LEARNING STYLES

CONTENTS: Essay examining the application of learning styles research to higher education.

SOURCE: SOURCE: Indiana State University Center for Teaching and Learning, Learning Styles site. (http://web.indstate.edu/ctl/styles/learning.html) Adapted for NTLF June 1999.

Excerpt from essay:
"Using Learning Styles to Adapt Technology for Higher Education"
by Terry O'Connor, Indiana State University

Having a Personal Point of View

Many of the mechanisms by which people learn are still unknown to us. How is it, for example, that a relatively brief talk can change the cognitive and/or emotional orientation of another enough to alter behavior? What happens that prevents this change? We don't quite know. There are complex physiological, psychological, & social processes involved.

Learning styles research is drawn out of studies about the psychological, social, and physiological dimensions of the educational process. It has yet to be precisely (or singularly) defined. Still, the scholarly literature provides a range of working models that can help us deal with some of the mysterious terrain between teacher & learner.

To understand learning style models, begin with one of the fundamental insights of 20th Century psychology: people rely on personally constructed filters to orient their relationships toward the world. These filters are responsive to a variety of factors: age, experience, internal psychodynamics, maturity, cognition, physiology, biochemistry, and so on. Since no one is capable of switching endlessly between all of these filters, it seems obvious that each individual has a unique approach he or she uses to perceive, understand, and plan his or her interactions. Information theory, for example, explains that the world is information rich and therefore people are selective in the information they perceive (& believe). Our personal way of selecting can be described as our style. In a very real sense, we create our own personal point of view.

At the same time, since the same limits are common to all humans, there are ranges within which we can characterize ways of responding to the world. Some people may tend to respond to auditory information more sensitively than to other kinds (say, iconic). The aim of learning style research is to find clusters of people who use similar patterns for perceiving and interpreting situations. Based on this information, we should be able to adjust educational environments to make them more efficient and successful places.

Learning Styles in Higher Education

When we look at our subject areas, we realize that different scholars approach our academic fields differently. It is this difference that make them complex and rich. Scholarship is stronger when it includes intuitive, subjective moments plus creative times plus careful data collection plus systematic analysis as well as reflective evaluation and well-written presentations. Of course, we will be better in some of these abilities and will have colleagues who are better at others. Our work (and our field) will be stronger when we devise ways to bring these multiple orientations to bear on the phenomena we study. The scholarly side of the academy clearly profits when it recognizes multiple points of view.

Compare this rich community to the typical classroom. Here most teachers tend to rely almost exclusively on sequential, verbal presentations, combined with private reading & writing activities. While we may expect the student to think in complex ways before completing a project, in fact they are often exposed to only a narrow approach to our subject matter. The loss of opportunities to engage in our subjects from a variety of orientations becomes an obvious flaw to those who recognize the inevitability of diverse points of view in the world. Even worse, we can trace lack of motivation, resistance, misperceptions, failure, and uninspired intellectual work to the fact that many students cannot learn well within the limited orientation provided them in the classroom.

Underlying learning style research is the belief, verified by some studies, that students learn best when they can address knowledge in ways that they trust. If their orientation to the world draws theory from concrete experience, then they will learn best through doing rather than reflecting. If their personal style is oriented around abstraction, then their best learning will be abstract. In fact, an individual may not ultimately confirm knowledge until they have handled it in modalities they strongly trust.

Auditory learners will learn well in lecture settings; private learners will gain knowledge from quiet reading. However, these are only two out of a broad array of preferences found among intellectually capable people. When learning experiences are limited to these modes, students who rely on other styles are bound to be less successful. Limited classrooms are likely to inhibit one or more clusters of students whose preferred styles are not given the opportunity to be used (a problem that may be wrongly attributed to lower ability or motivation).

Faculty can engage students in more rich learning opportunities by increasing the range of styles through which students can engage in studying academic fields. Technology provides new capabilities to reconstruct learning environments around specific learning styles. Below is an outline of some possibilities that emerge when using learning style models to develop technological applications to university classrooms.

Types of Learning Styles

Because of the variety of models used to characterize Learning Styles, Curry's categorization of the research about human learning differences is useful. She categorizes these studies into three levels that, looked at as examinations of different layers of an "onion," can explain our current understanding of human variations. More recently, this onion has been divided into the four levels described below.

Instructional & Environmental Preferences are those that describe the outermost layers of the onion, the most observable traits. Dunn & Dunn, for example, identify 5 dimensions that mark various preferences:

1. Environmental preferences regarding sound, light, temperature, & class design;
2. Emotional preferences addressing motivation, persistence, responsibility & structure;
3. Sociological preferences for private, pair, peer, team, adult or varied learning relations;
4. Psychological preference related to perception, intake, time, & mobility; and
5. Psychological preferences based on analytic mode, hemisphericity, & action.

While the latter category overlaps with subsequent layers in the onion, each of these preferences can be mapped through tests, observations, and productivity studies that illustrate how different approaches to the same subject or task can result in very similar gains.

