Critiques of Kolb

Critiques of David Kolb's theory of experiential learning

Roger Greenaway, UK training consultant, has put together a list of the main challenges to Kolb's theories, organised by perspective.

Learning styles - a waste of time & money?

Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review

This report, produced by the Learning & Skills Research Centre, a UK government agency, is available for download only.

This is an extensive document, which I've not had time to read in its entirety (182 pages onscreen & the sample pages I printed out are barely legible). I was drawn to it by Atherton's reference.

Section 9 of the report identifies nine "continuing problems within the research field of learning styles":

• Theoretical incoherence and conceptual confusion


• Learning styles in practice: labelling, vested interests and overblown claims


• The variable quality of learning style models


• Psychometric weaknesses


• The unwarranted faith placed in simple inventories


• No clear implications for pedagogy


• Decontextualised and depoliticised views of learning and learners


• Lack of communication between different research perspectives on pedagogy


• The comparative neglect of knowledge

Each is developed at length, in quite damning terms. Item 1, for instance, refers to the "sheer number of dichotomies" (page 136 lists 30 separate pairs) creating a situation where "the constant generation of new approaches, each with its own language (...) is both bewildering and off-putting to practitioners and to other academics who do not specialise in this field." The report quotes Reynolds' (1997) description of the whole field of learning styles as "a bedlam of contradictory claims".

The previous section had briefly presented the "semi-public critique" expressed by "those hostile to the learning styles camp, who mutter at conferences in the informal breaks between presentations, who confide their reservations in private, but who rarely publish their disagreement." These objections boil down to 5 main points:

• the unacceptability of basing conclusions on statistical analysis of subjective scores derived from self-reporting


• the meaninglessness of certain items on the questionnaires


• the influence of commercial interests on promoting certain tests


• the lack of evidence that changing teaching styles to cater for different learning styles has any significant effect on learning


• the simplistic 'common sense' conclusions drawn by many learning styles studies

The report authors end with a call for further extensive & co-ordinated empirical research, but remain unconvinced that this is likely to make any real difference. Might it not be better, they ask, to direct the funding into other, more fruitful areas of enquiry? The report's closing lines are worth quoting in full:

Finally, we want to ask: why should politicians,
policy-makers, senior managers and practitioners
in post-16 learning concern themselves with learning
styles, when the really big issues concern the large
percentages of students within the sector who
either drop out or end up without any qualifications?
Should not the focus of our collective attention be
on asking and answering the following questions?

• Are the institutions in further, adult and community education in reality centres of learning for all their staff and students?


• Do some institutions constitute in themselves barriers to learning for certain groups of staff and students?

If I'm able to return to this topic, I would like to look in more detail at the 2005 Demos report & the work of Michael Reynolds.

Purpose of this blog?

Now that we're officially in "blogging season" it seems worth reflecting on what I'm seeking to achieve here. We have our Tutor Group conference for discussion of issues arising from the course. We also have databases where we can upload our work for certain activities, in order to share it with fellow students. Some of our activities we probably shouldn't be posting on a publicly available site such as this one, if we're hoping to use them in an unchanged form for our end of course portfolio. What does that leave?

It could be a study journal, recording my reflections on the course.
It could be a place to publish notes on issues arising in the course.

This post comes under the first heading; most recent posts come under the second. I suspect it's the second use that will work best for me. I find it very helpful to put my reading into a fit state for blogging. Note-taking on the computer is a skill my first OU course taught me; polishing those notes for a small potential audience of peers gives me a little more discipline. It also protects them from fire, theft & lightning stike :-)

Heterodoxy

TheHeterodoxy section of teacher-trainer James Atherton's website has a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek piece on learning styles:
Learning styles don't matter

There's 'orthodox' coverage of learning theories, too:
Angles on Learning: An introduction to theories of learning for college, adult and professional education

Atherton describes himself as "a pragmatic practitioner, sceptical about any panaceas, who nevertheless believes that every practical choice embodies a value-position which is worthy of discussion."

