Learning styles: the myths and the merits

By Scott Donald

As stated on the main page, this blog is an attempt to bridge ‘the gap between scientific research and the classroom’. And the need to do this is perfectly demonstrated by the current hot topic: learning styles.

In fact, it was for this reason that I explicitly mentioned them at my talk in Malaga. I had been reading up on the idea that there was little scientific basis for them, and this was something that many teachers seemed unaware of. This seemed the perfect way to demonstrate the scientific/teaching gap and also to promote good practice and critical thinking.

There seemed to be a few raised eyebrows in the audience when I mentioned the lack of evidence during my talk, and at the end I was approached by Alexandra Costa, who was eager to tell me about her positive experiences of exploring learning styles in the classroom and on projects she had worked on with the EU. I was immediately intrigued, as my own explorations into learning styles had met with little success. Yet Alexandra, and many others, feel that there is something valuable in learning styles that we should be exploring. So, before we try and bridge the gap, let’s explore it first by defining what exactly learning styles are.

VAK, VARK & VAKOG

No, these are not characters from Star Trek. This is the probably the most pervasive idea of learning styles and the acronyms roughly stand for ‘Visual, Aural, (Read/write), and Kinaesthetic’ and ‘Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic, Olfactory (smell) and Gustatory (taste).’ You’ve all heard it, and maybe you’ve said something like, ‘I’m definitely a visual learner’, or ‘I can’t learn a new word until I write it down’. Maybe not so much, ‘I learn by smelling things’, but proponents of Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (NLP) are happy to beef up their acronym by including it (http://www.nlpworld.co.uk/nlp-training-vakog/). (I’m going to stick to using VARK.) I can see from this NLP website that they are offering a course for only £1620, which raises the first point about why these learning styles might be so popular: profitability.

However, VARK not only seems to be the most pervasive and profitable of the learning styles, it also seems to be the most widely discredited. The first indication I had that VARK was problematic, was when my excellent DELTA tutor suggested I cut it from my assignment as he wasn’t convinced by them. In the end, I kept them in the assigment because I’d spent so much time giving out the questionnaire and collating the results (which indicated that I had a mixed bag of students who weren’t really one particular learning style.) However, my trusted tutor’s hesitance was enough to turn me off VARK and so I treated it with mild scepticism from then on. Later, this scepticism was cemented after watching Dr. Tesia Marshik’s excellent TED talk on the subject. I highly recommend it for several reasons, but the one I’ll mention here is that Marshik raises another reason that learning styles might be so popular: likeability. If you say ‘I’m a visual learner’, it sounds quite good, it sounds ‘sexy’ — you’re able to make a definitive statement about how you learn. In the TED Talk, she explains that even though you may have a preference for a particular way of learning, repeated tests have shown that your preference doesn’t ‘enhance’ your ability to learn. In fact, if you look at the origins of VARK, a 1992 paper, the authors of the paper conclude that it is not yet possible to document the effect of these changes in terms of learning’ and instead talk about less tangible things like ‘positive support’ and ‘favourable comments’ from students about their ideas.

However, it’s not just students making favourable comments about VARK learning. Plenty of people have promoted it, and we’re not just talking about a bunch of hippies trying to align their chakras, or greedy start-up companies trying to make a quick buck here. Learning styles have been advocated by prominent institutes like the British Council, International House; quality publishers like DELTA publishing; and respected authors such as Jeremy Harmer (1998). I managed to find Cambridge providing a more nuanced description, but over the years, tutors on their training courses have promoted the idea of learning styles — and why wouldn’t they? They are clearly in good company, and that list of advocates only covers language teaching; there are countless educational authorities in other disciplines also promoting them. Yet, last week we have experts across a range of disciplines coming out in the Guardian to not only say there is a lack of evidence to support learning styles, but also to warn that it might be ‘unhelpful to assign learners to groups or categories on the basis of a supposed learning style.’

The gap here between the scientific community and classroom experience is massive. A quick look below the line of the Guardian’s comment section, always a dangerous prospect, will show you how contentious and serious an issue this is among educators, e.g. teachers arguing about the benefits they’ve seen in their own classrooms or how it has helped in their work with dyslexic children.

This is the fraught and confusing world of VAK, VARK and VAKOG. However, there are other things falling under the umbrella of learning styles, and we need to to check these before drawing any kind of conclusions. So let’s leave VAK, VARK and VAKOG to cool down for a bit and move on to another learning style theory.

Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences

This is the theory that Alexandra has explored in her classroom and then written articles on for the British Council. Very briefly, Multiple Intelligences (MI) is a theory by Howard Gardner in his book Frames of Mind (1983) which asks us to look beyond the typical definitions of ‘intelligence’, e.g. as something related to IQ, and instead asks us to consider other ‘intelligences’. He outlined them as the following: musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.

We can see there is some overlap here between MI and VARK, i.e. the inclusion of the terms visual, kinaesthetic; and arguably in the definition of the others. Similar to VARK, MI has its origins in academia, (though MI’s credentials seems to be more robust). Howard Gardner is an esteemed Harvard professor who continues to promote MI along with a formidable team of academics working on Project Zero. As for language teachers like me, we can find references to MI all over the place, including (again) in Harmer’s excellent How to Teach English (1998). But also, like VARK, we can see critics pouring in to suggest that MI has a lack of empirical evidence, i.e. no evidence that it works in practice. Or, that it lacks falsifiablity, i.e. the broad nature of MI makes it impossible to disprove. And while we have the academics arguing back and forth, we have teachers like Alexandra experimenting with MI in her class and getting practical results and positive feedback. Here is an account of a class she had with 16–17 year olds,

They didn’t like “normal” classes like reading, grammar, so I decided, after reading about Gardner, to give them the test to discover their intelligences. I discovered that their intelligences were mostly musical, interpersonal, linguistic. I tried to adapt different methodologies. The students who were mostly linguistic or mathematical learned more and better through reading and grammar exercises. The ones who were musical, interpersonal I tried to bring more songs, videos, films and role-plays to give them more opportunities to shine.

I’m certainly interested in Alexandra’s idea of appealing to mathematically-minded with grammar explanations. I often tried to convince an engineer I taught that language and maths do cross over at various points: I was showing him parse trees and corpus data… To be honest, I think I was more excited by them than he was and he never believed me, but that’s what I get for trying to teach something interesting to an engineer. (I’m joking, one of my best friends is an engineer…) I also think Alexandra’s investigation raises an interesting point about motivation and language learning. While scientists are concluding that learning styles don’t actually help people learn better, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that Alexandra’s students were more motivated after she made changes to the class content based on the questionnaire results.

In some educational contexts, high levels of motivation are not essential for learning — most parents taking their children to school every morning will, I’m sure, vouch for that. The fact that I learned anything in mathematics also attests to that. However, when it comes to language learning, Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis states that high motivation forms part of the necessary conditions for second language acquisition. I’m not suggesting that the key to motivation is experimenting with MI, but neither should we dismiss diverse approaches to teaching, especially in language learning.

The others

Before drawing some conclusions, let’s just make sure we have checked under the learning styles umbrella for anything else.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — Another one you might be familiar with. ‘Are you ISTJ or ENTJ?’ These four letter abbreviations are meant to indicate your ‘personality type’. A little investigating will dig up the same pattern as we’ve seen with the other learning styles:

• they begin with an academic link, this time Jung
• they become popular and enter the public consciousness
• they are then extrapolated to various other disciplines
• they are appropriated by less reputable authorities, often for profit
• they fail to live up to scientific testing and arguments ensue.

There are several other learning styles which follow this pattern of popularity and criticism; however, there are others which don’t. There are a couple of things falling under the umbrella of learning styles which have stood up better to scientific scrutiny. I would include here the research on motivation conducted by (a different) Gardner and Lambert, and Dörnyei, which included an examination of intrinsic, extrinsic, integrative and instrumental motivation. There is also the work of Honey and Mumford which explores the idea of learning styles or preferences: Activist, Theorist; Pragmatist and Reflector. The work of the above authors is also commonly used by educators and authorities, which is not to say that they are definitive, but they don’t seem to have been met with the same kind of criticism as things like VARK and MI. However, I’m not going to go into any further depth with these learning styles (in this article, at least), as I feel I have now covered enough ground to hazard a few thoughts.

