What advice for practitioners?

In the current state of research-based knowledge about learning styles, there are real dangers in commending detailed strategies to practitioners, because the theories and instruments are not equally useful and because there is no consensus about the recommendations for practice. There is a need to be highly selective. As we have seen, for example, with regard to Dunn and Dunn , Gregorc and Riding , the examination of the reliability and validity of their learning style instruments strongly suggests that they should not be used in education or business. On the other hand, the research of Entwistle  and Vermunt , which is both more guarded in its claims and built on more solid theoretical foundations, offers thoughtful advice that might, after careful trials and revisions, be extended to post-16 learning outside higher education.

A significant proportion of the literature on the practical uses of learning styles is not, however, so circumspect. Fielding, for instance, goes so far as to argue that an understanding of learning styles should be ‘a student entitlement and an institutional necessity’ (1994, 393). A thriving commercial industry has also been built to offer advice to teachers, tutors and managers on learning styles, and much of it consists of inflated claims and sweeping conclusions which go beyond the current knowledge base and the specific recommendations of particular theorists.

Some of the leading learning theorists, moreover, make extravagant claims for their model, which reflect badly on the whole field of learning styles research. Rita Dunn, for example, whose approach was evaluated

in Section 3.2, is quoted by O’Neil (1990, 7) as claiming that ‘Within six weeks, I promise you, kids who you think can’t learn will be learning well and easily … The research shows that every single time you use

learning styles, children learn better, they achieve better, they like school better’. In a similar vein, Felder has written articles on the relevance of learning styles to the teaching of science to adults. After examining four different models – the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory, Herrmann’s Brain Dominance Instrument and his own Felder-Silverman instrument – he concludes (1996, 23): ‘Which model educators choose is almost immaterial, since the instructional approaches that teach around the cycle for each of the models are essentially identical’. We disagree strongly: it matters which model is used and we have serious reservations about the learning cycle.

For other commentators, the absence of sound evidence provides no barrier to basing their arguments on either anecdotal evidence or ‘implicit’ suggestions in the research. Lawrence (1997, 161), for instance, does exactly that when discussing the ‘detrimental’ effects of mismatching teaching and learning styles. More generally, the advice offered to practitioners is too vague and unspecific to be helpful; for example, ‘restructure the classroom environment to make it more inclusive rather than exclusive’. The quality of advice

given to new post-16 teachers can be gauged by examining one of the leading textbooks (Gray, Griffin and Nasta 2000), where the topic of learning styles is dealt with in three pages. The authors advocate, without justification, Honey and Mumford’s four learning styles and then refer their readers to the practical manual on learning styles produced by the Further Education Development Agency (FEDA 1995). Typical of their unproblematic approach to learning styles is the claim that ‘a critical part of a carefully-planned induction … is to make an accurate assessment of each student’s unique learning styles’ (Gray, Griffin and Nasta 2000, 197). In sum, clear, simple, but unfounded messages for practitioners and managers have too often been

distilled from a highly contested field of research. 

Yet even among critics of research on learning styles, there is a tendency to write as if there was only one monolithic movement which was united in its thinking; in contradistinction, this review has presented a wide spectrum of theoretical and practical positions on a continuum, consisting of five main ‘families’ or schools of thought (see Figure 4, Section 2). Bloomer and Hodkinson (2000, 584), for instance, argue that ‘this literature proposes that learners possess relatively fixed preferences and capacities for learning [and] it seldom explores the extent to which, and the conditions under which, preferences change’. This criticism applies only to those theorists who emphasise deep-seated personal traits at the extreme left-hand side of the

continuum, but is not relevant to the clear majority of learning style theorists who are concerned to improve

styles of both learning and teaching. Bloomer and Hodkinson are simply wrong in claiming that most theorists treat learning styles as fixed. Bloomer and Hodkinson (2000) make, however, a more serious criticism of the learning styles literature to the effect that, even if they are prepared to accept that learning styles exist, they constitute only a minor part of individual dispositions which influence the reactions of learners to their learning opportunities, which include the teaching style of their teachers. Are these ‘dispositions’ anything more than Entwistle’s (1998) ‘orientations and approaches to learning’; or are they a broader concept? To Bloomer and Hodkinson, dispositions are both psychological and social; by the latter term, they mean that dispositions are constructed by the contexts in which people live and are not simply personal reactions to those contexts. 

Moreover, these dispositions are said to be wide-ranging in coverage, interrelated in scope and help to explain the strong reactions which many students have to the culture of different educational institutions. (See Ball, Reay and David 2002 for more research on this issue.) Dispositions would appear to be tapping contextual, cultural and relational issues which are not picked up by the learning style instruments of Entwistle (1998) or Vermunt (1998). The strategies which follow are treated separately, but in practice, they tend to overlap and theorists often advocate a judicious selection of approaches rather than an exclusive focus on just one. Furthermore, because we have adopted the stance of treating teaching, learning and assessment as one interactive system, we avoid the temptation to deal with strategies for students separately from strategies for teachers, tutors or managers.