Learning Styles

Abstract

Learning styles is an umbrella term that covers a highly diverse and controversial body of educational theories and practices. The term represents a generally accepted belief among the majority of educators that students differ widely in their ways of learning, demonstrating preferences in the way they process classroom experiences, and that pedagogical practices should be designed with an awareness of marked differences among students in how they learn. The term first surfaced widely in educational literature during the 1960s when it was strongly linked to a widespread interest in experiential learning. While that link is still prevalent in the literature and classroom practices of the twenty-first century, the concept of learning styles has assumed new importance as US schools increasingly deal with reconciling differences in how students learn with the intellectual rigors and emotional pressures of repeated, high-stakes, standardized student testing.

Overview

While the term "learning styles" has only gained popularity in educational circles during the past half-century, it is an ancient concern. Evidence of an interest in learning styles can be found in the centuries-old scripture and interpretative theological texts of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. For example, during the Jewish holiday of Passover, parents are instructed to educate their children about the holiday's meaning by assuming one line of questioning for the children they perceive as intellectually mature and another for children with less intellectual sophistication. The Letters of Paul in the New Testament and the message of Muhammad in the Koran both emphasize the need to tailor the essential spiritual message to vastly different learners. Buddhist scripture suggests that the transmission of spiritual knowledge must take into account the emotional intelligence as well as the intellectual intelligence of individuals and often suggests using paradoxical, oxymoronic verbal narratives as a way to appeal to the emotional and tacit knowledge of people who might think of themselves as purely intellectual, book-centered learners.

The term learning styles represents a generally accepted belief among the majority of educators that students differ widely in their ways of learning, demonstrating preferences in the way they process classroom experiences, and that pedagogical practices should be designed with an awareness of marked differences among students in how they learn. Who knows exactly what kind of learning experience catalyzes change in a learner? What types of environments and teaching strategies are most potent for what kinds of intelligences? Do classrooms contain learners with a myriad of diverse learning styles—or hold a myriad of diverse personalities who learn differently because of deep-seated personality differences?

Influence of Modern Psychology. Contemporary interest among educators in learning styles developed at the same time as the genesis of theories of psychology in the late nineteenth century in Europe and the US. If the mysterious and often invisible mechanisms of human learning could be successfully researched so that the mechanisms of learning could be clearly visible, early psychologists believed, then teaching could become a science. Teachers would no longer have to guess how best to instruct a child if that child's personality or mental capacities, as measured by a standardized IQ test, could become transparent to the teacher. However, this dream of a perfect marriage between psychological knowledge and best pedagogical practice has never actualized. Part of the difficulty in the late nineteenth century, and a continuing problem in the twenty-first century, is the absence of any one widely accepted theory of human psychology that comprehensively accounts for learning. While psychologists practicing behaviorism might see learning style only in terms of a student's visible behaviors, psychologists practicing Jungian psychology might view learning styles in terms of multiple invisible forces impacting a learner's personality.

Advances in Neurological Science. Advances in medical imaging and understanding of the neurological biochemistry of the human brain finds the interface between psychological theories and teaching more complex. Since medical science currently possesses the technological tools (CAT scans, for example) needed to view some of the brain's neural processes biochemically as learning tasks are given to experimental subjects, more knowledge has been secured about how different areas of the brain in different individuals engage with various learning tasks. This research is still in the early stages so few definitive findings are established that can be practically used by educators. Inaccurate simplifications of the differences between the brain hemispheres reported in the popular media have led some ill-informed educators into thinking their students are either "left-brained" or "right-brained." The cover of a best-selling book for parents with children diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder (ADD), Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World: Unlocking the Potential of Your ADD Child by Jeffrey Freed and Laura Parsons features a blurb that reads: "You can win over teachers and principals to the right-brained approach the ADD child thrives on."

