‘Constructs’ are the kind of things psychology researchers try to measure and ‘instruments’ are what they try to measure them with. For instance, in my field, cognitive load is a construct and instruments used to measure it include surveys asking subjects how much mental effort they invested in a task. For an instrument to be […]

The current scientific consensus on the idea of learning styles is clear: People often express a preference for learning in a particular way, they may even have distinct ways of thinking, but the notion of differentiating teaching to match students’ learning styles is one that lacks supporting evidence. We can have a semantic argument about […]

 I have written before about Victoria University’s 2016 education faculty handbook which promoted learning styles theories. Such theories are widely accepted to lack any evidence of being educationally useful. I also agree with Professor Stephen Dinham that they are potentially harmful in the way that they seek to label students. So I thought I’d […]

Professor Stephen Dinham of Melbourne University has written an excellent piece for The Conversation. In the article, he debunks the myth of learning styles and, in the process, makes an excellent point about the role of evidence in education: “Teachers need to be critical consumers of research – as with medicine, lives are also at […]

There’s a well defined cycle to internet discussions of learning styles. Someone like me will mention them in passing. I’ll say something like, “We all know learning styles theories are false but…” while making some different kind of point. Others will pick up on this, claiming that they are unaware of anyone who suggests that learning […]

Following my previous post on teacher education, Stewart Riddle of the University of Southern Queensland made the following observation: So, I thought I’d help him out a little. I used Google to search the education faculty websites of a number of Australian universities, looking for something recent on learning styles [e.g. search for: “learning styles” […]

There is a curious constituency out there who are desperate to make the case for learning styles, despite all of the evidence that we now have. Some recognise the issues with the way learning styles have been implemented and yet still wish to keep them from the grave. We read that there might be something in […]

Learning styles are a curious phenomenon for those of us interested in the education debate. Learning styles theories suggest that each student has a preferred style of learning; taxonomies vary, but a popular one distinguished between visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners. It implies that kinaesthetic students benefit from learning through physical activity whereas visual learners […]

A number of educationalists have suggested that students learn in different ways and that, as teachers, we have a responsibility to establish what these different learning styles are and vary our teaching to accommodate them. Various models have been put forward and a common approach is to classify learners according to their varying degrees of […]

The concept of a ‘learning profile’ is critical to the model of differentiated instruction developed by Carol Ann Tomlinson and colleagues. It is this model that is often cited by researchers, alongside the diagrams-of-brains approach known as ‘Universal Design for Learning’ or ‘UDL’. For this reason, it is probably worth exploring the concept of learning […]