Re: Joint statement on the GNU Project

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 10:40:47PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> "Diversity" in this context would involve more dimensions than the
> usual list of differences that nondiscrimination law covers, or might
> cover.  For instance, it might include profession, preferred learning
> style, educational background, personality, and other ways in which
> people's thinking can vary.

There is no evidence that presenting information via a person's 
preferred learning style helps the person to learn better.

>From https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf

> Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children
> and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer
> information to be presented to them.  There is also plentiful evidence
> arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly
> specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing
> different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence
> for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a
> precondition for validating the educational applications of learning
> styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very
> few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of
> testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover,
> of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results
> that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.