Applications

Multiple Intelligences. Perhaps the single greatest impact of any theory about learning styles in the 20th century comes from Harvard educator Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. First encapsulated in his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983), this theory argues that there are eight kinds of intelligence, and individuals learn best by using their strengths in one or more of them:

• Linguistic,
• Logical-mathematical,
• Musical,
• Spatial,
• Bodily-kinesthetic,
• Interpersonal,
• Intrapersonal, and
• Naturalist-ecological.

Gardner theorized that learners can excel or need remediation in these eight categories of intelligence. This promotes the study and use of a variety of classroom practices by teachers to meet a rich variety of different learning styles, which run counter to the "one size fits all" type of teacher lesson plan based on the assumption that all learners are cognitively alike and possess an identical learning style.

The virtues of Gardner's theory in making teaching a stimulating intellectual adventure in pedagogical experimentation can also be a practical shortcoming in actual daily classroom practice. It is a daunting enough challenge to teach a standardized curriculum to thirty different students at once. If a teacher is face-to-face with thirty different students with thirty different learning styles, it can invite despair over the impossibility of ever reaching all students successfully. Yet another challenge involves the assessment of student work. Should a student who shows evidence of above average linguistic intelligence and below-average mathematical intelligence be tested and graded in the same fashion as a student manifesting the opposite balance of talents?

One practical way to apply a facet of Gardner's theory that many teachers have found attractive involves engaging whatever sensory channels are most available in their students. While the overwhelming majority of students in the US depend primarily upon their sense of sight for learning, a significant minority learn primarily through hearing, and a small minority by touch, or taste. This has led some educators to design curricula emphasizing a blending of visual, aural, verbal, reading/writing, and kinesthetic (VARK) stimuli for students. Particularly in the elementary school grades, various teaching strategies have evolved in language arts curricula to accommodate different student learning styles to accommodate a range of learning styles marked by different sensory priorities.

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory. A theory similar to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences was developed by the psychologist Robert Sternberg. Sternberg divides the eight types of intelligence identified by Gardner into three types: analytic intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical or successful intelligence. In place of the phrase Gardner and other educators favor, "learning styles," Sternberg refers to "thinking styles," but the terms have been used interchangeably by many educators and psychologists since no learning of any style occurs without prior thinking. Like Gardner, Sternberg believes that students demonstrate different styles of learning in ways that bypass the assumptions about learning held by most US school administrators. Sternberg is particularly critical of standardized testing as a method to test anything more than a limited number of memory-related and problem-solving skills. Of particular interest to Sternberg is how students can obtain "street smarts" as opposed to "school smarts," his reframing of the theory of tacit knowledge found in The Tacit Dimension (1966) by Michael Polanyi. Polanyi believes that humans know more than they tell of what they know since we often learn through informal experiences we rarely see as actual lessons. Since it is a commonplace assumption of modern psychologists and philosophers that no two individuals experience daily life in the identical way that would imply that each of us learns from our unique life experiences in different styles.

Constructivism. How significant attentiveness is when dealing with differences in learning styles among students varies among educators, depending upon their philosophy of education. If the purpose of education is seen essentially as preparation for economic livelihood and traditional family and citizenship roles and responsibilities, then differences in learning styles might be seen as a relatively insignificant issue. All students would profit from being seen as a homogenous group needing to attain the same educational goals at the same pace through the same methods. If the purpose of education is seen as preparing students to create a world fundamentally different from the one they inherit from their parents, then differences in learning styles would become a central concern. This philosophy of education, commonly identified with a philosophy called constructivism, would emphasize the primacy of highly individualized learning programs designed in synchronization with self-initiated student behaviors that might call for educators to try very different methods to suit different student learning inquiries in the same class.

Mvududu and Thiel-Burgess stress the relevance of constructivism in the twenty-first century this way: “Constructivism represents one of the big ideas in education. Its implications for how teachers teach and learn to teach are enormous. If our efforts in reforming education for all students are to succeed, we must focus on students. To date, a focus on student-centered learning may well be the most important contribution of constructivism.” In line with Knowles’s Adult Learning Theory, or Andragogy, Constructivism Learning Theory encourages learners to take an active role in their learning experience, facilitating deeper learning and transfer of learning. It can be categorized as cognitive, social or radical. Cognitive constructivism focuses on the learner's stage of development, social constructivism, considers the impact of peer and societal influence in learning, and radical constructivism considers the utility of learning and the idea of inventing, rather than discovering, knowledge.

