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.