It's a lovely site to visit, with some great design touches.

Kolb

The Kolb Learning Style Inventory
Developed by David Kolb in the 1980s
this uses a 12 item questionnaire to classify learners into four types, based on permutations of their learning preferences as follows:

Diverging (experiencing + reflecting)
Assimilating (reflecting + thinking)
Converging (thinking + doing)
Accommodating (doing + experiencing)

Again, it seems to boil down to dichotomous pairs, as this summary makes clear:

• Concrete Experience - CE (feeling) -----V-----Abstract Conceptualization - AC (thinking)


• Active Experimentation - AE (doing)-----V----- Reflective Observation - RO (watching)

The fuller descriptions of each learning type offered on that page bear an uncanny resemblance to the sort of 'personality profiles' one can read on astrology websites.

"People with a Diverging learning style have broad cultural interests and like to gather information. They are interested in people, tend to be imaginative and emotional, and tend to be strong in the arts."

Right.

Herrmann

I turned to Wikipedia & the author's own site for an overview of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument.
Developed by Ned Herrmann in the 1970s, the HBDI uses a 120 item questionnaire to classify "thinking preferences" into four quadrants, as shown in this graphic from the Herrmann International website's FAQs:

The quadrants are (according to Wikipedia):

Analytical
Sequential
Interpersonal
Imaginative

Although based on disputed theories about how the brain works (an example of the sort of rhetoric this topic inspires) this particular model is at least clear in its emphasis on the desirability of "whole brain thinking".

It seems directed more at learners than at educators, as a tool for self-awareness & hence self-development. In other words, it throws the responsibility for acting on the results of learning style analysis onto the learner. This makes more sense than requiring educators to tailor their delivery to an impossibly complex multiplicity of learning styles - the implicit demand ridiculed by Stahl.
Nevertheless, the Funderstanding site offers a summary of ways in which educators can take left-brain/right-brain preferences into account.

Anecdotal aside: I interrupted today's study for a coffee. On the kitchen table I found a booklet of exercises from the British Academy of Advanced Training. My 16 year-old daughter is taking part in a short programme of "thinking workshops" led by Roy Paget, British authority on "brain-based learning", which seems pretty close to what Herrmann is leveraging for profit offering.

Still sceptical....

Funderstanding

Thanks to Nigel for flagging up this handy site, especially the Engaging Kids section.

While this East Jersey company's raison d'être would make Noble shudder:

Once we have product concepts that meet your needs, we'll test them on kids. Testing early in the product development cycle lets you improve the product at the point that it is least expensive - before you go to production. We offer you the ability to do virtual testing. In virtual testing, we'll create software proxies for your product that our community of kids can test online. This accelerates the rate at which you get feedback while decreasing the cost of prototypes.

they've certainly put together a useful starter guide to learning theories.

second home

http://bluefluff.livejournal.com/

Using this as a back-up while blogger is "being difficult".

Learning Styles (1)

Decided to be a good student & take a closer look at learning styles, despite my scepticism based on previous encounters. The course material & set book list five major systems.

1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [1957]

This uses a 126 item questionnaire to classify learners into 16 types, consisting of permutations of their choices within four pairs of dichotomous preferences. The pairs are:

EI - Extraverts/Intraverts
SN - Sensing/Intuitive
TF - Thinking/Feeling
JP - Judging/Perceptive

The first recommended website wasn't available.

The second provided most of the above information.

The third observed that there is "infinite variation, even among people of the same type" which casts something of a shadow over its usefulness (didn't we already know that human beings are infinitely variable?).
It quickly became impenetrable to the lay reader:
Phi coefficients, statistics for categorical data, corrected using the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula, could be expected to underestimate reliabilities of type categories because the MBTI data are not true categories, but rather a result of scoring.Tetrachoric r correlations....
so I moved on.

