Here’s the learning styles stuff I promised.
Before you dive in, you might want to take this Index of Learning Styles survey, just for fun. If you do, post your results here (in the comment area) and your thoughts on the survey and what it claims to measure.
http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html
Here’s also a link to the decoder ring that tells you how the survey’s designers would interpret the results.
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/ILSdir/styles.htm
There are countless instruments out there like this one and I am only linking to this one because it happens to be freely available on the web and not prohibitively time consuming in length. It is posted on the NC State School of Engineering website, and may be valued by them particularly because one of its designers is a chemical engineer.
Here’s how they describe it elsewhere on their site:
“Index of Learning Styles was created in 1991 by Richard M. Felder, a chemical engineering professor at North Carolina State University, and Barbara A. Soloman, then the coordinator of advising for the N.C. State First-Year College. The four learning style dimensions of the instrument were adapted from a model developed in 1987 by Dr. Felder and Linda K. Silverman, an educational psychologist then at the University of Denver. The first version of the instrument (which had 28 items) was administered to several hundred students and the data were subjected to a factor analysis. Items that did not load heavily on one and only one item were replaced with new items to obtain the current 44-item version of the instrument. The ILS was installed on the World Wide Web in 1996. It gets over 500,000 hits per year and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and several other languages.”
The conversation among educational researchers about learning styles is more than 4 decades old—and has its roots in theories that date back to the early 20th century. It’s a complicated field to discuss and impossible to give a truly in depth overview in the context of this blog. One recent article in a journal of educational psychology that provides an overview of learning styles theories, methods and measures, discusses more than 25 different approaches.
As I said before, the field of education is full of proponents and skeptics about both the validity of the measures used to establish learners’ profiles and also about the usefulness of the profiles for learners and for teachers. I find myself among the skeptics, generally, but I don’t feel that the discussion of earning styles is devoid of value. For one thing, it places the focus on learning and learners—and it suggests, at the very least that there is this other less visible dimension of diversity in our classrooms that we should take into consideration. If an interest in learning styles encourages us to presenting material in a range of formats and to provide students with a variety of different kinds of classroom experiences and assignments, then the effect is positive.
Some critics of the learning styles approach focus on the questionable validity of many of the instruments that are used to create learning styles profiles of individuals. The concomitant concern has to do with how we use this information, once we have it. There were debates in England recently when the government decided to make “personal learning planning” (PLP) a key element in educational policy and asked schools to adopt a learning styles approach, en mass. Some schools went so far as to put labels on students’ desks, indicating what kind of learners they were. The Department of Education and Skills in England published a learning styles guidance pamphlet for teachers which one critic, Professor Frank Coffield of the London Institute of Learning called, ‘woefully under-researched, simplistic and downright dangerous.” Coffield worked with a group of other researchers on a study for the Learning and Skills Development Council of England. They found (among other things) that only three of the 13 most valued models for predicting and analyzing learning styles came near to meeting baseline criteria for internal consistency and predictive validity
Here’s a link to their report, the result of 18 months of study, which is published on the website of the Learning & Skills Research Centre
http://www.lsneducation.org.uk/user/order.aspx?code=041540&src=xoweb&cookie_test=true
Other critiques of learning styles models and applications can be found in:
Curry, L. (1990). One critique of the research on learning styles. Educational Leadership, 48, 50-56.
Miller, A. (1991) ‘Personality Types Learning Styles and Educational Goals.’ Educational Psychology 11 (3 &4): 217-37.
Moran, A. (1991) ‘What can Learning Styles Research Learn from Cognitive Psychology?’ Educational Psychology 11 (3 &4): 239-45.
Reynolds, M. (1997) “Learning Styles: A Critique’ Management Learning 28(2): 115-34.
Some basis assumptions underlying the learning styles perspective:
- There are individual differences in learning.
- An individual's style of learning is fairly stable across time.
- An individual's style of learning is fairly stable across tasks/problems/situations.
- We can effectively measure an individual's learning style.
Most educators and researchers share the first assumption. It is the about the other three that opinions diverge (Denzine, "Learning Stles: Myth or Reality." http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~dlk/Learn.styles.html)
Here’s some other basic terminology:
- Cognitive style: an individual’s typical or habitual mode of problem solving, thinking, perceiving and remembering--how individuals characteristically approach different cognitive tasks
- Learning style: the application of a cognitive style in a learning situation--how individuals characteristically approach different learning tasks
- Learning strategies/approaches--strategies selected by students to deal with different learning tasks.
- This distinction between learning styles and strategies is reflected in the “state or trait” debate around learning styles which are considered by some to be stable over time (structural/traits) or changing with varying experiences & situations (processual/states.)
- Learning preferences: learners’ preferences for one method of teaching over another (such as a preference for group work over independent study.)
- Many learning styles models integrate or address explicitly some major forms of learning preferences.
One popular method of classifying learning styles models is the ‘Onion’ Model developed by educational researcher, Lynne Curry (Curry 1983.) It divides learning styles models into four layers (hence onion), listed below starting with the inner most, or least observable and progressing to the outer later, most observable:
Personality Models focus on the influence of personality on the ability to acquire and integrate information. Models stressing personality include Witkin's (1954) construct of field dependence/field independence and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1978) with dichotomous scales measuring extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception.
The Information Processing Models focuses on the processes by which information is obtained, sorted, stored and utilized. This model includes Schmeck's (1983) construct of cognitive complexity and Kolb's (1984) model of information processing.
Social Interaction Models - focusing on how learners interact with their peers in the learning. Reichman and Greisha’s Student Learning Style Scale and attempts to categorize learners as independent/dependent, collaborative/competitive and participant/avoidant.
The Instructional Preference Models focus on the most observable traits of a learner, examples of which are environmental, emotional and sociological preferences. This model describes, among other instruments, the Learning Preference Inventory (LPI), which tries to measure preferences for the following kinds of learning: Abstract, Concrete, Individual, Interpersonal, Student-structured, and Teacher-structured.
The text in the four paragraphs above describing the onion model is an amalgam of descriptions taken (mostly verbatim) from these two articles:
1. Gordon, D. (2004). The Nexus Explored: A Generalised Model of Learning Styles. In C. Crawford et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2004 (pp. 917-925). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
2. Giles, E., Pitre, S., Womack, S. (2003). Multiple intelligences and learning styles. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Available Website: http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?printable=1&resID=7543
Here are a few links to other sites with information about learning styles.
Introduction to learning Styles
http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=7543&printable=1
Teaching English, a website sponsored by the BBC world service and the British Council.
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/methodology/learning_style.shtml#four
“Matters of Style,” article by Felder (one of the designers of the Index of Learning styles, linked above) Felder gives fairly straightforward descriptions of four learning styles models, including his own:
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/LS-Prism.htm
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