This is the second blog in my ‘The problem with…’ series.
The problem with learning styles is that they are an industry crafted from almost thin-air, a hyped, commercialised near-fiction.
The ‘meshing hypothesis’ is the name given to the claim that teachers should match their instruction to students’ learning styles. According to the hypothesis, teachers should first determine what style each learner has. A quick internet search will reveal that there are many to choose from: how about ‘VARK’ for starters, which categorises us as visual learners, or auditory, readers/writers, or kinaesthetic. Or there are Kolb’s four styles, where we could be divergers, assimilators, converters or accommodators. Or we could choose to divide our students into holistic or analytical learners, practical or creative learners – Coffield and colleagues found 71 different styles described in the literature in 2004. I wonder how many there are now?
The main issue is this: research into the effects of tailoring instruction to different learning styles (e.g. Coffield, Moseley, Hall and Ecclestone, 2004; Pashler et al, 2008) shows that it doesn’t lead to better learning. As Hattie and Yates say, ‘there is not any recognised evidence suggesting that knowing or diagnosing learning styles will help you to teach your students any better than not knowing their learning style’ (‘Visible Learning and the Science of How we Learn’, 2014).
It is true that when asked, many people express a preference for how they learn. They may feel they learn best with words or pictures, for example, or they may decide they are ‘divergers’. Although people may believe in their preferences, that doesn’t mean they actually learn better that way. When he was in Year 10 and 11, my son, James, was convinced that he could learn just as well if he studied whilst at the same time listening to music, half-watching YouTube and checking in regularly with his friends on Instagram. He certainly preferred to work that way, but it wasn’t helping him to learn. And nor would trying to turn every learning activity into a kinaesthetic event.
But what about: ‘learners are all different from each other, so different learning styles makes sense…’ We ARE all different from one another and, indeed, our different characteristics as learners – our prior learning, the motivation we bring to our work, the effort we expend, any barriers to learning we may face and so on – are very important for learning, but the process by which learning occurs is very similar for all of us, because our brains are very similar.
So, teaching does not need to match preferred learning styles. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that it shouldn’t, because it is the content – what we want to teach – that should principally determine how we teach. If I’m teaching football, I will want to use a ball at some stage; if I’m explaining the difference between crimson and maroon, I’ll want to use images of those colours; and if we are studying what different historical sources say about the Battle of Hastings, we will need to read some.
‘When instructional style matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better, regardless of their differing preferences for how the material is taught’ (‘Make it Stick’, Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, 2014).
