I was interested in an item recently broadcast on “The One Show” featuring advice on memory and how to improve your memory. The show item was, in itself, fine and provided quite commonly available advice on one way of improving memory. Viewers were directed towards a BBC website for more information.
Section 6 has highly disputed information, presented as if it were accepted ‘fact’. It’s our old enemy Learning Styles! You know, the thing that ‘progressive’ university types are trying to indoctrinate trainee teachers with? Except of course many of us fight the Learning Styles guff we see in schools at every opportunity.
So this is how the BBC iWonder website supported the item on “The One Show”
The section begins with the statement (attributed to Dr Jess Quirke, a clinical psychologist).
“When you want to learn specific information, before an exam perhaps, it’s best to know what style of learning is your strongest.” Clinical psychologist Dr Jess Quirke says: “By using your preferred learning style you are more likely to retain and remember information. These usually breakdown into three areas: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning.”
In education we are fighting hard to dispel the myth of learning styles which seem to pervade our schools. The reality of learning styles is that there is no such thing! People may describe or provide a ‘preference’ but research shows that this in no way aids their learning.
In a published peer reviewed paper in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Pashler et al (2008) state in their conclusion that: “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing. If classification of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.” (full text available by clicking here).
Riener and Willingham (2010) state, “students may have preferences about how to learn, but no evidence suggests that catering to those preferences will lead to better learning” (p. 35). A careful review of literature suggests that, while learning styles are prominent in education, there is nearly no supporting evidence of their existence, and that the theory should not be used in education.
A meta-analysis of research into learning styles by Coffield (2004) also concluded that “learning style researchers do not speak with one voice; there is widespread disagreement about the advice that should be offered to teachers, tutors or managers. For instance, should the style of teaching be consonant with the style of learning or not? At present, there is no definitive answer to that question, because – and this brings us to the second problem – there is a dearth of rigorously controlled experiments and of longitudinal studies to test the claims of the main advocates.” (p.140)
Baroness Susan Greenfield is also a critic of learning styles, stating that “The rationale for employing Vak learning styles appears to be weak. After more than 30 years of educational research in to learning styles there is no independent evidence that Vak [visual, auditory, kinaesthetic], or indeed any other learning style inventory, has any direct educational benefits.” She goes on to state that “We do students a serious disservice by implying they have only one learning style, rather than a flexible repertoire from which to choose, depending on the context.”
Additionally, while learnings styles is also common in business management, its use there has also been severely criticised e.g. by Reynolds (1997) who states that there is inadequate research to support the use of learning styles and that there are considerable doubts about its validity (full reference available by clicking here)
There is a considerable body of evidence to show that learning styles are a popular myth, with no empirical research that conclusively shows the advantages of such categorisations for individual learners.
I’ve submitted a complaint. I wonder if W1A will take note…
Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E., & Ecclestone, K. (2004). Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review. Learning and Skills Research Centre (pp. 1-182). London, UK.
Dekker, S., Lee, N.C., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in education: Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers. Frontiers in Psychology: Educational Psychology, 429, 1-8.
Lilienfeld, S. O., Lynn, S. J., Ruscio, J., & Beyerstein, B. L. (2010). Students learn best when teaching styles are matched to their learning styles. 50 great myths of popular psychology: Shattering widespread misconceptions about human behavior (pp. 92-99). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.