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.
posted by bluefluff @ 2:30 am
3 comments
3 Comments:
Hi, sorry I'm late but I'd guess you've been expecting me :-P
I'm reading this through so this is initial thoughts rather than reasoned argument but my initial feeling is that there is some sleight of hand going on here. An example; "Why does the notion of 'learning styles' have such enduring popularity - despite the lack of supporting evidence?" But in reality all he appears to have done is knock out the central planks of one researcher's findings - he hammers Carbo but are we to believe that she's the only researcher in the field? He then looks briefly at Gardner but rather than criticising the research he lampoons the idea of a classroom full of children wearing Walkman and eating crisps - does ths devalue the research? Then he goes back to poor old Carbo and suggests that her 1995 Reading Style Inventory looks like a fortune teller's cheap tricks but he then bigs up his findings based on weaknesses in Carbo's work - he damns everyone based on this, and he doesn't really address anything other than reading styles yet he suggests that weaknesses in Carbo's Reading Style Inventory can be extrapolated to all work on learning styles - no mention of Kolb? Pask? Sternberg? McCarthy's 4MAT System?
Gonna grab a beer and read it through again to see if I get converted :-)
Stahl died on 10th May, 2004 at the age of 52. His work was based (seemingly) on "early years" literacy so I'm not sure we're comparing apples with apples when considering his critique of learning styles per se.
I fully accept the limitations of Stahl's arguments - he was a specialist, as you say, in teaching reading, so it's perhaps understandable that his article is based on his professional experience & acquaintance with the literature in that area.
I'm not convinced that this alone invalidates his scepticism, though.
I look forward to your further thoughts on this, as it's an area where I'm genuinely perplexed. Educate me :-)
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