Seen it? Heard it? Felt it? Smelt it? Tasted it?
Going well?
Wrongly labelled
Next time you see a learning styles questionnaire, burn it
Frank Coffield
It's the last week of term and you can already smell the bouquet of your first sip of holiday Rioja. Like all good tutors, you've begun to think about next term. You've dug out the sheet that claims to differentiate students into visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and even tactile learners, or Vakt, for short. You look at the item that's always troubled you, "Learning How To Make a Cake". You know what the students have to do: read three choices and tick the one preferred. So, when baking a cake, do you
a) look at the instructions on the packet?
b) listen to a tape about what to do?
c) try to make it?
(A fourth tactile option could have been added, "feel the texture of the mix".)
No prizes for guessing that ticking box a) means visual; box b), auditory; and c), kinaesthetic. Some schools and colleges make it easier for students by putting a little v, a or k beside the appropriate choice. (The readers of Cosmopolitan or Nuts work it out for themselves.) After completing 12 such choices, students and staff are labelled (or worse, label themselves) visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners.
I'm not making any of this up, honest. The example above comes from one of the most popular questionnaires used in colleges. May I suggest you do something different with the form next term? Use it to light your next barbecue.
The next time an Ofsted inspector or your "line manager" mentions learning styles, I suggest you ask: "Which instrument do you recommend? What's its validity? Reliability? Any evidence of positive impact on raising attainment or improving behaviour?" If the answer is "no idea", explain that we are professionals trying to build a solid base of knowledge about teaching and learning. Practice should be informed by evidence, not by the unexamined hunches of some guru who's making a fortune from peddling poppycock.
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