Learning one way or another has different repercussions as to the transferability of the knowledge/activity learned. You can’t learn how to ride a bike with just MCQs. You can’t learn how to surf the net by writing an essay. You often can’t succeed in academia if you don’t master how to read thick textbooks (think dyslexic students). Its about literacies, not just personal cognition.

There was a good point in the response too – about “real world” factors or situatedness (see Lave and Wenger). The maths we learn at school is not necessarily the maths we use in the supermarket. The experiments done in labs reflect only controlled variable manipulation, not the everyday mix of competing variables. Social science is complex stuff.

The authors do call for a much more robust research into learning styles and this is probably a good call. But they shouldn’t really claim yet that learning styles is all junk as they only did one “experiment”. Interesting debate, gonna search for the methodology in the article, let’s see if they tell us empirically, and exactly, how they did the experiment, as a physicist would have too.

I say, let people take their notes and computers into the classroom for testing or for online work. When students get from teachers that they have to know about the material enough to apply it to contextually useful test questions, using notes and finding information will not be a problem. Why? Because you can teach facts all day long and students can memorize all day long, but real learning occurs when learners know what to do with the information they have access to. Said differently, teachers teach cheatable courses because students are not taught to think, but to regurgitate information. Teachers should not complain about students cheating when teachers are cheating students out of an education.

With this I will end: If a test is easy to create, then the teacher is cheating and can only expect that students will do what is easy, too. When teachers respect students, students will respect themselves and their teacher. Tests that are hard to create are very difficult to cheat on because all the notes in the world won’t help a lazy student think through a test that requires him or her to think.

Some of this research indicates that students cheat because they are unsure of what constitutes cheating or plagiarism, while others feel they have no other options. Certainly, some students are committed cheaters, but for most, it is not a deliberate economic/cost-benefit decision.

Your 5 year old is similar to my 7 and 10 year old. They are always taking over my phone to look things up. Don’t we all anymore?

When the Internet was first publicly reachable, I fell in love with it.
When the internet because “the web” my students and I learned together to insert images and video.

Now my students teach me. I simply guide their directions.

Interesting article here.. Thanks for sharing.