Learning Style Inventory (LSI)

One of the most influential models of learning styles was developed by David Kolb in the early 1970s. His theory of experiential learning and the instrument which he devised to test the theory – the Learning Style Inventory (LSI) – have generated a very considerable body of research. The starting point was his dissatisfaction with traditional methods of teaching management students, which led him to experiment with experiential teaching methods. He then observed that some students had definite preferences for some activities (eg exercises), but not others (eg formal lectures): ‘From this emerged the idea of an inventory that would identify these preferences by capturing individual learning differences’ (Kolb 2000, 8). For Kolb and for those who have followed in his tradition, a learning style is not a fixed trait, but ‘a differential preference for learning, which changes slightly from situation to situation. At the same time, there is some long-term stability in learning style’ (2000, 8). Kolb goes so far as to claim that the scores derived from the LSI are stable over very long periods; for example, the learning style of a 60 year old will bear a close resemblance to that individual’s learning style when he or she was an undergraduate of 20. It is, however, difficult to accept this claim when the necessary longitudinal research has still to be carried out. Be that as it may, Kolb’s four dominant learning styles – diverging, assimilating, converging and accommodating, each located in a different quadrant of the cycle of learning – have been enormously influential in education, medicine and management training. Here it is more relevant to see Kolb as the main inspiration for large numbers of theorists and practitioners who have used his original ideas to generate their own questionnaires and teaching methods.

For example, Honey and Mumford (2000) make explicit their intellectual debt to Kolb’s theory, although they also make it clear that they produced their own Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ) because they found that Kolb’s LSI had low face validity with managers. They also made changes to Kolb’s nomenclature by substituting reflector, theorist, pragmatist and activist for Kolb’s rather more unwieldy terms: reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, active experimentation and concrete experience. But as De Ciantis and Kirton (1996, 810) have pointed out: ‘the descriptions [of the four styles] they represent are, by design, essentially Kolb’s’. Honey and Mumford (2000) also give pride of place in their model to the learning cycle, which for them provides an ideal structure for reviewing experience, learning lessons and planning improvements. For Honey (2002, 116), the learning cycle is: flexible and helps people to see how they can enter the cycle at any stage with information to ponder, with a hypothesis to test, with a plan in search of an opportunity to implement it, with a technique to experiment with and see how well it works out in practice.

In the US, McCarthy (1990) has developed a detailed method of instruction called 4MAT, which is explicitly based on Kolb’s theory of the cycle of learning, and which is receiving support from increasing numbers of US practitioners. In much the same way as Honey and Mumford were inspired by Kolb’s pioneering work, Allison and Hayes (1996) latched onto two notions (‘action’ and ‘analysis’) in Honey and Mumford’s LSQ when they were devising their own Cognitive Style Index (CSI). For Allinson and Hayes, style is defined as an individual’s characteristic and consistent approach to processing information, but they readily admit that a person’s style can be influenced by culture, experience or a particular context. At first reading, it may appear that Allinson and Hayes’ fundamental dimension of style is brain-based, with action being characteristic of right-brain orientation, and analysis being characteristic of left-brain orientation. Their claim, however, is not substantiated by any research and so, in our view, Allinson and Hayes are more appropriately placed within the Kolbian ‘family’ of learning theorists.