Daily Archive for July 30th, 2007

Sometimes the press gets something right on the $$. Julie Henry of the Great Britian (UK) Sunday Telegraph did in her coverage of efforts to thwart the spread of fertalizer about learning styles. Writing under the headline “Professor pans ‘learning style’ teaching method,” Ms. Henry has this lead:

A leading scientist has dismissed the latest approach to teaching that has been endorsed by the Government and embraced by teachers.

Under the new system children are considered to have different “learning styles” and instead of being taught by the conventional method of listening to a teacher, they should be allowed to wander around, listen to music and even play with balls in the classroom.

But now Baroness Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institute and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, has dismissed as “nonsense” the view that pupils prefer to receive information either by sight, sound or touch.

She said that the method of classifying pupils on the basis of “learning styles” is a waste of valuable time and resources.

Hear! Hear! See! See! Touch! Touch! Feel! Feel! Smell! Smell! Taste! Taste! Intuit! Intuit!

There are two points in Ms. Henry’s coverage I’d like to correct: First, the learning style movement is not new; Lester Mann covered the history of the idea in his marvelous book, On the Trail of Process (ISBN-10: 0808911376; ISBN-13: 978-0808911371). Second, the story over-emphasizes modality preference; herein is one of the problems with the literature on the topic: Some of the literature examines whether people express preferences (they can and do) but the more important matter, as I see it, is not whether they have preferences but whether adapting instruction to the purported style (whether established by preference assessment or some other means) improves their outcomes.

Despite these minor objections, hooray for Ms. Henry’s coverage. Read her entire story here. Check here for additional entries at LD Blog that refer to the matter of learning styles.