Today I participated in a study about preparation for online teaching. I've been part of several studies in this area in the past; with the continuing growth of online education, there is a lot of ongoing research here. What caught my eye was this item on the survey:
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| A screen-grab from the survey I was taking... |
I was not sure how to respond to this one. Here's why:
I've come to a point where I don't think "learning styles" really are a thing to consider. Or, at least, we should not try to tailor our teaching to different learning styles. (I've written a bit about this before here on the blog: Are Your Students Olfactory Learners? and Reconsidering Learning Styles in Light of Research, for two examples.) But this is one of those prevalent topics in the field of education that just keeps coming up.
It's appealing to think of learning styles as a way of recognizing students' uniqueness, and on the face of it, it might seem like people learn in different ways. But neuroscience does not seem to be supporting this perspective. Check out this research from way back in 2008 that suggests that adjusting teaching styles to match students supposed learning styles really doesn't make a difference. Here's a quote from the summary of this paper: (emphasis mine.)
There is growing evidence that people hold beliefs about how they learn that are faulty in various ways, which frequently lead people to manage their own learning and teach others in nonoptimal ways. This fact makes it clear that research—not intuition or standard practices—needs to be the foundation for upgrading teaching and learning. If education is to be transformed into an evidence-based field, it is important not only to identify teaching techniques that have experimental support but also to identify widely held beliefs that affect the choices made by educational practitioners but that lack empirical support. On the basis of our review, the belief that learning-style assessments are useful in educational contexts appears to be just that—a belief. Our conclusion reinforces other recent skeptical commentary on the topic (e.g., Coffield et al., 2004; Curry, 1990; Willingham, 2005, 2009). Future research may develop learning-style measures and targeted interventions that can be shown to work in combination, with the measures sorting individuals into groups for which genuine group-by-treatment interactions can be demonstrated. At present, however, such validation is lacking, and therefore, we feel that the widespread use of learning-style measures in educational settings is unwise and a wasteful use of limited resources. (p. 117)
The question in this survey caught me, because there was a time I really worked to tailor my instruction to my students' supposed learning styles. I gave them inventories to try and discern their preferences for different modes of learning, and then tried to adjust what I was doing to meet the unique needs for each one.
Today? I don't do this anymore. Not because I don't believe that different students need different things, but rather--along the lines of this quote I've pulled--it makes more sense to improve the quality of my instruction overall. This means I'm working emphasize strong pedagogy that matches my teaching methods to the content being learned. I'm working towards building an active, interactive learning community in every course I teach, whether face-to-face or online. I'm working on using stories, emotional engagement, and personal connections as hooks for learning, which seems to be a better use of time and seems to be having more of an impact on ensuring students' understanding.
The reality is this: teachers have a finite amount of time to prepare for class, to work with students, and to assess their learning. At this point, research does not support the time it takes to individualize instruction based on learning styles.
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