I have to admit that I have often disagreed with others over what textbooks are best, but I think that's natural.
For one, you often start a field with a specific book. If you pour a lot of time into that book, you often feel more attached to it. Then, when trying to evaluate another textbook, it's hard (impossible?) to go through that same experience and understand if you would have had an easier time with the material. There are definitely some obvious cases, but it isn't always.
Second, sometimes people just have different learning styles and have a preference for them. Landau and Lifshitz has a reputation for being very hard (but rewarding!) to parse, and that is easily a showstopper for some people. Other books might only have relatively easy exercises (Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right, for example), which can help you gain a lot of confidence, while others might have many very difficult or very tedious problems. Some might have solutions to problems, some might not.
Really, I think the best we can do is put a list of "top books" for each subject rather than the "best textbooks" for each subject.
Same reasons I take issue with the phrase "best practice". Besides my cynical POV that when people start talking about "best practices", they are about to tell you that whatever you're doing is wrong, and here, let me sell you on NEW_DEVELOPMENT_PARADIGM_FAD. I'm all for making things better, but I'd argue, there's no "best" practice, only strongly recommended guidelines and some practices that have fallen by the wayside as we learn to do things better.
Replace Best Practice, with Good Practice and it may be less irksome for you, as it leaves it open for improvement, and is not mutually exclusive with other good practices.
perhaps it's really related to the word "Best" and wouldn't be as bad with "Good" but i've found that these things, more often than not, are neither. "Best Practice" is just a concise reformulation of "this has been blogged about a lot and everybody else seems to be doing it", it's an incantation intended to shutdown brains and differing views. i'm just moving off a job in a company full of "Best Practices" that cost shitloads of effort in exchange for negligible benefits. nobody stopped to weigh the pros against the cons, because they're industry best practices, so they gotta be good; doing what everybody else does gets you more job offers than doing what works well.
I definitely agree that reading textbooks is not commutative with respect to ordering. I wonder whether there is any method for de-biasing from this pernicious effect? Other than, perhaps, split up a test and control group that reads A followed by B, or vice versa, and then debates what they have learned?
> For one, you often start a field with a specific book. If you pour a lot of time into that book, you often feel more attached to it. Then, when trying to evaluate another textbook, it's hard (impossible?) to go through that same experience and understand if you would have had an easier time with the material. There are definitely some obvious cases, but it isn't always.
Exactly what I noticed about other types of comparisons. People conflate familiarity with quality. That's why loyalty wars, like vim vs emacs, verilog vs vhdl, python vs ruby, etc, have significant components of subjectivity. It's not a purely objective debate about vim vs emacs, rather a debate between a comfortable user of vim and a comfortable user of emacs. That's why when someone decides to learn the rival tool properly before bashing it, they end up not being too radical in their views.
To your first point: I agree that as a consumer of textbooks, it is difficult to fairly compare them. But, if one were an instructor in a subject, it would probably be a bit easier to observe how groups of people react to different textbooks, to get some bulk idea of which is better or worse. So, I don't think it's impossible to meaningfully compare books and make a "best of" list, but that list should be created by people who are maybe less biased and have wider perspectives.
Of course, as your second point gets to; a book that's generally considered "best" won't always be the best for a specific reader and their circumstance.
Also, it really depends on what you already know and don't know before you start with a new field. You may be turned off by having to go through too much beginner material to get to what you need.
The article exaggerates a little bit. The myth is that every person has one specific style in which they learn best, and that this is how they should ALWAYS be taught.
Different ways of learning different subjects will be more or less effective for different students. All the studies linked in the article show that students perform best when presented new information in multiple representations, so they can then focus on the style that is working best for them in that case.
My "learning style" is a consequence of my attention span (I've got ADD). I tend to start thinking about tangents even (or especially) during the more interesting lectures. After 30mins I'm often hopelessly lost. Books (or video lectures for that matter) let me rewind when I "snap back" after those tangents.
My main point being: maybe learning styles don't exist in the traditional sense, but external factors (ADD being just one of them) can lead to another type of "learning styles" that manifest in effectively the same way.
Yeah, you two are talking about different things. "Learning styles is a myth" refers to a very specific definition (that was used and defined in academic literature) of learning styles.
It doesn't mean that people won't learn differentially. It just means that specific model is wrong.
Same. Lectures are useless to me. I also find books and equations generally boring. I can do it, but I have to overcome some kind of aversion, and when the author explains something I don't think is important I immediately go do something else. I suspect I'm a lost cause. I do much better with the random walk.
That isn’t really germane to the grandparent poster’s point.
Feel free to replace his or her shorthand “learning style” with something like “personal preference, past experience, and miscellaneous psychological factors”.
Whether or not the published work about “learning styles” was solid science with meaningful conclusions for guiding formal pedagogy, it is all but impossible to argue that different students don’t respond better to different books.
Or so some studies say. But the quality and reliability of soft science studies like these is an even bigger myth -- and the reproducibility crisis is real.
In any case, whether learning styles are a myth or not, learning preferences about teaching styles are very real, and what works for someone to keep them engaged can bore someone else to tears and drive them off a course.
I won't downvote you because I disagree with you (who does that???)...
look, sure this broad idea about learning styles may be false, but you cannot I think disagree that a book may be more or less suitable for someone depending on their particular strengths and weaknesses, and that OP's point.
The point of using learning styles should never be to pigeonhole someone into a limited form of data consumption. It needs to used to teach them build a bridge from where they are, to where they need to be. It should be about teaching the student how to process any type of information from any type of source. In order to do that, we need to know how they process, so they can build a system that allows them the best use of whatever it is they're learning.
The brain needs to be progressively challenged just like any muscle and achieving a state of mild confusion while consuming new information does just that.
For one, you often start a field with a specific book. If you pour a lot of time into that book, you often feel more attached to it. Then, when trying to evaluate another textbook, it's hard (impossible?) to go through that same experience and understand if you would have had an easier time with the material. There are definitely some obvious cases, but it isn't always.
Second, sometimes people just have different learning styles and have a preference for them. Landau and Lifshitz has a reputation for being very hard (but rewarding!) to parse, and that is easily a showstopper for some people. Other books might only have relatively easy exercises (Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right, for example), which can help you gain a lot of confidence, while others might have many very difficult or very tedious problems. Some might have solutions to problems, some might not.
Really, I think the best we can do is put a list of "top books" for each subject rather than the "best textbooks" for each subject.