Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments The dubunking of learning styles (again)

To me there are two questions: whether a particular learning style exists and how the said learning style should be taught are to very distinctly different questions, and I will comment on the existences first.

It is clear that different people learn different types of skills with different levels of ease. From an analysis point of view if such a test exists to differentiate individuals as being relatively better at one set of tasks that are human defined to be visual spatial tasks with a high level of confidence then it should follow that that this human defined category can be said to exist. Let's make it clear it makes no difference what those tasks are, or how they might relate to the brain or body. Just the answered question: can two populations be categorized as having different relative comparative strengths with some level of confidence. If a natural phenomenon is shown to be the causal agent it does strengthen the label, but it is not required in order to state that such a category can exist. It seems clear that if one chooses the right set of tasks to be the label for visual learner then certainly the label can be allowed to exist because certainly we can define a test that can with a high level of confidence show that some people are better able to learn certain types of information than others.

As for dirty data, the fact that many individuals do not cleanly fit within a category is not important. I think anybody who regularly works with real world data should be quite comfortable with blurry decision boundaries. blurry decision boundaries do not give cause for saying the category does not exist. Please understand it is my intention to pretend that I am creating this term despite its previous existence. It is to show that such a term has the right to exist assuming it is defined properly and can be tested.

Second, the effectiveness of teaching in a particular style. This I believe is a truly hard problem to answer. There are many reasons this is hard to answer, but here is one that jumps out to me:
Let's say that everybody does agree with my logic that one should be able to create a label called visual spatial. My same logic combined with just how different everybody seems to be from one another should allow the creation of a truly large number of categories that we can name. Some teaching strategies that might seem appropriate for the visual spatial learner might be totally inappropriate for some of these other categories. It is also very likely that these other categories are not all mutually exclusive. meaning person "A" might be a visual spatial person which should do well with tactic "B", but person "A" might also be a DoDoDah person who performs poorly with tactic "B".

Now, that I have stated in my own way what is probably obvious to most people... that people are complicated. Let me say that I do believe that if very well designed studies were conducted to mate up different learning styles to different types of learners, and if there was a way to implement these categories efficiently it probably would lead to a better overall learning experience. However herding cats is a hard thing to do as well.