It's trivially obvious that some people get more from reading than from watching, and vice versa. If you think a study disproves something trivially obvious, odds are that either the study is flawed or you've misunderstood it.

I'm guessing the latter, as mjw1007 points out.

> If you think a study disproves something ...

That wasn't the comment. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So, I don't really know why the parent posted that. Or why you try to imply counter evidence, but don't name any.

> trivially obvious

It's something you see on a street intersection? I'm kidding, but i don't agree. I don't even agree that the problem is framed correctly. Somebody mentioned "isomorphism" in this thread, which is a very important notion. Different methods of learning are used to learn different things. The things are in principle in different domains. The things might be isomorphic, ie. readily transferred from one domain to another, but they are not equal. A painting of a square is not the same as a verbal description of it. On the one hand, nobody is equally skilled in all domains. On the other hand, there should be some basic skills that are necessary to solve certain problems. So, either everyone who isn't comfortable with a given "learning style" will inherently fail to solve corresponding fundamental problems, or there are multiple ways to solve a problem effectively -- which ideally would mean the student can choose the problems of interest and capability.

In conclusion, both hypothesis are true at the same time, but you are assuming a misguided context. Of course there might exist different ideas of what's elementary or fundamental.

That's saying that some recently fashionable, and fairly elaborate, theories about teaching children are basically junk science.

That includes the ideas that there are left/right brain learners, children who are holistic as opposed to serialists, and children who are inherently "verbalisers" or "visualisers".

I don't doubt they're right. But I think it would be a mistake to read that article and conclude that adults who simply say they do much better with videos than books, or vice versa, are mistaken about themselves.

Uneducated individual here. What is the proper term for arguing against a claim that was never made or incorrectly assumed, but ambiguous enough to become a target? I see this a lot in political debates. Something more technical than a misunderstanding.

Anyway, I think that’s what’s happening here. It’s not a simple matter of different learning styles, but rather the strength of stimuli that are involved when learning something new. Some people may find text sufficient, but a lot of people prefer videos because it’s far more engaging. Breaking down learning styles into visual, audio, etc is meaningless imo.

I think this falls under a strawman argument. I don't think there's any requirement that strawmans have to be deliberate.