learning-styles

LSRC reference Section 8
page 126/127
Many practitioners have long since discovered for
themselves that traditional methods (of transmission
by teacher and assimilation by student) fail many
students, and the learning style literature provides
a plausible explanation for such failure. The modern
cliché is that the teacher may be teaching, but no one –
not even the teacher – may be learning. The argument
of many learning style developers is that traditional,
formal schooling (and higher education even more so)
are too biased towards students who are analytic
in their approach, that teachers themselves tend to
be analytic learners, and that the longer people stay
in the education system, the more analytic they
become. They argue further that learning styles provide
a means whereby the diverse learning needs of a much
broader range of students can be addressed. In other
words, many teachers tend to respond well to the
invitation to examine their own teaching and learning
style; and the hope of the theorists is that by doing
so, they will become more sensitive to those whose
learning style is different.
Because of a growing interest in learning styles,
teachers and managers begin, perhaps for the first
time, to explore the highly complex nature of teaching
and learning. In the pedagogical triangle of teacher,
students and subject, the learning styles approach
trains professionals to focus on how students
learn or fail to learn. When, or if, this happens, what
some now see as the overemphasis on providing,
for example, student teachers with an understanding
of how particular subjects (English, mathematics,
science, etc) are most appropriately taught may begin
to be corrected. The corrective may, however, create
its own imbalances: what is needed is equal attention
to all parts of the triangle and their interactions. The
danger is that we end up with content-free pedagogy,
where process is celebrated at the expense of content.
For some learning style developers, there is no
special category of students with learning difficulties,
only teachers who have not learned that their
teaching style is appropriate for perhaps a quarter
of their students and seriously inappropriate for the
remainder. Those teachers who have incorporated
the Dunn and Dunn model into their practice speak
movingly at conferences of how this re-categorisation
of the problem (where students’ failure to learn
is reformulated as teachers’ failure to teach
appropriately) has transformed their attitude to
students they previously dismissed as stupid, slow,
unmotivated, lazy or ineducable. This is not an
inconsiderable achievement.
It is not only front-line practitioners and middle
managers who have been persuaded of the benefits
of introducing learning styles. For some senior
managers, for inspectors, for government agencies,
policy-makers and politicians, the appeal of learning
styles may prove convenient, because it shifts the
responsibility for enhancing the quality of learning
from management to the individual learning styles
of teachers and learners. Learning styles enable the
more managerialist and cynical to argue as follows:
‘There’s no longer any need to discuss resources,
financial incentives, pay and conditions, the culture
of institutions, the curriculum, the assessment
regime or the quality of senior management: the
researchers now tell us that failure can be laid at the
door of those narrow, analytic teachers who’ve never
heard of learning styles.’
The objections to learning styles
The critics of learning styles can be divided into two
main camps. First, there are those who accept the
basic assumptions of the discipline (eg the positivist
methodology and the individualistic approach), but
who nevertheless claim that certain models or certain
features within a particular model do not meet the
criteria of that discipline. A second group of critics,
however, adopts an altogether more oppositional stand:
it does not accept the basic premises on which this
body of research, its theories, findings and implications
for teaching have been built. As all the other sections
of this report are devoted to a rigorous examination
of 13 models of learning styles within the parameters
set by the discipline itself, this sub-section will briefly
explain the central objections raised by those hostile
to the learning styles camp, who mutter at conferences
in the informal breaks between presentations, who
confide their reservations in private, but who rarely
publish their disagreement. We wish to bring this
semi-public critique out into the open.
The opponents, who are mainly those who espouse
qualitative rather than quantitative research methods,
dispute the objectivity of the test scores derived
from the instruments. They argue, for example, that the
learning style theorists claim to ‘measure’ the learning
preferences of students. But these ‘measurements’
are derived from the subjective judgements which
students make about themselves in response to the
test items when they ‘report on themselves’. These
are not objective measurements to be compared with,
say, those which can be made of the height or weight
of students, and yet the statistics treat both sets
of measures as if they were identical. In other words,
no matter how sophisticated the subsequent statistical
treatments of these subjective scores are, they rest
on shaky and insecure foundations. No wonder, say the
sceptics, that learning style researchers, even within
the criteria laid down by their discipline, have difficulty
establishing reliability, never mind validity.