learning-styles

Respondents are also encouraged to give the first
answer which occurs to them. But the first response
may not be the most accurate and is unlikely to be
the most considered; evidence is needed to back the
contention that the first response is always the one
with which psychologists and practitioners should work.
The detractors also have reservations about some
test items and cannot take others seriously. They point,
for example, to item 65 in Vermunt’s ILS (see Section
7.2) which reads: ‘The only aim of my studies is to enrich
myself.’ The problem may be one of translation from
the Dutch, but in English, the item could refer to either
intellectual or financial enrichment and it is therefore
ambiguous. Or they single out the item in Entwistle’s
ASSIST (see Section 7.1) which reads: ‘When I look
back, I sometimes wonder why I ever decided to come
here.’ Doesn’t everyone think this at some stage in an
undergraduate course?
Others quote from the Dunn, Dunn and Price PEPS
instrument (see Section 3.2), the final item of which
is ‘I often wear a sweater or jacket indoors’. The answers
from middle-class aesthetes in London, who prefer
to keep their air-conditioning low to save energy, are
treated in exactly the same way as those from the poor
in Surgut in Siberia, who need to wear both sweaters
and jackets indoors to keep themselves from freezing
to death. What, ask the critics, has this got to do with
learning and what sense does it make to ignore the
socio-economic, cultural and even geographic context
of the learner?
Those who simply wish to send up the Dunn, Dunn
and Price LSI for 6–18 year olds reveal that it contains
such items as: ‘I like to do things with adults’; ‘I like
to feel what I learn inside of me’; and ‘It is easy for me
to remember what I learn when I feel it inside me.’ It is
no surprise that some psychologists argue that criticism
should not be directed at individual items and that one
or two poor items out of 100 do not vitiate the whole
instrument. Our response is that if a few items are
risible, then the instrument may be treated with scorn.
Other opponents object to the commercialisation
of some of the leading tests, whose authors, when
refuting criticism, are protecting more than their
academic reputations. Rita Dunn, for example, insists
that it is easy to implement her 22-element model,
but that it is also necessary to be trained by her and
her husband in a New York hotel. The training course
in July 2003 cost $950 per person and lasted for
7 days at a further outlay of $1384 for accommodation.
The cost of training all 400,000 teachers in England
in the Dunn methodology would clearly be expensive
for the government, but lucrative for the Dunns.
Some opponents question what they judge to be
the unjustified prominence which is now accorded
to learning styles by many practitioners. Surely,
these academics argue, learning styles are only one
of a host of influences on learning and are unlikely
to be the most significant? They go further by
requesting an answer to a question which they pose
in the terms used by the learning style developers,
namely: ‘What percentage of the variance in test
scores is attributable to learning styles?’ The only
direct answer to that question which we have found in
the literature comes from Furnham, Jackson and Miller
(1999), who study the relationship between, on the
one hand, personality (Eysenck’s Personality Inventory)
and learning style (Honey and Mumford’s LSQ);
and on the other, ratings of the actual performance
and development potential of 200+ telephone
sales staff: ‘the percentage of variance explained by
personality and learning styles together was only about
8%’ (1999, 1120). The critics suggest that it is perhaps
time that the learning style experts paid some attention
to those factors responsible for the other 92%. 12
12
It has not been possible to answer the question ‘What proportion of the
variance in achievement outcomes is attributable to learning style?’
because we only found one reasonably relevant study – Furnham, Jackson
and Miller (1999). There is a considerable body of research in which
measures of prior achievement, ability, motivation and personality have
been evaluated as predictors of university first-degree performance, but
we have found none in which learning styles have been considered as well.
Information about the prediction of learning outcomes in post-16 education
and training outside higher education is relatively sparse, but again, there
is no work in which learning styles have been compared with ability
measures as predictors.
In general, it can be said that no powerful predictors of learning in higher
education have been identified by any researchers, since the proportion
of variance accounted for in large-scale studies rarely exceeds 16%,
no matter how many characteristics of learners are considered.
There is one apparent exception to the above generalisation. Drysdale,
Ross and Schulz (2001) carried out one of the largest predictive studies
we have found in a university context, but in that study, only learning style
was used as a predictor of first-year academic performance. The effect
sizes were substantial for mathematics, science and technology subjects,
with Gregorc’s ‘sequential style’ students outperforming those with
a ‘random’ style. The reverse was true in fine arts, but no differences were
found in the liberal arts or in nursing. This result is hard to understand,
in view of the problems we have identified with Gregorc’s Style Delineator
(see Section 3.1). We recommend that similar studies be carried out
with a variety of learning style instruments, but adding in other predictors.
The Herrmann and Jackson instruments (see Sections 6.3 and 5.3
respectively) would be suitable for this purpose.