Have you ever been told you are a ________ learner? (Fill in the blank with visual, auditory, kinesthetic/tactile, or active/reflective, sensing/intuitive, visual/verbal, and sequential/global.
John Wills Lloyd points out:
Despite its intuitive appeal, there is a distinct lack of evidence for basing teaching on putative modality learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.). I’ll need to provide more depth about these matters in a later post, but here’s the quick version, in hopes fewer people will get fooled by the learning styles bologna.
JohnL is not alone. Wikipedia reports:
A literature review [1] carried out in 2004 in the UK by a team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne identified 71 different theories of learning style.
[snip]The Newcastle team's conclusions about the Dunn's model were unequivocal.
"Despite a large and evolving research programme, forceful claims made for impact are questionable because of limitations in many of the supporting studies and the lack of independent research on the model."
Another model, Gregorc's Style Delineator (GSD), was found to be "theoretically and psychometrically flawed" and "not suitable for the assessment of individuals."
Coffield's team found that none of the most popular learning style theories had been adequately validated through independent research; the idea of a learning cycle, the consistency of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic preferences and the value of matching teaching and learning styles were all 'highly questionable'.
Liz, thanks for the amplification. The report by Coffield and his colleagues is a good one. It's focused on what we in the US call post-secondary education, but it's applicable here, too. I'm depressed by how far the LS meme has penetrated into culture. It's in the business world (right alongside Myers-Briggs and such) as well as special, general, and * education, it seems.
Posted by: John Lloyd | Wednesday, July 05, 2006 at 02:01 PM