CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: A Widely Used Idea With Little Proof

MAN: Good evening. Tonight we look at a classroom idea that keeps being used long after the evidence turned against it, the practice of teaching students according to their so-called learning style. A new survey from the Fairwood school district found that more than eight in ten teachers now build lessons around the belief that pupils learn best when material is shown, heard, or done, depending on the type of learner each child is thought to be. Researchers were not surprised by that number, because studies testing the approach directly have failed again and again to find any real benefit from it. Xenia Ruiz, a professor of educational psychology at Camden University, has spent several years reviewing that research. She does not dispute that students have genuine preferences about how they like to receive information. What the studies cannot confirm, she explains, is that building lessons around a preferred style actually raises test results. In controlled comparisons where the same lesson was taught two different ways, students performed about the same regardless of which style they had originally reported. For Ruiz, the gap between so many teachers using the method and so little supporting research is itself the real story. She adds that her concern is not with teachers who mention the term casually to pupils, but specifically with the money school districts keep spending on formal style inventories and related training sessions. Ruiz puts the district's spending on those inventories at about forty thousand dollars last year, roughly the cost of a part-time reading tutor. Declan Delaney, who teaches fifth grade at Willowbrook Elementary, reads the same numbers differently. He has heard the approach questioned throughout his entire career, yet in his classroom the label still gives children an easy way to describe how they concentrate and what makes them feel capable. He readily admits the underlying science does not hold up, and he is not asking anyone to keep sorting pupils into fixed categories. What he values is the conversation the label makes possible, not any claim about matching instruction to a type. He no longer sends style results home, after several parents asked that their child be taught one way only. District officials expect newer training programs to gradually replace today's workshops. Even so, most observers on both sides agree that the everyday wording of learning styles, unlike the funding behind it, is likely to remain part of how teachers and parents talk about children for a good while yet.