Psychological Typing. Two other major contributions to theories regarding learning styles have been presented by Carl Jung and David Kolb. The psychologist Carl Jung emphasized that individuals across all cultures can be classified as types. These psychological types demarcated those who live and learn largely within the bounds of their sense of a deeply unique interior identity, a type he categorized as "introverts." Those who largely live and are acutely aware of the impact that people and their environments have on their socialization and learning, he labeled as "extroverts." Few psychological theories of personality types have ever achieved widespread popularity among educators with the exception of this theory, and that was related to how Jung's personality theory could be practically applied to students if one accepted the accuracy of a personality test based upon Jung's categories. That test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an easy-to-administer ninety-three item questionnaire that draws its design from Jung's book "Psychological Types" (1971).

The questionnaire can serve as a tool in discovering different learning styles through posing all persons as habitually moving between four sets of dichotomies. The first, as mentioned earlier, is extraversion and introversion. Then Jung distinguishes between "sensing" types, those relying heavily upon sensory experiences daily, and "intuitive" types, those who rely heavily on hunches when discerning the meaning of experience. Yet another pair of opposed characteristics are illustrated by those who are "thinking" types, meaning that their favorite way of processing experience is cerebral and marked by rational analysis as opposed to those who are "feeling" types, who rely upon a wellspring of emotion to interpret experience. Finally, Jung establishes a continuum between the "judging" types, those who come quickly to value judgments about experiences as opposed to the "perceiving" types, those who try to let their experiences speak for themselves without rushing to judgment. The MBTI does not result in some students showing more aptitude for one or the other polarity within these four dichotomies. Rather it establishes preference patterns that help establish a psychological type.

Part of the test's enormous popularity among educators might be related to the fact that the qualitative categories central to the test, extraversion and introversion, seem to be reformulations of the ancient folk belief that some children are predisposed to be "social butterflies" while others appear born to be loners. If these are indeed stable psychological types, educators can then easily discern these two types in class and plan accordingly. Since it is also a qualitative test profiling personality, it is acceptable to educators who might resent any quantitative student test to evaluate learning styles, since purely quantitative psychological testing is objected to by many teachers as a dehumanizing act reducing students to mere numbers.

An adult-education study investigated the relationship of learning-strategy preference to personality type. Learning-strategy preference was identified with the Assessing The Learning Strategies of AdultS (ATLAS), and personality type was measured with the MBTI. The findings indicated that “while overall personality type is not related to learning strategy preference, three of the four indicators of personality type show a relationship to learning strategy preference.” As a result of these findings, the authors conclude that while stereotypes cannot be made to link approaches to learning with overall personality types, certain personality traits “can be indicators of how one might be approaching learning tasks.”

Educator David A. Kolb created the Learning-Style Inventory (LSI) that is as intensely rooted in the theories of John Dewey as the MBTI is rooted in Jung's theories. Kolb posits two ranges of learning styles to be measured in students. He notes that some learners are extremely engaged and active experimenters while others are more inwardly reflective and non-participatory observers. Some learners move quickly into forming abstract, symbolic concepts from their experiences while others interpret their experience in more concrete and literal terms. The LSI, like the MBTI, indicates a pattern of learner preferences.

Viewpoints

Few educators, not to mention parents, will unequivocally claim that any two children learn a lesson in exactly the same way. Yet this commonplace view has not been converted remotely into a generally accepted way to assess learner differences in order to better tailor teaching strategies to meet individual student types and needs. The fact that over seven dozen very different competing theories of learning style are present in the intellectual marketplace for educators to sort among indicates the extreme lack of consensus.

