One of the more popular terms in education discussions is “learning styles.” The short version of it is that people perceive and think and learn in different ways, “meshing” with classroom content with different cognitive maps and dispositions. With a diversity of learning styles in any classroom, then, pedagogies must themselves diversify, allowing each learning style its chance to flower.
Educators apply it throughout primary, secondary, and higher education, the notion sparking changes in how people are supposed to teach, what resources schools should invest in, and how students are to be evaluated.
Like so many popular ideas in the field, however, the empirical evidence for learning styles is still weak. A study of the current scientific literature appears here in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
Authors Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork read and evaluated studies of learning styles and found, first, that “learning styles” is an amenable concept.
“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.”
People like to regard their mental habits as distinct, and they like to have information customized to those habits. But when examined on scientific grounds, “learning styles” didn’t hold up as well:
“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.”
With so little evidence for “learning styles,” the authors conclude, to make it the basis for pedagogical and curricular reform is risky and wrong-headed:
“We conclude, thereform, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice.”
9 Responses to ‘Learning Styles’ No Basis for Policy
jairrels - October 5, 2010 at 9:33 am
I’m not sure you’re correct when you write that educators apply the concept of learning styles at the primary and secondary levels. I can tell you that I was not taught the concept of “learning styles” when I was working on my master’s (or doctorate) and that I used no such methodology based on the concept of “learning styles” when I was teaching at the middle-school level. I can also tell you that a review of the list of presentations at national educational conferences that I have attended indicate no mention of learning styles. I do not even use such terminology when instructing my graduate students. Do you have some research data to support your idea that many educators are currently using learning styles methodology at the primary and secondary levels (or college level)? Could you give a specific example of what a primary or secondary teacher does when he/she uses a learning style methodology?
goxewu - October 5, 2010 at 5:37 pm
What’s the difference between the last word in #1, above, and “method”? Four syllables of pretense, perhaps?
newpseudo - October 5, 2010 at 7:31 pm
To #2, open a dictionary and you can teach yourself the difference.
goxewu - October 5, 2010 at 10:11 pm
Re #3:I was being en peu facetious. The definitions of the two words do overlap, but the last word in #1 could just as well have been the shorter, simpler, crisper “method.” Most academics (at least in the humanities; I’ve heard no physicists speak of “the scientific methodology”) can no more forego ostentatiously attaching “ology” to “method” at every opportunity than their freshmen students can quit saying “like” every four words. The drawbacks of peer pressure, you know.
maggie2b - October 6, 2010 at 7:43 am
Good riddance to bad buzzwords!
newpseudo - October 6, 2010 at 8:18 am
Re #4, Instead of writing “peu,” you could have written “a little.” Instead of writing “facetious,” you could have written… Instead of writing “forego,” you could have written..What is that expression? Hmmm, I think it’s “a case of the pot calling the kettle black” or is it the other way around?
goxewu - October 6, 2010 at 10:04 am
Re #6:I was being un peu stylistically facetious in saying “un peu,” “facetious” and “forego.” (Is there a “Brainstorm” commenters’ contest in being literal-minded that I don’t know about? If so, bronze medal to newpseudo.) But still my bad: If you have to explain ‘em…Nevertheless (uh-oh, four syllables!), nothing in #3 or #6 counters my assertion that using “methodology” where “method” would do is simultaneous conformity/pretentiousness on the part of a lot of academics.
newpseudo - October 18, 2010 at 9:20 am
To Goxewu, you didn’t have to explain anything. I knew exactly what you were doing from beginning to end. The point(which you missed)is that you have freedom of speech and you need to stop trying to control what other people say. If you’re a professor, control what your students write. The fact that you regressed to attempting to use a personal insult (which doesn’t work, because who knows or who cares what you think) shows your true integrity level. You can dish it out, but you can’t take it. For pretentiousness, look in the mirror.
goxewu - October 20, 2010 at 8:08 am
1. If newpsuedo “knew exactly what [I] was doing from beginning to end,” he or she wouldn’t have written the comment before his or her most recent.
2. Yes, I did miss the “point” that I “have freedom of speech and…need to stop trying to control what other people say.” That’s probably because, express or implied, it’s nowhere in anything newspeudo has had to say.
3. How can I possibly be “trying to control what other people say” on “Brainstorm”? By raising a tiny–but telling–question about rhetoric? If it is, then what about newpseudo’s three–count ‘em, three–similar criticisms of what I said. This is a kind of double-down on newpseudo’s own pot-calling-the-kettle, etc.
4. The very fact of a reply is dishing it out but not being able to take it? OK, then, if newpseudo replies to this, it’ll prove he or she can dish it out but not take it.
5. When I look in the mirror, I see virtue, kindness and humility unbounded.