Where am I coming from?
Over the last few months I've read a number of blog posts about learning styles (see references at end of post). So, do learning styles indicators measure what they say they do? (for what it matters, I'm in the 'no they don't' camp) However, this post isn't so much about whether or not they do measure actual learning styles, rather I'm more interested in why people believe so strongly that learning styles indicators do in fact provide a measure of how an individual learns best.
Let's put aside our opinions for a moment!
Just for the sake of it, put aside your personal view for a moment and join me. Say to yourself, "There is no evidence that learning styles indicators actually work". Believe with me that the weight of scientific evidence is strongly behind your point of view. Now imagine that you meet another learning professional and the conversation happens to move on to learning styles. You mention that there is no evidence that learning styles indicators actually work. The person you are speaking to turns towards you with a look of questioning shock, basically they think you are mad! They say, "What do you mean? I use them all the time and they really do work!"
So we explain ourselves
You explain to your friend that you have just finished reading some papers (here and here) by a bloke named Frank Coffield and they have convinced you that what you had wondered about was true, learning styles questionnaires do not provide any indication of a learner's learning style. You suggest that they have a look and see what they think.
A week later
You meet your friend again, the first thing they say is, " I read a paper by that Coffield bloke and, 'what a load of rubbish.......'" You ask, "why?" They reply, "what a lot of scientific mumbo jumbo, I bet he's never worked a day of his life in a real classroom, what would he know........!"
Now, let's forget about learning styles for a moment
This post isn't really about learning styles. It is more about why people hang on to ideas that evidence indicates are not true. This is really the very essence of education and learning, as isn't all learning a matter of processing new ideas to replace older less well-formed ideas. It's what my 4 year old boy is doing all the time (and he's very happy and ready to throw away his 3 year old ideas for the more up to date 4 year old version). But adults are not always so ready to accommodate the new.
Back to how I started on this train of thought
Late one night a couple of weeks ago I read a series of tweets from Martin Shovel and Marion Chapsal. It began with a blog post about "The Dangers of Co-opting Scientific Explanation", (great article with some good reading in the comments as well), from there I slept on my thoughts, waking in the morning to read another excellent blog post by Simon Bostock on learning styles, "Learning Styles: fable-ous and tragic", now my mind was really working.
Where my mind went next
The beauty of the iPhone is that when you think you'd like to find out something, you can anywhere any-time. My reading late the night before had got my mind thinking of Plato's cave allegory (it's true, eating muesli, thinking Plato!) So, I looked it up on my iPhone in Wikipedia. Somewhere in my head I had thought that the belief that learning styles indicators worked was in a way similar to Plato's cave story explaining how people form ideas and beliefs through limited experienced. From wikipedia is this explanation of the cave allegory, a fictional discussion between Plato's teacher Socrates and his student Glaucon:
"Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads 'including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials'. The prisoners can only watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.
Socrates asks if it is not reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just the reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. Wouldn't they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?"
I read this and thought - "yep, that fits what I was thinking!"
It does fit! When learning professionals 'use' learning styles indicators in learning environments they 'see' a result - they link this result to learning styles, so they say, "it must be true!" But really all they are seeing are Plato's shadows. If learning professionals could only 'move outside the cave' they might see that what they thought to be true was not.
The allegory continues to describe how a prisoner leaving the cave eventually comes to see that their earlier view of reality was false and the allegory also deals with how this person's new view on reality would be received by those who remained in the cave (a hint - not well!)
Back to Learning Styles again
So, why are so called 'Learning Professionals' so caught up with a debate about whether or not learning styles indicators work to show how individuals prefer to learn? Every day we deal with learners who are tied to ideas that we have been tasked to 'develop' (ie change!), isn't all instructional and learning design about moving prisoners from the cave? The problem is though that we all want to understand reality so much that we convince ourselves that what we believe is reality. This in turn becomes even more strongly embedded when we share our 'reality' with others who also see things as we do, we now have a shared belief. "We must be right", they tell themselves, "look at all these people who agree with me!"
Just another fallacy?
At its core, isn't the learning styles indicators debate just another case of false ideas, another set of shadows? I admit here I am no philosophic scholar, however I recently some interesting thoughts on the philosophy of fallacies. All around us are fallacies that some people believe strongly in! Once it was a flat Earth, later it was 'peace in our time' and today they continue.
It keeps us in work!
I suppose it will always be true, there will always be more to learn, there will always be new caves to leave. Our task as learning professionals is to make the transition from cave to sunlight simpler for our learners. We also need to remember that we learning professionals have caves of our own to leave.
So....finally!
Two weeks after I began thinking I've put my fingers to the keyboard to write this post! It does deal with many points but I hope you can all see where I'm coming from. It can really all be boiled down to one thought, "we live and learn".
Other recent reading
CreativityWorks: The Dangers of Co-opting Scientific Explanations
Bunchberry & Fern: Learning Styles: fable-ous and tragic
TeachingExpertise: A Teaching Elixir or best-fit pedagogy? Do learning styles matter?
