LEARNING STYLES
Chapter Five Objectives 1.
Describe the explanations concerning how learning occurs.
2.
Distinguish between learning style and learning preference.
3.
List and discuss the various learning styles. Give examples of each learning style.
4.
Review instructional strategies to be employed with different learning styles. Not all students learn in the same way. Learning styles have been defined as the
"cognitive, affective, and physiological traits that serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to learning environments" (Keefe, 1982, p. 43). Within teaching-learning interactions, an effort to assess learning style reflects a receiver orientation and recognizes that students differ in their preference for and ability to process various kinds of instructional messages. Style elements may be conditions under which an individual is most comfortable and prefers to learn, or they may be factors which must be recognized to understand how information is processed and stored (Gorham, 1986). These conditions can be assessed through both observation of and discussion with the student. Discussions of learning style appeared in the literature as early as 1892, but early findings were plagued with methodological problems and with a preoccupation with determining the one stylistic insight that would most improve student learning. Current efforts to explain how students learn best tend to follow one of two paths: one group is primarily concerned with attempts to explain differences in cognitive processing, or how one's brain makes sense of information; the other group focuses on applied models of learning and teaching and multidimensional analyses of styles. In this chapter, we will further discuss the definition of learning style, review five dimensions of style assessment and some of the approaches used to "get at" each of them, and discuss the implications of understanding students' learning styles in terms of matching, bridging, and style-flexing techniques.
What is Learning Style? Most learning style elements are conceptualized as bipolar continua, on which an individual student may fall at either extreme or anywhere in between. Most of the time, one
Chapter Five - 59