Learning Styles

If you want to start a controversial argument among educational researchers, one of the best way to do this is by bringing up the topic of "learning styles", or the closely related topic of "multiple intelligences". There is much disagreement among researchers and practitioners as to how valid and/or useful these concepts are with strong proponents on both sides.

Learning styles (or "learning preferences" as you text refers to them) refer to the ways in which a person learns most effectively (or prefers to learn). The most often discussed types of learning styles are sensory based like auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. Learning styles are thought to be independent of intelligence or ability, rather they are simply preferences or tendencies towards certain types of learning. Multiple intelligence theory, on the other hand, specifically refers to different abilities, with the fundamental premise that there are many different types of intelligences and that these are relatively independent. Any given person may be very skilled in one type of intelligence (e.g., logical-mathematical), but quite weak in another (e.g., linguistic), according to the theory. I have lumped learning styles and multiple intelligences together here, because both concepts/theories are based on the premise that there are many important individual difference dimensions that determine how well someone can learn. In the case of learning styles these dimensions have more to do with the way in which one learns, and with multiple intelligences this has more to do with the type of information that is being learned. Both of these are also similar in that they have both been used as an argument for adapting instruction to the student. So, for example, a person who is an "auditory learner" might learn best from a lecture rather than from text. Though the implications are not so direct, multiple intelligence theory can be used in a similar manner. For example, a student strong in "linguistic" intelligence may learn best from written materials, while a student strong in "spatial" intelligence may learn best from drawings and graphs.

These concepts/theories sound good intuitively. We all recognize that we have strengths and weaknesses, and we’ve all probably found that we differ from other students some times in the ways in which we seem to learn best. Further, there’s also little question that we can learn better from a teacher who pays attention to our individual learning preferences, and works with our strengths. So one might wonder why anyone could object to such an intuitively appealing idea. First of all, researchers point out that actual research evidence for the effectiveness of adapting instruction based on students’ learning styles is quite mixed, as your text points out. This does not necessarily mean that it’s not effective to adapt instruction to a student's learning style. It might very possibly simply be that "learning style" is a difficult thing to measure, and that our measures of learning style are simply not very effective. A second (and obvious problem) is that it is very difficult for an instructor in a large classroom to teach every student in a different manner, as you can imagine. This is why some have suggested that the best way to take learning styles into account is for the instructor to vary his or her teaching methods. This also points to one of the ways in which computers have the most potential for aiding instruction, since, hypothetically at least, computers can be programmed to present content in various ways depending on learner characteristics.