Editorial pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Finding No Evidence for Learning Styles Stacey Lowery Bretz* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056, United States ABSTRACT: An extensive literature exists that describes how to categorize students by a plethora of learning styles, including recommendations for teachers on how to match curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to optimize student learning. Two recent review articles are discussed, both of which conclude that no experimental evidence exists to support the hypothesis that instruction designed in response to student learning styles can actually improve achievement. KEYWORDS: General Public, Testing/Assessment, Learning Theories
L
earning styles. Learning strategies. Learning modalities. Learning orientations. These synonyms refer to the belief held by many that human beings have innate differences with regard to how they optimally learn. More than 71 different schemes1 have been reported in the literature to describe how learners prefer to perceive and process new information. Typical self-report questionnaires sort learners into categories such as concrete versus abstract or visual versus verbal. In 2001, Marcy Towns authored an article describing how Kolb’s learning styles of convergers, divergers, accommodators, and assimilators were particularly well-suited to learning in the chemistry laboratory.2 In 2003, I authored a book chapter describing how these and other learning styles such as Fleming’s visual−aural−read/write−kinesthetic and Felder− Silverman’s Index of Learning Styles might be applied to improve learning in the chemistry classroom.3 There’s just one problem. Not one research study has been published with evidence that instruction designed in response to students’ learning styles has resulted in improved achievement. In 2008, a review article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest reported a summary of the existing evidence in support of what is known as the “meshing hypothesis”, namely, learning is optimized when instruction is presented that matches the learner’s preferences.1 In this review, Pashler and colleagues described a precise experimental method that would be required in order to generate evidence for the meshing hypothesis:
Figure 1. A crossover interaction as evidence of the meshing hypothesis between learning styles and instructional methods. Adapted with permission from ref 1. Copyright 2008 SAGE Publishing.
• Learners must be divided into two or more groups based on their answers to a learning style measurement • Learners within each of these groups must be randomly assigned to one of two or more instructional methods • Learners must answer an achievement test
Pashler’s review cites ample evidence that students can and do express their preferences about how information to be learned should be presented. They also found abundant evidence that “people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitude for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information” (ref 1, p 105). Nonetheless, Pashler et al. found no credible evidence in which the appropriate methodological design resulted in a crossover interaction. Even more striking, however, was their finding that several studies exist that did employ the requisite methodology, yet generated findings that directly contradicted the meshing hypothesis. Not surprisingly, the review from Pashler et al.
When all three of these experimental conditions have been met, then evidence to support the meshing hypothesis may exist if and only if the instructional method that optimized the performance of students with one learning style differed from the instructional method that optimized the performance for the students with the other learning style. This result is known as a crossover interaction, as shown in Figure 1. (Additional representations of both crossover interactions and the absence of such interactions can be found in ref 1.) © 2017 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Published: July 11, 2017 825
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00424 J. Chem. Educ. 2017, 94, 825−826
Journal of Chemical Education
Editorial
American Chemical Society and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She conducts chemistry education research, with expertise in assessment, student understandings of multiple representations, and meaningful learning in the laboratory. She served on the Board of Trustees for the ACS Examinations Institute from 2002 to 2015 and as Chair of the Board from 2009 to 2014. She currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Chemical Education.
concludes there is no evidentiary basis to administer learning style assessments to students, nor to spend the time and money required to customize curriculum and pedagogy to respond to learning styles. A recent review by An and Carr4 cites three primary challenges for the extensive literature on learning styles: (i) it lacks a clear, explanatory theoretical framework; (ii) the measures themselves generate data lacking both validity and reliability; and (iii) credible evidence for crossover interactions is nonexistent as described by Pashler et al. An and Carr encourage teachers (and students) to recognize that while individual differences exist, they ought not consider them to be immutable. Rather, they summarize recommendations from the discipline of cognitive science to argue that “teachers need to shift from viewing these as indelible ‘styles’ to developmental levels of expertise” (ref 4, p 414). For example, rather than labeling students as “concrete” or “abstract”, the findings from cognitive science point to the importance of considering the adequacy of students’ organization of their prior knowledge and the strength of the connections among those ideas when called upon to engage in tasks such as problem solving or decoding visual representations. Rather than identify a student’s learning style and try to teach to that perceived strength, it is incumbent upon teachers to create opportunities for students to grow in those skill sets that the students themselves perceive as less well-developed. The NRC report on discipline-based education research summarizes current best practices for integrating findings from cognitive science into the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment of chemistry classrooms and those of other STEM disciplines.5 Chemistry has matured from a discipline that once was limited to providing descriptions of observable changes in color, temperature, and states of matter as evidence for reactions having occurred to a discipline that has developed and requires the use of theory to predict and generate causal mechanisms to explain the behavior of atoms and molecules. So too must chemists demand an analogous change in thinking of themselves as teachers in the classroom. Learning styles are at best a description of students’ preferred behaviors, but they cannot be explained by theories of cognitive development, nor do they offer a causal, mechanistic explanation of learning (ref 1, p 117): Basic research on human learning and memory, especially research on human metacognition...has demonstrated that our intuitions and beliefs about how we learn are often wrong in serious ways. We do not...gain an understanding of the complexities of human learning and memory from the trials and errors of everyday living and learning. ...[P]eople hold beliefs about how they learn that are faulty...which frequently leads people to...teach in nonoptimal ways.
■
■ ■
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author thanks Ellen J. Yezierski for her feedback on an earlier version of this editorial. REFERENCES
(1) Pashler, H.; McDaniel, M.; Rohrer, D.; Bjork, R. Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. Psychol. Sci. Public Interest 2008, 9 (3), 105− 119. (2) Towns, M. H. Kolb for Chemists: David A. Kolb and Experiential Learning Theory. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78 (8), 1107. (3) Bretz, S. L. All Students Are Not Created Equal: Learning Styles in the Chemistry Classroom. In Chemist’s Guide to Effective Teaching; Pienta, N., Cooper, M., Greenbowe, T., Eds.; Pearson Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2005; Vol. I, pp 28−40. (4) An, D.; Carr. Learning Styles Theory Fails To Explain Learning and Achievement: Recommendations for Alternative Approaches. Pers. Indiv. Differ. 2017, 116, 410−416. (5) National Research Council. Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering; The National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2012; https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13362/discipline-based-educationresearch-understanding-and-improving-learning-in-undergraduate (accessed Jun 2017).
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. ORCID
Stacey Lowery Bretz: 0000-0001-5503-8987 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS. Stacey Lowery Bretz holds the rank of University Distinguished Professor at Miami University. She is a Fellow of the 826
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00424 J. Chem. Educ. 2017, 94, 825−826
