Ah, learning styles. You do have a way of getting under people’s skins.
The Washington Post published a column by Jay Mathews highlighting the recent research published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. This was quickly followed by a blog post by Will Thalheimer and a snowstorm of follow up comments and posts.
What many people seem to want is a black or white, binary status. Learning styles are either right or wrong, good or bad. But the truth will most likely lie in that grey area that most of human psychology belongs to. There may well be some situations where a person’s expressed preference for how they learn will lead to better performance results. Conversely, there will be situations where the way something is learned is more important than a person’s expressed preference (you can’t learn to swim by reading a book).
The important question is, on balance, can we predict which approach works better? And the answer at the moment is absolutely not.
A learning styles questionnaire can be used to prompt discussion and self reflection about how we learn best. The results, when presented as a bit of fun, can help us to question which approaches will work best for us when we need to learn a new skill or increase our knowledge base. However, that’s not how they’re normally used and there are other ways of achieving the same outcome without using a questionnaire that maps onto a simplistic model for how people learn. This, combined with the way they’re used by people who have limited understanding of the background to them to ‘label’ people, makes the case for not using them at all pretty powerful.
The role of a workplace learning professional is to help people do their jobs more effectively. Understanding the current thinking about how we learn, and how that process might be optimised, is important because it enables informed experimentation. If we only ever used evidence based approaches, progress would be very slow indeed (just look at how long it takes for a piece of research to get published).
However, when it’s found that something we’ve been using doesn’t work, we should be sufficiently un-dogmatic that we simply stop using it.
> you can’t learn to swim by reading a book
True. But…
- you can teach some people to swim by throwing them in the water. Do that with other people and they drown.
- you can teach other people to swim by giving them lessons. But some people (like me) will just end up hating the instructor and will never learn to swim at all.
Now Thalheimer and other will say that there is no ‘evidence’ for learning styles. But either the characterization I make above is completely false and I have to discard the evidence of my own senses, or there is *something* to be said for the idea that different people need to be taught different ways.
Stephen,
I completely agree that there is most likely something to be said about the need for people to be taught in different ways. In what contexts though? The point here is that it’s probably a bit more complicated that the simplistic taxonomies that are characterised by VAK, Honey & Mumford and Dunn & Dunn.
They’re useful tools to start a discussion and get people thinking about it, but far too often these questionnaires and models are used in rigid, dogmatic ways.
It would be great if some decent research carried out into when different approaches work well and when a homogenised approach is more effective (the answer might well be never). At the moment, what Cauffield and the authors in Psychological Science in the Public Interest are saying is that there’s no good evidence *for* learning styles.
Submitted on 2010/02/18 at 3:53pm
I’ve been collecting links and articles on the Learning Styles debate. They’re here:
http://www.bfchirpy.com/2009/11/learning-styles-fable-ous-and-tragic.html
One recent piece has a really interesting twist. Instructors may find it more effective to focus on the subject’s ‘teaching style’ than to focus on learners’ styles. Each Learning Objective may have an optimal ‘teaching style’:
http://hypergogue.posterous.com/matching-teaching-style-to-learning-style-may
I have no idea how that might be useful in the workplace.
It is getting a little tiresome to hear Stephen Downes continue to mischaracterize the arguments against USING learning styles in designing learning events.
Nobody has said there are NOT learning styles (although some of us think of some of them as preferences more than styles).
In the article that has renewed Stephen’s ardor, the researchers (world-class researchers by the way) go out of their way to say that they think people learn differently. Here is what they say:
“Although we have argued that the extant data do not provide support for the learning-styles hypothesis, it should be emphasized that we do not claim that the same kind of instruction is most useful in all contexts and with all learners…Furthermore, it is undoubtedly the case that a particular student will sometimes benefit from having a particular kind of course content presented in one way versus another. One suspects that educators’ attraction to the idea of learning styles partly reflects their (correctly) noticing how often one student may achieve enlightenment from an approach that seems useless for another student. There is, however, a great gap from such heterogeneous responses to instructional manipulations—whose reality we do not dispute—to the notion that presently available taxonomies of student types offer any valid help in deciding what kind of instruction to offer each individual. Perhaps future research may demonstrate such linkages, but at present, we find no evidence for it.” (p. 116)
I quoted this in my brief review of the research review.
I have also said—and Stephen has read this because he commented on the same blog post on which I wrote this: “Let me be clear, my argument is not that people don’t have different learning styles, learning preferences, or learning skills. My argument is that for real-world instructional-development situations, learning styles is an ineffective and inefficient waste of resources that is unlikely to produce meaningful results.”
Although it is tiresome to respond, once again, to Stephen’s distortions; such bullying behavior must be met with vigor so that it stops. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that his analysis is lazy and shallow or that he is intentionally distorting the arguments that have been made.
And let me correct Owen—or add precision—who says that the researchers in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest say, “there’s no good evidence *for* learning styles.” That is NOT exactly what they say (as the quotes above make clear). What they emphasize is that there is NO evidence that using a learning-styles approach (as measured by the many learning-styles inventories available) is worthwhile at this time.
The recent research review in question:
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9, 105-119.
Will,
Thanks for responding here and for highlighting the paper in your original blog post (I’m a regular reader). You’re correct that I could have been more precise in my comment and I completely agree that the research shows that there is no evidence for using the current crop of learning style inventories in the development of learning initiatives.
I think that there’s quite a bit of common ground amongst most informed people in the field in the observation that different people learn most effectively from different approaches. It’s also clear from existing research that there’s no way to be able to predict which methods work best with which learners based on testing using the current tools.
For me, it’s just another case of trying to deal with complex, sophisticated challenges using simplistic tools which are not up to the job. There’s two actions that can be taken here. Firstly, stop using the current tools. Secondly, try and create better tools. While the second action may prove fruitless in the end, it’s the pursuit of exactly this kind of knowledge that leads to greater understanding.
Thanks Owen for your thoughtful reply. We are in agreement. Skepticism of the current instruments is good, skepticism of using learning-styles as a primary approach (at the present state of our knowledge) is good, but we should still look for opportunities to give individuals more tailored learning supports.