Learning Styles

Are you a visual, auditory, read/write, or kinesthetic learner? These are the four different learning styles of VARK, a popular learning style framework. Maybe you have taken this test or another that analyzes your preferences for receiving information. Perhaps you are familiar with the Myer Briggs Personality Test, an assessment often used in the workplace to help you understand your personality and how you best work within a team.

Learning Styles research became popular during the 1970s and is based on the idea that individuals learn best through different modes of presenting information.^[1] According to Straub, “The idea of learning styles is that there are stable, consistent methods that individuals take in, organize, process, and remember information, and by teaching those methods, students learn better.”^[2] Learning Style research was so prominent during the late 20th century that over 70 models of learning have been developed to map the differences in how learners integrate new information into their understanding.

Since 2012, numerous studies have been conducted to disprove the concept of learning styles, asserting that the models are too rigid to accurately represent the complex processes of learning and cognition. They claim it is harmful to assert that each individual has a consistent style of learning, and that if teachers teach to the learning styles of their individual students, they will have better success.^[3] Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist, maintains that “good teaching is good teaching” and that some forms of instruction are more effective for everybody.^[4]

Although most teachers know that learning styles have been debunked, they still use learning style or personality tests to inform their teaching. So why use a bogus theory as an instructional tool? And why are we having you take a learning style quiz?

Learning and Attention

Learning Style research likely became popular because we intuitively believe that we all have individual ways of learning. Moreover, before the 1970’s, the lecture style of teaching was the standard way of presenting information, which certainly did not work for everyone. The average attention span of an adult is 8 seconds, and our ability to focus on one task only extends to about 20 minutes. Delving into learning styles helped teachers understand that there are diverse modalities of delivering instruction.

Learning style critics assert that students do not understand their learning styles well enough to accurately self-report, but the skill of self-reflection is essential to improving your learning outcomes. This class focuses on helping you notice your patterns of learning, your learning attitudes, and how you learn best.

None of this is an exact science. What works for you may be a result of your genetics, conditioning, or preferences. What works for you may be partially determined by cognitive differences, such as ADHD. What works for you might change over time as your brain and body undergo developments in distinct phases of your life. What works for you might depend a lot on how interested you are in a topic. What matters more than any learning framework is that you are actively engaged in finding ways to learn in the variety of learning environments you experience in your education, personal life, and employment.

The purpose of this class is not to develop static methods of approaching reading, but to help you change your approach based on the task at hand and your level of concentration. We invite you to engage your mental flexibility to adapt your reading methods to enable you to be successful even when you are bored, tired, or unmotivated. When one method is not working, we invite you to try another way.

Even if learning style tools are imperfect measurements, they help students and teachers understand a bit more about themselves. They help teachers pay attention to how their students learn and students pay attention to how they are learning. Attention is a concept we will address quite a bit in this workbook. Unlike the models of learning styles, attention is a cognitive concept for which there is significant research-based evidence. Learning cannot occur without attention. In a world plagued by information overload, attention is becoming a scarce commodity.

Instead of getting locked into rigid modalities of learning, a more relevant question for educators is: how can we engage students’ attention most effectively? By extension, educators should focus on how to engage multiple parts of the brain in learning. This might be the best argument yet for presenting information through different modalities.

Our brain is not one learning center. It is a set of neural networks that process information in numerous ways. The more parts that light up when we are interacting with new information, the better. Consider this explanation of the cognitive process of reading from Nadine Gaab of Harvard Medical School.

For this reason, this workbook approaches reading through iterative strategy exercises. Students learn through prior experience, engagement, active learning, deep thinking, repetition, and self-reflection. So take charge of your learning experience. Try something new. Learning Styles correctly assert this key concept: there is more than one way.

In the next exercise, you will take a learning style assessment based on the C.I.T.E. framework. Once more, the purpose of this exercise is not to lock you into a strict perception of your learning preferences, but to provide you with ideas of different approaches that you can incorporate into your individual process or toolbox. For this reason, focus on the table at the end that provides lists of strategies that might work for you. When deciding what to pick, reflect on this core consideration: what gets and keeps my attention?