HEALTH WARNING

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Heterodoxy:
 Learning Styles don’t matter

 

There is a vast amount of current, sometimes contradictory, literature on "learning styles". What are you going to do with it? So some people are holists and some serialists, some activists, reflectors, theorists or pragmatists, some visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners. And some are bright and some just plain thick. So what?

In this class there is a serialist pragmatist kinaesthetic learner (who is also field-dependent, not to mention his MBTI) primarily a convergent thinker, high on logico-mathematical intelligence but low on linguistic intelligence, sitting next to a holist, reflector, primarily visual and field-independent... who is also chronically shy (no-one mentions that). Even assuming that such things can be assessed with some validity and reliability, which is itself far from clear — what are you going to do about it? There are after all thirty other students in the class, each of whom could be described in similar terms. And two-thirds of them are female, and one-third male (two of whom are gay). Five of the class are from ethnic minorities, two are dyslexic, one is visually impaired, and three are clinically depressed (although only one of them knows it). Six are "mature" students — at least, they are chronologically over 25.

In other words, a fairly typical class, composed of people. (One of them has his Yorkshire terrier in a holdall, but perhaps we can ignore that.) You, of course are...

Some of the students are really keen on the subject; some decided after three weeks that they had made a wrong choice, but it was too late to change. Some are here because it is a required course.

All the theory tells you to value these students equally. All learning styles are valid and to be respected. No-one must be disadvantaged: the only quality you can disparage is the notorious surface learner who must be won over.

You are all different. You already know this, of course, on a less than formal basis. You recognise that when one student pipes up with, "Can I just ask a question...?" you can expect something really stupid and irrelevant, and that when another starts the same way it will really put you on the spot. Some will make notes even of your jokes, and some will relish the little exercises you set up to break up your presentation, while others will whinge that you are holding back on the correct answers.

Can you cope with all this information? Can you even imagine how you might adapt your teaching to suit each of this bunch? How many times might you have to re-cast a point to make sure it connected with all these minds? And how many of them would switch off each time you repeated it?

Of course, if you have the luxury of working with a small group of learners, you may very well tailor your teaching style to address their particular preferences — but you will know those preferences as part of your wider and deeper knowledge of them as people (probably) and not through superficial testing mechanisms which seek to force them into pre-determined pigeon-holes.

Or, if you were devising a resource-based learning programme to go out to thousands of learners (as the Open University does), it might — perhaps — be reasonable to produce different versions for all the claimed learning styles. But this is the real world, and real time. Learning styles theory is an academic luxury: the students not only have rights but also responsibilities. You can't tune in to all of them, so they have to tune in to you.

"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man"

Shakespeare, Hamlet I:iii:78

(Bearing in mind that Polonius is a pompous ass.)

Moreover, as the page on supporting students will argue, pandering to learning styles may be doing the students a disservice: they will benefit more from adapting and becoming versatile, more able to respond both to formal teaching and learning from experience, than they will from having everything made as easy as possible for them in your particular subject. 

For more on learning styles go here

and here for a marginally more objective account

 

Up-date:

I wrote the above in May 2002: in June 2004, the Learning and Skills Development Agency published a major study on learning styles, which provides a much firmer basis for, if anything, even greater scepticism:

with shorter articles based on it, at

And in 2005, the following report from the Demos thinktank made similar points:

Note that the url for the download from the LSDA has mysteriously changed...

To reference this page copy and paste the text below:

ATHERTON J S (2002) Heterodoxy:  [On-line] UK; Available:  Accessed:

© James Atherton
last updated
3 March 2006