Social Interaction Models consider ways in which actors in specific social contexts will adopt certain strategies. William Perry's well-known model showed how college students developed through different intellectual maturation levels as they went through college. Mary Belenky illustrated how women preferred different strategies than those recognized and rewarded in typical universities. More recently Marcia Baxter Magolda has described how epistemological strategies used by students varies by gender and by maturity and is responsive to the teaching context the student finds him/herself in.

Information Processing Models describe the middle layer in the onion, and are an effort to understand the processes by which information is obtained, sorted, stored, & utilized. Probably the most recognized idea about information processing is the right brain/left brain discussion. More complex approach is Kolb's approach to experiential learning which has become a much used model. He maps out four quadrants and shows how they can serve as stages of wholistic learning (individual styles are seen as particular strengths in the process). Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences is another popular model for educators.

Personality Models describe the innermost layer of the onion, the level at which our deepest personality traits shape the orientations we take toward the world. The popular Myers- Briggs Type Indicators categorizes people as extroverts/introverts, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. How individuals rate along these scales indicates tendencies in their attitudes toward engaging the world. This model anchors our preferences in our very make-up. For educators, the question is not simply one of trainable skills or attitudes but recognizing that people who have fundamentally different instincts are in the classroom. They are unlikely (or unable) to be successful when limited to activities that are not compatible with the attitudes they bring into the learning situation.

Using Learning Styles to Teach

Learning styles research has given educators new directions for making changes in their classrooms. The single most widespread change has been to open classrooms to more than one approach to intellectual work. Different social groupings, alternative activities, more complex projects have all been introduced as efforts to create opportunities for students to use their various strengths in dealing with course material.

Despite the wide range of models, the concept of learning styles has gained growing attention from educators because it provides a stable-enough characterization to plan pedagogical strategies. These strategies appear more responsive to students needs. They seem to provide better learning opportunities. They give fresh direction to alternative teaching. And, especially, the describe middle-level models for progressive educators engaged in student-centered, experiential philosophical positions. Below are listed some general conclusions for teachers that seem to cut across the various models:

1. Students will learn better when using preferences in which they're successful
2. Students will be better learners when they can expand their preferences
3. When teaching accommodates various preferences, more students will be successful.
4. Teachers can construct activities that include specific (& multiple) learning preferences
5. This can be done by adding alternatives or, completing learning cycles that incorporate all styles or, by utilizing wholistic, complex tasks.

One consequence of studying learning styles is the recognition that teachers also have their own approaches to the classroom. While these may have become habitual and while the teacher may define the classroom according to their not student) preferences, teachers have to acknowledge that their styles will not necessarily suit clusters of students in their classroom. As teachers attempt to modify their classrooms, they need to begin by exploring their own styles. Dunn & Dunn offer a teaching style inventory and suggest steps teachers might take to make classrooms more responsive to multiple student learning styles. Tony Grasha nicely integrates his teaching style and his learning style models around a faculty development plan. Three levels of instructional strategies that follow offer some overall suggestions of how the curricular plans can be effectively modified through responding to learning styles.

Adding Alternatives

One general strategy that an educator can use to create increased opportunities for students to use different styles is to offer additional alternative activities that supplement or replace traditional ones. Having a student write a poem about or act out a scenario allows students who respond well to global learning styles to utilize their sensitive, holistic abilities. Creating hands-on materials that can be used outside the lecture hall give active experimenters the chance to confirm abstractions. Learning Centers allow teachers to mix and match various modalities. Lectures that alternate between various styles re-engage students every few minutes.

The add-on approach encourages teachers to think of multiple ways to approach the subject and to find ways to create modules that allow different students to find the one most appropriate. Dunn and Dunn suggest multisensory packets comprised of a range of activities that give students a set of options that include something for the different learning styles. Extra attention should be given to key concepts or conceptual bottlenecks (those ideas upon which many other ideas depend but where students traditionally get stuck) rather than whole classrooms.

Learning Cycles

The teacher who wants to not only offer additional opportunities but also wants to challenge students to develop their learning skills in other learning style preferences can design a systematic set of activities that utilize all learning styles before completing an assignment. Dunn and Dunn develop Contract Activity Packages where activities are arranged to include at least some skills from each of their major learning style. A model like Kolb's can be taken as a set of iterative stages that must all be addressed to provide comprehensive learning of a subject. A student will be expected to be strong in one quadrant but need assistance in others. The 4MAT model begins by organizing the curriculum around central concepts that can be addressed from each of the four learning style quadrants and serves to integrate a variety experiences.

This systematic, program-oriented approach asks the teacher to go beyond content. He or she needs to organize the course around a model of learning styles that recommends different types of learning activities at each stage of the learning process. Course material becomes organized around themes or problems with the emphasis on how students develop skills using the content. This model allows each student to contribute using his or her preferred style while experiencing other styles.

Complex Activities

A third approach to creating multiple learning styles in a course is to organize activities around complex projects. Such projects inevitably demand that students approach a topic with multiple skills. They accept that there are many starting points and a number of acceptable avenues for successfully completing the activity. When the teacher provides adequately broad terms for the work (terms that permit various social and emotional needs, for example) students can use the approach that best suits them to accomplish the task. Project-based learning, especially when connected to community-service initiatives, provide a typical semester-long, complex activity for students to bring their different preferences together into a cooperative effort.