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Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students - Teach...http://chronicle.com/article/Matching-Teaching-Style-to/49497/?key=STp...1 of 5 12/16/2009 11:34 AMTeachingHome News Faculty TeachingDecember 15, 2009Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May NotHelp StudentsBy David GlennIf you've ever sat through a teaching seminar, you've probably hearda lecture about "learning styles." Perhaps you were told that somestudents are visual learners, some are auditory learners, and othersare kinesthetic learners. Or maybe you were given one of the dozensof other learning-style taxonomies that scholars and consultantshave developed.Almost certainly, you were told that your instruction should matchyour students' styles. For example, kinesthetic learners—studentswho learn best through hands-on activities—are said to do better inclasses that feature plenty of experiments, while verbal learners aresaid to do worse.Now four psychologists argue that you were told wrong. There is nostrong scientific evidence to support the "matching" idea, theycontend in a paper published this week in Psychological Science inthe Public Interest. And there is absolutely no reason for professorsto adopt it in the classroom."We were startled to find that there is so much research publishedon learning styles, but that so little of the research usedexperimental designs that had the potential to provide decisiveevidence," says Harold E. Pashler, a professor of psychology at theUniversity of California at San Diego and the paper's lead author."Lots of people are selling tests and programs for customizingeducation that completely lack the kind of experimental evidencethat you would expect for a drug," Mr. Pashler says. "Now maybethe FDA model isn't always appropriate for education—but that's aconversation we need to have."Advocates of learning styles respond that Mr. Pashler is the one wholacks evidence. Robert J. Sternberg, dean of arts and sciences atTufts University and a psychologist who has done a lot of work onlearning styles, says in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that theresearchers did not fully survey the scholarly literature, and thus"come across looking either biased about or largely ignorant of thefield."

Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students - Teach...http://chronicle.com/article/Matching-Teaching-Style-to/49497/?key=STp...2 of 5 12/16/2009 11:34 AMMr. Pashler's study does not dispute the existence of learning styles.But it asserts that no one has ever proved that any particular style ofinstruction simultaneously helps students who have one learningstyle while also harming students who have a different learningstyle.Of the hundreds of research papers that have been published onlearning styles, Mr. Pashler says, almost none have randomlyassigned students into one classroom type or another. Only thatkind of experiment, he says, can suggest anything definitive aboutcausation. And the few studies that have used an adequate researchdesign, he adds, have mostly failed to support the hypothesis thatteaching styles should match students' learning styles.More Alike Than DifferentConsider an experiment about teaching the structure of complexmolecules. The matching hypothesis might predict that kinestheticlearners would absorb the concept best by building ball-and-stickmodels in the lab, while verbal learners would do better by readinga few pages about the logic of molecular design.That sounds intuitive. But according to Mr. Pashler and hisco-authors, almost every well-designed study of that type hasdiscovered that one instructional style actually works best for bothgroups.What happens, Mr. Pashler says, is something like this:Experimenters randomly assign students to a classroom that useslaboratory lessons or to a classroom that uses texts. At the end of theweek, students are tested on their knowledge of molecularstructures.Among the students who are taught in a hands-on laboratorysetting, it turns out that the kinesthetic learners enjoy their lessonsmuch more than their verbal peers do. They also perform better onthe test at the end of the week. Let's say that the kinestheticstudents average a 95 on the test, while the verbal students' averageis 80.That might seem like strong evidence for the learning-styleshypothesis. Not so fast, Mr. Pashler says.Look at the second classroom, where students learn aboutmolecules by reading texts. Here, the verbal students enjoy thelessons much more than their kinesthetic peers do. But on the test,both the verbal and kinesthetic students average around 70. Theverbal students are actually better off learning this concept in alaboratory, even though they enjoy it less.