2. Felder Silverman Learning Model [1991]

The first recommended website wasn't available. ("UniversalEducator.com is for Sale!")
The second recommended website hastily redirected me from www2.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSpage.html
to
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/ILSpage.html
Restraining myself from speculating on what might have been happening in the locker rooms of North Carolina, I learned:
This uses a 44 item questionnaire to classify learners into 16 types, consisting of permutations of their choices within four pairs of dichotomous preferences. This time, the pairs are:

Active/Reflective
Sensing/Intuitive
Visual/Verbal
Sequential/Global

Definitely more economical than Myers-Briggs.
I tried this one out, here, & found it almost impossibly vague. For example:

When I am learning something new, it helps me to
(a) talk about it.
(b) think about it.

Where's the option for "both the above"? So I play "ip dip penny ship", pick one at random & irrevocably shift the balance of my learning style? Hmm. Telling me in the FAQs that "if you find that you have a hard time answering many questions that relate to a particular dimension, it just means that you are fairly well balanced on that dimension." doesn't really reassure me.

3. Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument
Recommended website not available. I'll come back to that one.
4. Kolb's Learning Style Inventory
Recommended website not available. I'll come back to that one.

5. Honey and Mumford's Classification
Recommended website is... Peter Honey's Online Shop.
Since I haven't "already registered as a pay-as-you-go user", my explorations are limited, but in between the exclamations NEW!! "Only £10" "market leader", it appears that:
This uses an 80 item questionnaire to classify learners into just 4 types:

Activist
Reflector
Theorist
Pragmatist

Although it is a relief to escape the dichotomous pairs, I can't help suspecting that £10 won't make my learning "easier, more effective and more enjoyable".

I'll be back....

Different Strokes

I've had an intuitive suspicion of "learning styles" for a long time. Learning style inventories always struck me as being somewhat akin to those "personality quizzes" one finds in magazines & blogs. Even if they did reveal some truth about how people learn, it was never clear how this ought to translate into educational practice. But I carried on pretending I believed in them, because they were dressed up in fancy academic language, & everybody else seemed to believe in them....

Tonight I found a sceptic.

Different Strokes for Different Folks: A Critique of Learning Styles

In this 1999 article, Steven A. Stahl argues that not only is learning style analysis seriously flawed, it is also practically useless as an educational tool.

Stahl's thesis is "the utter failure to find that assessing children's learning styles and matching to instructional methods has any effect on their learning" (p.1). He systematically demonstrates the absence of empirical evidence, drawing on 14 years' worth of research reviews. (It's almost as if the reviewers couldn't believe their eyes & had to keep looking again!) & concludes:

These five research reviews, all published in well-regarded journals, found the same thing: One cannot reliably measure children's reading styles and even if one could, matching children to reading programs by learning styles does not improve their learning. (p.2)

The main problem with learning styles inventories, for Stahl, is that they rely on statements that have a ring of truth about them, but are actually so vague as to be almost meaningless - rather like the 'convincing' declarations made by fortune-tellers. More seriously, perhaps, they fail to take into account other forms of difference between individuals (prior experience & current skills levels, for instance) that do have a proven impact on learning. Furthermore, claims Stahl, they are low in reliability: repeated tests do not produce repeated results (either because they fail to measure learning styles accurately in the first place, or because learning styles change over time).

Stahl believes that the energy invested in assessing children's learning styles & attempting to produce learning situations that cater for all the learning preferences the tests supposedly reveal, is misdirected.

I'm inclined to agree.

Digital Diploma Mills

Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education

I've been reading one of the early articles by David F. Noble (Canadian historian & famous/notorious opponent of e-learning) published in FirstMonday back in January 1998. It makes a very clear statement of the case for one of the claims about e-learning that the course asks us to consider:

"It will lead to the commercialisation of all education".

Noble argues that the introduction of e-learning to Higher Education is both a vehicle & a cover for the take-over of universities by corporate capitalism. Unable to maintain their industrial dominance in the post-oil-crisis world, claims Noble, developed Western nations have turned to education as their new arena for profit-making activity.