The Traditional Approach. Another school of thought among educators invested in traditional pedagogical approaches holds that while differences in learning styles will always be a fact in any group of students, these differences in learning style are not as significant as the content of curriculum packaged into universally engaging lesson plans and a traditional, classics-based curriculum. Within schools based upon the "Classical Christian" philosophy of education, in the US, such thinking is often based upon the premise that teaching the classics of Western civilization can be so intrinsically stimulating to students of various learning styles that all types of learners will engage with the assigned subject matter if offered in an age-appropriate manner. As Douglas Wilson suggests, all students should learn grammar by rote in early childhood, and dialectics and rhetoric through class discussions and written assignments in their teen years. Further, some educators in this camp believe that stylistic flexibility should be encouraged among all children at the same time rather than individualizing lessons to the unique learning style of every student. Christian classical educator Stuart Fowler suggested the need for avoiding "the risk of treating students as learning style types rather than uniquely individual learners whose learning styles will never wholly fit any type."

High-Stakes Testing. Another issue for educators involves judging the utility of sensitizing themselves to differences in learning styles during an era of intensive, routine, high-stakes standardized testing. While this test-centered atmosphere might drive teachers deeper into discovering how to design lessons for different kinds of learners, some would say that preparing all students for such rigorous universal academic testing takes away the prep time that is needed to tailor lessons individually to learners displaying different learning styles. Overcrowding in urban classrooms is also believed to make alternative evaluations of student learning styles and achievement more difficult.

Cultural Learning Styles. Another controversy surrounding the way students learn involves cultural differences among children attending the same school. What is categorized as a particular learning style by a teacher with a White, middle-class, American background might be viewed by a student from an Hispanic or Philippine heritage as simply "the way things are done." For example, the haptic sense, the sense of touch, is often an integral part of the learning style of children raised in African and Asian families cohered by highly traditional folkways. However, the sense of touch has never been a dominant avenue of instruction for children in American public schools. Ackerman offers significant evidence as to how learners from various cultures take for granted that the sensory channels from which they most prefer to learn are universal, when that is not the case.

The Learning Process. Differing viewpoints about learning styles are also connected to differing definitions of the learning process and when that process begins and ends. For example, John Dewey defined learning as solving real world problems within the context of a community of learning facing the same acknowledged problem. By way of contrast, Cardinal Newman, a significant figure in Catholic education who also influenced secular education, saw learning as the inculcation of a moral and religious sensibility synthesized with the presentation of issues involving analytic reasoning. In Dewey's model, learning is achieved when a learner can demonstrate agility with problem-solving tools to better the world. For Newman, learning is an act of devoted attentiveness to worldly and otherworldly challenges through which a learner develops a character embodying moral sensibility. When talking about styles of learning, an educator with Dewey's philosophy will focus upon a learner's preferences for solving worldly problems while successfully navigating the interpersonal world of a school.

An educator favoring Newman's concept of learning will focus upon the learner's potential to contact the wellsprings of faith and reason within their innate personality for the sake of redeeming religiously all of creation. This dichotomy suggests that learning styles can be seen as preferences, aptitudes, or even manifestations of innate character. Depending on cultural context, an unusual learning style manifested by a non-conforming child might be interpreted as a symptom of madness induced by supernatural forces.

Instructional Design. One practical way to work with learners that might well unite opposing educational camps entails highly flexible instructional design. Instructional design refers to how the content of a lesson is offered in terms of sequencing, quantities of data given within what schedules, and the means of delivery (actual classroom lecture and/or discussion, virtual online networks, etc). Inspiring educators of all persuasions have long taught students that there are many possible routes to attaining a correct answer or authoring a convincing, well-organized expository essay. As educational software grows in sophistication, it might be possible to envision programs that can quickly adapt in real time to variations in style of learning. Prototypes of such software were developed for training purposes by the US Army based upon "fuzzy logic," meaning that a computer develops a profile of a user's learning style through remembering recent keyboard and mouse activity and will gradually alter the usually programmed array of learning tasks to tailor the program objectives to the user's style of learning.

