You’re not actually a visual learner
Not exclusively, anyway. That and more science, all in this issue!
I used to think that I was a visual learner, because when I studied for exams I would often remember information based on where I remembered seeing it on the page. The recall during the exam would go a bit like this: “Enzyme kinetics? That’s on a left-side page of the textbook with a graph. What did that say again…” But having a memory full of images does not make me a visual learner. In fact, nobody is a purely “visual learner”. Researchers who study how people learn have found that the best method is to take in the information in many different ways. I didn’t *just* learn about enzyme kinetics from the left page of a textbook. I also heard about it in lectures, interacted with the concept in labs, and wrote reports about it.
The idea that everyone has their own preferred learning style is a very persistent “neuromyth” – a myth about how the brain works. Other popular ones include the mistaken idea that we only use 10% of our brains or that everyone is either “right brained” or “left brained”. For most of us, it doesn’t really matter much if we believe in these myths. Whether I actually use only 10% of my brain or a good chunk more than that doesn’t change how I think and act. But for teachers who plan how their students receive information, a belief in the learning styles myth could set them off on the wrong foot. They could be encouraging some students to only read or only listen to information, when the evidence-based approach would be to offer all options.
Unfortunately, teachers around the world very strongly believe in this myth. For an article for BOLD I spoke with education experts from different countries to find out how to change that. You can read that here. One of the things the experts highlighted was that teachers might be conflating the outdated idea of “learning styles” with the fact that we do indeed all have our own preferences when it comes to learning. This is called learning variability, and does have a basis in evidence.
Great science reads (and videos) on the web
I’m always amazed when other science writers manage to see science stories in topics that are very familiar to me. It makes me wonder why I never considered that angle. For example, Hannah Docter-Loeb turned an annual Dutch walking event for school children into a health story for The Guardian! Dutch children are unusually happy and healthy. Is it because of this walking ritual?
They call it stupid hot for a reason: Heat muddles animal brains. By Marta Zaraska for Knowable Magazine.
How forgotten voyages helped track El Niño. By Gill Sennett and Paul Johnson for the BBC
An Early Step on the Long, Strange Road to Photosynthesis. By Carrie Arnold for Quanta Magazine
The first scientists to splice DNA faced a daunting question: ‘Should we?’ Video from the Science Communication Lab on Aeon. (sidenote: I wrote about the same topic for JSTOR Daily last year.)
For science journalists
I know that some of you are science journalists or science communicators yourself, so these links might be interesting for you. The rest of you can treat this as a look under the hood of what’s happening in the science journalism world!
A new book from The Open Notebook analyses great stories about science to show why they work so well.
The European Conference of Science Journalism announced the programme for the October meeting, and tickets are at a cheaper rate until the end of September.
If you really want to get ahead of things and save money on a meeting that doesn’t happen until 2027, the World Conference of Science Journalists has a super early bird rate for members of WFSJ-affiliated organisations that’s only available until the end of this month. From July it will go up.