Why won't learning styles die?
A debunked theory turned into a social justice ideology
"Why won't learning styles die?" This question was posed to me by a high school teacher during a conversation about using research evidence in education policy and practice. He was referring to the idea that individuals have different styles of learning, such as visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinaesthetic, and that they learn better when the pedagogical practices of the teacher matches their learning style. This is a common belief in the field of education, but "there is no evidence to support the idea that matching activities to one’s learning style improves learning."Â
Individuals may prefer that information be presented orally or visually, and "people might be better at learning to distinguish between pieces of visual information, whereas others may be better at learning to distinguish between sounds." But just because someone may prefer to learn through a specific style does not mean that they are unable to learn in other ways. Some researchers have found that working memory might be the barrier for some learners: "Students who have good working memory are able to adapt their learning style to different learning situations, regardless if information is presented with pictures, text, details, or the big picture." One might like words or pictures better, but words or pictures won't necessarily work better for their memory.
The concept of "ways of knowing" uses a similar logic as learning styles when applied to learning in classrooms. Ways of knowing describes how you know what you know. There are four epistemic categories that fall under ways of knowing: empiricism, rationalism, authority, and intuition, inspiration, or revelation. Scholars of indigenous populations often describe storytelling as a way of knowing, which falls under the category of authority. Elders in the community tell the younger generation stories about cultural customs that they are expected to follow. The concept makes sense from a transmission of knowledge perspective, but just like with learning styles, it falls short from a pedagogical standpoint.
I worked with pre-service teachers who completed their student teaching (a graduation and licensing requirement) on an American Indian reservation. Prior to beginning their student teaching, the pre-service teachers took a class to learn about American Indian history and culture. One of their assigned readings described the ways in which indigenous children learn that are unique to indigenous people. Roland Tharp claimed in a 2006 study that there are pedagogical methods that are universally effective across cultures and some that are universal only within American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and other related populations. He conducted a review of research to come his conclusion; although, notably, Tharp was an author or co-author of 20 of the 21 research studies that he examined.Â
The five universal standards of effective pedagogy across cultures that he outlines are as follows:
Joint Productive Activity: Teacher and students producing together; facilitate learning through joint activity.
Developing Language and Literacy across the Curriculum: Develop competence in the language and literacy of instruction in all content areas.
Teaching in Context: Connect teaching and curriculum to experiences and skills of students' home and community.
Teaching Complex Thinking: Challenge students toward cognitive complexity.
Instructional Conversation: Engage students through dialogue.
The two standards of effective pedagogy universal only within native populations that he outlines are as follows:
Modeling and Demonstration: Learning Through Observation.
Student Directed Activity: Encourage Student Decision Making.
In Tharp's description of the last two standards, he poses the question: Why are these features so salient in Native American educational programs? Then he goes on to provide the following answer: "Because these two Standards reflect powerful and distinctive Native cognitive and social characteristics." Notice he used the term "cognitive" characteristics, which seems to imply that native cognition is different than non-native cognition.
One pre-service teacher took this knowledge from Tharp with him to his American Indian classroom. He thought that teaching his students through visual demonstrations would help them learn better. His supervising teacher quickly pointed out the inaccuracies and inherent problems with this pedagogy. The teacher stressed that some of his high school students relied on visual cues because they had lower literacy skills, not because their brains worked differently.
Tharp did not use the term "ways of knowing," but his research is a confluence of the concept and learning styles. And how my student interpreted his research demonstrates how ways of knowing gets erroneously translated into practice and how the myth of learning styles gets perpetuated in research and practice, when, in reality, there may be other reasons for why students default to one preferred way of knowing or learning style over another.
Individuals may not have fixed learning styles or ways of coming to know content, but they do have different abilities. And as far as how they learn, teachers would be better off matching their pedagogical approach to the content that they are teaching. In other words, they should help students learn disciplinary ways of thinking—how a mathematician solves a problem is different than how a novelist solves a problem. Decoding the Disciplines provides this type of pedagogical approach. It is "a process for increasing student learning by narrowing the gap between expert and novice thinking" by following these steps:
Identify a bottleneck to learning.
Uncover the mental tasks needed to overcome the bottleneck.
Model these tasks.
Give students practice and feedback.
Motivate and lessen resistance.
Assess student mastery.
Share what has been learned through the Decoding process.
In the case of my student, he taught social studies courses. He would have been better off teaching his students how to think like a historian to solve problems than defaulting to images and demonstrations, as Tharp would have him do. This approach may have also helped him diagnose the literacy issue that was creating a barrier to learning for some of his students—i.e., the bottleneck to learning.