Demski wrote that “by marrying the principles of personalized learning with the tools of technology, some educators believe that they have a chance to create the kind of customized learning environment that can finally break schools out of the Industrial-age model of education to bring about true 21st-century school reform.” She cites the following four “key” technological elements as being important to reaching that goal: a well-implemented 1-to-1 laptop initiative, learning-management systems, access to online remedial coursework, and open access to search tools.

Whatever one's belief regarding learning styles, there is no question that education has never been a simple matter of delivering knowledge into identical minds. As long as learners continue to not be simple receptacles of educator wisdom, questions pertaining to how the minds of different students engage differently with the same task will continue to challenge educators.

Criticisms. In addition to the lack of consensus among proponents of the learning styles concept, there also exists significant controversy over whether the idea is useful at all. Increasingly, arguments from neuroscientists and other researchers claim that efforts to match alleged student learning styles with certain types of instruction show no impact on learning outcomes. Willingham, Hughes, and Dobolyi found that despite public conceptions, there is little scientific evidence to support the efficacy of any theory of learning styles. Several studies have noted that all measurements of learning styles are flawed and that such models are too variable to provide any useful data. Others have suggested that exposing students to narrowed ideas about how they learn could in fact limit their openness to learning and prevent them from thinking in new ways. In the early 2020s, research remained mixed concerning the validity and reliability of psychological testing and its correlation with learning style.

Terms & Concepts

Constructivism: An educational theory based upon the concept that learners actively construct meaning for themselves through the activity of synthesizing sensory impressions and thoughts into concepts that are regularly tested experientially for validity.

Instructional Design: A form of educational research and practical application concerned with the possible forms of how academic content can be optimally presented to learners verbally and through other means.

Learning-Style Inventory: An instrument created by the educational psychologist David A. Kolb intended to measure differences between learners favoring the abstract presentation of subject matter and learners favoring more concrete and literal presentations of subjects.

Multiple Intelligences: A theory created by educational psychologist Howard Gardner marked by eight categories of human intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist-ecological.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: An instrument to indicate personality types delineated as archetypal in the theory developed by psychologist Carl Jung. It consists of a questionnaire offering insights into the learning preferences of sixteen different archetypal personalities and was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers.

Psychological Types: A theory advocated by psychologist Carl Jung claiming that all individuals across time and cultures can be known psychologically through an analysis of personality types that they are often unconscious of in daily life.

Stylistic Flexibility: The ability of learners to "shift gears" and transition among various ways of thinking and learning, a notion the ancient Greeks described as "polytropos," being of many minds having many mental tools at one's disposal to solve different kinds of challenges.

Tacit Knowledge: A philosophical and educational concept categorizing knowledge that is practical and derived from experiences outside of formal schooling.

Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic (VAK ): A type of learning where the senses of vision, hearing, and touch play particularly key roles.

Bibliography

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Suggested Reading

Anderson, M. (2016). Learning to choose, choosing to learn: The key to student motivation and achievement. ASCD.

Denig, S. J. (2004). Multiple intelligences and learning styles: Two complimentary dimensions. Teachers College Record, 106, 96–111. Retrieved July 29, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Educational Research Complete.

Franklin, S. (2006). VAKing out learning styles - why the notion of 'learning styles' is unhelpful to teachers. Education 3-13, 34, 81–87. Retrieved July 29, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Educational Research Complete.

Jones, C., Reichard, C., & Mokhtari, K. (2003). Are students' learning styles discipline specific? Community College Journal of Research & Practice, 27, 363–376. Retrieved July 29, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Educational Research Complete.

Pritchard, Alan. (2018). Ways of learning: Learning theories and learning styles in the classroom (4th ed). Routledge.

Zhang, L. & Sternberg, R. J. (2005). A threefold model of intellectual styles. Educational Psychology Review, 17, 1–53. Retrieved July 29, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Educational Research Complete.