New technology and burnout: two sides of the same coin

Technology for the planet: tools and applications that help raise environmental awareness

Bibliography: 

Kirschner, Paul & Van Merrienboer, Jeroen J. G.. (2013). Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education. Educational Psychologist. 48. 169-183. 10.1080/00461520.2013.804395.