http://www.saffroninteractive.com/writing-for-the-reader-banishing-the-business-speak-and-energising-your-e-learning/

* Gregorc’s abstract and ordering dimensions
* Kolb’s model of concrete experience vs. abstract conceptualization and reflective observation vs. active experimentation
* Dunn and Dunn’s environmental, emotional, sociological, physiological, and psychological dimensions
* Felder’s inventory of 32 learning styles over two dimensions (one of which is the input dimension of visual vs. auditory)

In reality, verbal, visual, and kinaesthetic learning are treated less as learning styles and more as a form of cognitive style in much of the literature (though there is some overlap). What I’ve presented here is much more centred around Pavio’s dual-coding theory, which has significant empirical backing. All the conclusions I drew in this article, for example, are based on empirical research by Mayer and Sims, Riding & Sadler-Smith, Sadoski et al, and Jakob Nielsen.

I think the real issue here is that verbal vs. visual learning should be discussed under the banner of cognitive style rather than the baggage-laden label of learning styles.

I was just wondering if you can point to any evidence (a) that learning styles exist and (b) that using someone’s preferred learning style actually improves their learning and/or engagement with the material. So far, all the research I am aware of suggests that there is little to no evidence of these things (see Paschler et al, 2008 and also Coffield et al., 2006, both of which are pretty thorough meta-analyses).

Everyone’s brain encodes semantic/auditory and visual information separately, but I’m not totally clear here how that in itself would support the existence of learning styles (or whether you intended it to read that way). Tickling both pathways is definitely a great way of ensuring that people take in information more efficiently, though.

Concreteness is a really interesting area — again, there’s some pretty compelling evidence that concreteness and specifics help information gel in the mind of the learner. And again, that’s probably true for pretty much everyone and doesn’t necessarily demonstrate the existence of learning styles per se. Putting these bits of information side by side doesn’t actually build any kind of compelling argument that one is related to the other, or that learning styles exist; I think you need to work on your argument here because these are interesting and valuable points in and of themselves, but they do nothing to support the existence of learning styles.

Finally, lest the above comes across as a bit snippy, I think there’s loads more research to do here and it’s a really interesting space. I taught undergraduate students for nine years and anecdotally it makes complete and intuitive sense to me that learning styles exist (and many educators would probably say something similar), yet objectively we just don’t have evidence for it. So we really shouldn’t be too hasty to talk brain stuff, which we know impresses and persuades people even when it’s totally irrelevant, in the same breath as talking about things for which there is no evidence. As a cognitive scientist, this stuff is important to me to get right.

Kind regards,

Chris

Interesting article,

best regards,