Some conclusions on learning styles

1. Question our beliefs. (The importance of critical self-reflection) — I know TED Talks have their critics, but I really do recommend Tesia Marshik’s talk. As well as her criticisms of VARK-type learning styles, she also emphasises several important points that, although we ‘know’, I think we often forget. Things like just because a lot of people believe it, doesn’t mean it’s true; or people don’t like to be told they are wrong. These may sound like slightly patronising platitudes, but does that mean they aren’t true? I certainly know I have been guilty of falling into these thinking traps before. In her video, Marshik also says some important things about confirmation bias and alludes to our own personal echo chambers. These are demonstrable scientific ideas, and we, as educators, need to be aware of them.

2. Don’t spread or implement ideas which we know to be flawed — while I’m certain there is still much to discover about learning styles, preferences, motivation, and their effect on learning, I think it’s clear that along the way, some people have got it wrong. They have taken one of these concepts, cut off a slice, and spread it all over their classroom, their school, their business, their training course, or an entire region that they preside over as an educational authority. Their intentions were, I’m sure, entirely good, but now they are in a big sticky VARK-coated mess. And if experts are coming together to denounce learning styles like VARK, then we need to try and undo the damage. The spread of misinformation regarding learning styles needs to be stopped before it has any more detrimental effects on education. And as we seem to be living at a time when misinformation is rife, there is an onus on us as teachers and trainers to be actively doing this.

This is not to say we need to adopt a preachy approach. especially if we are unaware of the full facts ourselves, but making subtle changes will help. We should be asking students what activities they enjoy or how they like to learn, not ‘would you describe yourself as an auditory learner?’ Of course, the authorities have a responsibility too, but where we have the freedom to, I don’t think we should be promoting things that we don’t really understand. I can speak from my own experience in saying that I have now heard several teachers who, on finding out that the evidence for learning styles is murky, have been very critical of the training courses they’ve attended for promoting them. Therefore, to the best of our abilities, I think we should ensure that the science and research is there before adopting something and making it part of our classrooms. This, in essence, is one of the main motivations behind starting the blog.

3. Seek to find out more — what we know about the brain is essentially nothing. Similarly, the way we understand learning, or what role something like error-correction plays in second language acquisition, we just don’t fully understand. So let’s firstly give ourselves a break and say, hey, we’re all just trying out best, and we’re allowed to get it wrong sometimes. But don’t give up. Aim to find out more. Google things like ‘VARK’ and see what pops up. Have a look at the first few pages of search results: do they look like reputable sites to you? No seriously, do they? By all means look up sites like Wikipedia, but follow their references and see where they take you. And, as the catchy title of this blog suggests, why not do some action research…

4. Don’t pick up the pitchforks — in the current climate of identity politics and anti-movements and alt-movements, it’s all too easy to think that the solution is to now become anti-learning styles. So, let’s imagine you’re now convinced that learning styles are a myth and that you’ve been fooled all these years. Before you go scoffing and pointing the finger at those who have promoted them, remember we are talking about numerous educational institutes, respected writers like Harmer, and excellent organisations like IH and the British Council. And it’s not that they were entirely wrong, but that new observations might mean they have to shift their views. As Jessie Pinkman says, ‘yeah, science!’ Neither should we be throwing the baby out with the bathwater; there are aspects of learning styles that we might want to keep or investigate further. We don’t want to go in the opposite direction and start treating out students like identical drones, devoid of individuality. In Alexandra’s article she talks about the importance of diversity in the classroom and I think that’s a much more practical concern than wasting time trying to deal with VARKy learning styles.

5. Embrace eclecticism and diversity in the classroom— My own classroom experiment with VARK left me with data indicating I had a mixed bag of learning styles. I decided that this variety among the students made implementing a particularly learning strategy difficult or unworkable. This also convinced me even more that the eclectic methods which are promoted in modern day language classrooms are probably the right way to go about things — employing the best bits from various approaches and using a range of teaching methods. But that doesn’t mean we can’t adapt them and add to them. I’ll finish with a humbling story from a few weeks ago, just as I was mulling over how to approach this article. I decided to do something outside my usual teaching repertoire with my class of 11 year old students. I’d borrowed an idea from a colleague which had the students jumping about to decide ‘the best dancer’ (superlatives). There was a little too much fun and too little language in the activity for my liking, but I thought I’d give it a go. The students loved it and most of them were really excited, but one girl, Carmen, was particularly engaged. I had pleaded with this girl’s mum at parents night to encourage her daughter to be less reserved and speak more in class, and now I was watching Carmen dancing about, full of confidence. After the activity, back in my own teacher-comfort-zone, I gave them a Pokemon top trumps game to play. I couldn’t get Carmen to shut up. The shy girl had come out of her shell and I was now asking her to calm down and sit in her seat. Now, after all this talk, I’m not suggesting she’s a ‘kinaesthetic learner’, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing there to be explored, that there are no lessons to take from that experience. So next week, all going well, I’ll be teaching the Future Perfect Continuous using Scottish Ceilidh dancing.

