Perhaps, but it’s kind of irrelevant in any practical way. In the same way that I think we need evidence-based policies on a societal level, we need evidence-based pedagogy, and I don’t see where we have that.
As a first example, I think my son (who is getting ready to graduate high-school) has been through four total swap-outs of curriculum and pedagogy in his academic career. It kind of begs the question that if each of these were good enough to justify the downsides of swapping, how come after only a few years its no longer good enough? And where is the evidence that such trashing doesn’t make things worse for the kids? If each of these changes really was superior enough to justify the time and expense of retooling the schools and bumping the kids around, by now he should be in some kind of educational nirvana. He’s not.
As a second example these understandings of “learning styles” seem to totally ignore neurological studies and research when hey conflict with the fads of the day. Recent studies, for example, have suggested that the “old way of doing things” – things like rote memorization and cursive writing – actually help to lay down important neurological pathways for learning (cursive, for example, requires the student to manipulate symbols on a higher level than printing, owing to the fact that the letter change depending upon their context (surrounding letters)). And other studies suggest that rote memorization actually does help students learn how to think. But this conflicts with the “common sense” of the curriculum designers, so it is largely ignored.
