I've never been truly comfortable with preferred Learning Styles - Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic (VAK for short).I came across these on an in-service day about 8 years ago, where some of my colleagues were preaching about these new concepts and how they would potentially help improve boys learning. When we returned to the department to discuss these concepts and to look for ways to make our pupils learning more VAK oriented, I argued that we used all our senses at different times to explain concept to our pupils. Sometimes we chanted a fact to make it memorable (auditory); sometimes we used diagrams to show relationships between hardware/software (visual); other-times we got the pupils to use the facilities on the computer to understand the concept.
I hear lots of my students talking about VAK and I always challenge them to give me an accurate definition of each category. In variably they give examples rather than a definition. I then ask where the VAK theory comes from, the answer is usually a conversation or class.
A couple of years ago I came across a report Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning. A systematic and critical review by Frank Coffield et al (2004, Learning and Skills Research Centre), which raised serious issues and questions about the validity of the learning styles model or theories.
I also found a web page closer to home - Learning Styles (notes) by Steve Draper at Glasgow University.
Finally, coming up to date and to the serendipitous reason I wrote this posting. I came across a posting by Charles Nelson's on his Explorations in Learning blog titled: Learning Styles is Nonsense. His posting was inspired by an article in the Sunday Telegraph, which reports that Baroness Greenfield thinks that learning styles is "nonsense" from a neuroscience point of view.
I think teachers and educationalists, like the VAK theory because it's simple to understand and appeals to their intuitive nature. Basically it feels right when we think about how we learn and teach.
2 comments:
That's the problem: learning styles "feel right," and this "feeling" cuts off critical examination of how learning styles arise, whether they change according to situation, whether people should work on their supposedly non-preferred styles of learning, and how much they actually influence learning.
'Learning styles' appeal to the Anglo-Saxon desire for a panacea. We always want to find short cuts which will somewho miraculously enable all students to succeed. Proponents of learning styles always assert that since all children are different we must use different styles in teaching them, which of course we do, but it is not the eight (or nine, or ten or however many) intelligences which determine this. We teach according to their ability and, in the end, it is the subject which determines the modality. It has to. You can't make sport less or non kinaesthetic, so you don't try. Similarly learning a language is about as abstract and mind-based as anything can get. A kinaesthetic or visual activity it is not, not even if you chuck a ball about the room.
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