He sees this as a two-phase development:

1. the commoditisation of universities' research function

(through new partnerships between academic & corporate interests, the conversion of laboratory discoveries into patented products, the shift of funding from education to research - with a corresponding rise in class sizes, reduction in teaching staff & narrowing of the curriculum)

2. the commoditisation of universities' education function

This is where e-learning comes in, as a supposedly cheap fix for the problems caused by the first phase. According to Noble, four separate interest groups are promoting e-learning for their own, profit-driven purposes:

• vendors of e-learning hardware, software & packaged 'content'


• corporate training specialists, who see it as "yet another way of bringing their problem-solving, information-processing, "just-in-time" educated employees up to profit-making speed" (p.5) - preferably at public expense


• university administrators, who see an opportunity to make savings on premises & staff, assert control over the academics & maybe even become vendors themselves


• "ubiquitous technozealots" (p.6) who see computers as the answer to everything

Consequently, Noble goes on, universities are no longer considered as places of education, but as production sites:

Teachers are de-skilled and reduced to the status of factory workers, working long hours, constantly monitored and losing ownership of the course material they produce, which can be sold on to other institutions, where cheaper people can be employed to deliver it. Any who protest are dismissed as "obstructionist", "standing in the way of progress" (p.9)

and markets:

Despite evidence that "students want the genuine face-to-face education they paid for, not a cyber-counterfeit" (p.10) universities are forcing them to become consumers of e-learning, & even using them as guinea pigs in "thinly-veiled field trials" (p.11) of educationally unproven products.

Noble concludes gloomily: "Quality higher education will not disappear entirely, but it will soon become the exclusive preserve of the rich and the powerful."(p.12)


Noble has continued his crusade against e-learning in the face of institutional opposition. A trenchant - if necessarily biased - account of that opposition is given in this excerpt from his 2001 book version of Digital Diploma Mills.

So, is he a lone voice of sanity crying in the wilderness, or as one right-wing (Zionist) opponent put it recently, a "flaky academic extremist", embodying "a strange hybrid of Marxism and crackpot Luddism"?

The counter-argument is my next task!

Bloom's Taxonomy

Kept coming across this in my reading, so I thought I'd better look it up. It turned out to involve quite familiar material that I'd just never known by its proper name.

Benjamin Bloom (1913 - 1999)


His taxonomy (1956)

Learning is divided into three categories:

• cognitive (mental knowledge)


• affective (emotional attitude)


• psychomotor (physical skills)

This is at the top level of the taxonomy.
After that, being a taxonomy, it subdivides. The cognitive subdivisions are ranked from most basic to most advanced.

• knowledge


• comprehension


• application


• analysis


• synthesis


• evaluation

That's enough, I think - plenty of websites out there with the fine details!

Making a meal of it

First, there was a question:

"How does the shift towards programme-based planning & accreditation fit with the shift towards greater granularity of content offerings?"

Then there was an answer.

It was one of those lovely moments when things connect. Daughter #3 & I were comparing homeworks over tea (as you do) & she wanted to know what Learning Objects were. By the time I'd finished explaining, & my husband had thrown Learning Outcomes into the mix, it suddenly made sense.

I changed them into Shopping Outcomes, eg "a balanced meal for Monday tea". The pasta carbonara you buy for it doesn't come labelled as "Monday tea", because it might also be suitable as "Tuesday lunch" or "Wednesday supper". It's a Shopping Object that can be chosen for lots of different purposes. You might choose to add a green beans Shopping Object to accompany it.

So... the Shopping Outcomes are not embedded in the Shopping Objects. They're on the shopper's shopping list for the week's menu (the programme). Perfectly obvious, really, but it took a while for the lightbulb to come on.

The question came from a webcast of the OU's recent conference on Curriculum Futures.
The Learning Objects came from H806 (even though I'm not up to that part yet).
The pasta carbonara came from Asda.