Thanks and a call for more contributors

Firstly, if you feel anything in this article is not entirely accurate, or I’ve omitted something important, please message me and let me know. Secondly, a big thank you to Alexandra for coming to speak to me at the end of the talk and sharing her experiences with me. It would be really great if more people did this and we could open up a wider discussion on this controversial topic. Ideally, it would be nice to have something which looks more like a mini-case study, so I’ll aim to get an example of one up on the blog. There are things going on behind the scenes of the blog, levers are being pulled and cogs are turning, but I’d be happy to have an extra pair of hands: so if any way you would like to contribute, please get in touch.

Bibliography

Armstrong, T., (2009) Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom 3rd ed. ASCD Publishing

http://courses.britishcouncil.org/teachertraining/course/index.php?categoryid=44 (An example of the type of workshops that promote Learning Styles)

http://www.cie.org.uk/images/271174-active-learning.pdf (An example of Cambridge’s more nuanced approach)

Costa, A., ‘Learning with Diversity’ from In English Digital. British Council Magazine. Available at: https%3A%2F%2Fissuu.com%2Fbritishcouncilportugal%2Fdocs%2Finenglishdigital3

Development Edge Consulting. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) http://www.dec.co.th/mbti_explanation.htm

Dörnyei, Z., (1994) ‘Motivation and Motivating in the Language Classroom’ from The Modern Language Journal, 78, 3, 273–284. Available at: http://www.zoltandornyei.co.uk/uploads/1994-dornyei-mlj-a.pdf

Fleming, N. & Mills, C., (1992) ‘Not Another Inventory, Rather a Catalyst for Reflection’ from To Improve the Academy, Vol. 11, page 137. Available at: http://www.vark-learn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/not_another_inventory.pdf

Gardner, H., (1983) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligence. Basic books

Gardner, R. C. & Lambert, W. E., (1972) Attitudes and motivation in second-language learning. Newbury House Publishers

Harmer, J., (1998) How to Teach English. Longman

Honey P. & Mumford A., (1992) The manual of learning styles. Peter Honey Publications

http://www.ihes.com/bcn/tt/workshops/ylworkshops1011.html (An example of the type of workshops that promote Learning Styles)

Jung, C. G., (1971) Psychological Types (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 6). Princeton University Press

Klein, D., (1998) ‘Multiplying the problems of intelligence by Eight: A Critique of Gardner’s theory’ from Canadian Journal of Education 23, 1, 103–112. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1585790?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Klein, D., (1998) ‘A Response to Howard Gardner: Falisifiability, Emperical Evidence, and Pedagogical Usefulness in Educational Psychologies’ from Canadian Journal of Education 22, 4, 377-394. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1585969?origin=crossref&seq=1#fndtn-page_scan_tab_contents

Krashen, S. D., (1988) Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Prentice-Hall International

Krashen, S D., (1988) Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Prentice-Hall International

NLP World (2008) http://www.nlpworld.co.uk/nlp-training-vakog/

Project Zero http://www.pz.harvard.edu/

Rosenberg, M., (2013) Spotlight on Learning Styles. DELTA Publishing. http://elta.org.rs/kio/nl/04-2015/serbia-elta-newsletter-3Borrowed%20from%20Spotlight%20on%20Learning%20Styles.pdf

Sharp, J., Bowker, R. & Byrne, J., VAK or VAK‐uous? Towards the trivialisation of learning and the death of scholarship. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02671520701755416?src=recsys

Smith, Mark K. (2002, 2008) ‘Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences’, the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/mobi/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-and-education.

Waterhouse, L., ‘Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical’ from Educational Psychologist, 41, 4, 207–225. Available at: http://www.faculty.mun.ca/cmattatall/Multiple_Intelligences_.pdf

Weale, S., (2017) Teachers must ditch ‘neuromyth’ of learning styles, say scientists. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/13/teachers-neuromyth-learning-styles-scientists-neuroscience-education?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook