Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 141
able success. When he retired, having chalked up six American and National League championships and three World Series titles, he was hailed as one of the greatest managers of all time.
Each of us has a large basket of resources in the form of aptitudes, prior knowledge, intelligence, interests, and sense of personal empowerment that shape how we learn and how we overcome our shortcomings. Some of these differences matter a lot— for example, our ability to abstract underlying principles from new experiences and to convert new knowledge into mental structures. Other differences we may think count for a lot, for example having a verbal or visual learning style, actually don’t.
On any list of differences that matter most for learning, the level of language fl uency and reading ability will be at or near the top. While some kinds of diffi culties that require increased cognitive effort can strengthen learning, not all diffi culties we face have that effect. If the additional effort required to overcome the defi cit does not contribute to more robust learning, it’s not desirable. An example is the poor reader who cannot hold onto the thread of a text while deciphering individual words in a sentence. This is the case with dyslexia, and while dyslexia is not the only cause of reading diffi culties, it is one of the most common, estimated to affect some 15 percent of the population. It results from anomalous neural development during pregnancy that interferes with the ability to read by disrupting the brain’s capacity to link letters to the sounds they make, which is essential for word recognition. People don’t get over dyslexia, but with help they can learn to work with and around the problems it poses. The most successful programs emphasize practice at manipulating phonemes,
Make It Stick ê 142
building vocabulary, increasing comprehension, and improving fl uency of reading. Neurologists and psychologists emphasize the importance of diagnosing dyslexia early and working with children before the third grade while the brain is still quite plastic and potentially more malleable, enabling the re-routing of neural circuits.
Dyslexia is far more common among prison inmates than the general population, as a result of a series of bad turns that often begin when children who can’t read fall into a pattern of failure in school and develop low self- esteem. Some of them turn to bullying or other forms of antisocial behavior to compensate, and this strategy, if left unaddressed, can escalate into criminality.
While it is diffi cult for learners with dyslexia to gain essential reading skills and this disadvantage can create a constellation of other learning diffi culties, the high achievers interviewed for the Fortune article argue that some people with dyslexia seem to possess, or to develop, a greater capacity for creativity and problem solving, whether as a result of their neural wiring or the necessity they face to fi nd ways to compensate for their disability. To succeed, many of those interviewed reported that they had to learn at an early age how to grasp the big picture rather than struggling to decipher the component parts, how to think outside the box, how to act strategically, and how to manage risk taking— skills of necessity that, once learned, gave them a decided leg up later in their careers. Some of these skills may indeed have a neurological basis. Experiments by Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that individuals with dyslexia do poorly at interpreting information in their visual fi eld of focus when compared to those without dyslexia. However, they signifi cantly outperform others in their ability to interpret information from their peripheral vision,
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 143
suggesting that a superior ability to grasp the big picture might have its origins in the brain’s synaptic wiring.4
There’s an enormous body of literature on dyslexia, which we won’t delve into here beyond acknowledging that some neurological differences can count for a lot in how we learn, and for some subset of these individuals, a combination of high motivation, focused and sustained personal support, and compensating skills or “intelligences” have enabled them to thrive.
Belief in the learning styles credo is pervasive. Assessing students’ learning styles has been recommended at all levels of education, and teachers are urged to offer classroom material in many different ways so that each student can take it in the way he or she is best equipped to learn it. Learning styles theory has taken root in management development, as well as in vocational and professional settings, including the training of military pi lots, health care workers, municipal police, and beyond. A report on a 2004 survey conducted for Britain’s Learning and Skills Research Centre compares more than seventy distinct learning styles theories currently being offered in the marketplace, each with its companion assessment instruments to diagnose a person’s par tic u lar style. The report’s authors characterize the purveyors of these instruments as an industry bedev iled by vested interests that tout “a bedlam of contradictory claims” and express concerns about the temptation to classify, label, and ste reo type individuals. The authors relate an incident at a conference where a student who had completed an assessment instrument reported back: “I learned that I was a low auditory, kinesthetic learner. So there’s no point in me reading a book or listening to anyone for more than a few minutes.”5 The wrongheadedness of this
Make It Stick ê 144
conclusion is manifold. It’s not supported by science, and it instills a corrosive, misguided sense of diminished potential.
Notwithstanding the sheer number and variety of learning styles models, if you narrow the fi eld to those that are most widely accepted you still fail to fi nd a consistent theoretical pattern. An approach called VARK, advocated by Neil Fleming, differentiates people according to whether they prefer to learn through experiences that are primarily visual, auditory, reading, or kinesthetic (i.e., moving, touching, and active exploration). According to Fleming, VARK describes only one aspect of a person’s learning style, which in its entirety consists of eigh teen different dimensions, including preferences in temperature, light, food intake, biorhythms, and working with others versus working alone.
Other learning styles theories and materials are based on rather different dimensions. One commonly used inventory, based on the work of Kenneth Dunn and Rita Dunn, assesses six different aspects of an individual’s learning style: environmental, emotional, so cio log i cal, perceptual, physiological, and psychological. Still other models assess styles along such dimensions as these:
• Concrete versus abstract styles of perceiving
• Active experimentation versus refl ective observation modes of pro cessing
• Random versus sequential styles of or ga niz ing The Honey and Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire, which is pop u lar in managerial settings, helps employees determine whether their styles are predominantly “activist,” “refl ector,” “theorist,” or “pragmatist” and to improve in the areas where they score low so as to become more versatile learners.
The simple fact that different theories embrace such wildly discrepant dimensions gives cause for concern about their
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 145
scientifi c underpinnings. While it’s true that most all of us have a decided preference for how we like to learn new material, the premise behind learning styles is that we learn better when the mode of pre sen ta tion matches the par tic u lar style in which an individual is best able to learn. That is the critical claim.
In 2008 the cognitive psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Bob Bjork were commissioned to conduct a review to determine whether this critical claim is supported by scientifi c evidence. The team set out to answer two questions. First, what forms of evidence are needed for institutions to justify basing their instructional styles on assessments of students’ or employees’ learning styles? For the results to be credible, the team determined that a study would need to have several attributes. Initially, students must be divided into groups according to their learning styles. Then they must be randomly assigned to different classrooms teaching the same material but offering it through different instructional methods. Afterward, all the students must take the same test.
The test must show that students with a par tic u lar learning style (e.g., visual learners) did the best when they received instruction in their own learning style (visual) relative to instruction in a different style (auditory); in addition, the other types of learners must be shown to profi t more from their style of instruction than another style (auditory learners learning better from auditory than from visual pre sen ta tion).
The second question the team asked was whether this kind of evidence existed. The answer was no. They found very few studies designed to be capable of testing the validity of learning styles theory in education, and of those, they found that virtually none validate it and several fl atly contradict it. Moreover, their review showed that it is more important that the mode of instruction match the nature of the subject being
Make It Stick ê 146
taught: visual instruction for geometry and geography, verbal instruction for poetry, and so on. When instructional style matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better, regardless of their differing preferences for how the material is taught.
The fact that the evidence is not there to validate learning styles theory doesn’t mean that all theories are wrong. Learning styles theories take many forms. Some may be valid. But if so, we can’t know which: because the number of rigorous studies is extremely small, the research base does not exist to answer the question. On the basis of their fi ndings, Pashler and his colleagues argued that the evidence currently available does not justify the huge investment of time and money that would be needed to assess students and restructure instruction around learning styles. Until such evidence is produced, it makes more sense to emphasize the instructional techniques, like those outlined in this book, that have been validated by research as benefi ting learners regardless of their style preferences.6
Successful Intelligence
Intelligence is a learning difference that we do know matters, but what exactly is it? Every human society has a concept that corresponds to the idea of intelligence in our culture. The problem of how to defi ne and mea sure intelligence in a way that accounts for people’s intellectual horse power and provides a fair indicator of their potential has been with us for over a hundred years, with psychologists trying to mea sure this construct since early in the twentieth century. Psychologists today generally accept that individuals possess at least two kinds of intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold informa-
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 147
tion in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the procedures or mental models one has developed from past learning and experience. Together, these two kinds of intelligence enable us to learn, reason, and solve problems.7
Traditionally, IQ tests have been used to mea sure individuals’ logical and verbal potential. These tests assign an Intelligence Quotient, which denotes the ratio of mental age to physical age, times 100. That is, an eight- year- old who can solve problems on a test that most ten- year- olds can solve has an IQ of 125 (10 divided by 8, times 100). It used to be thought that IQ was fi xed from birth, but traditional notions of intellectual capacity are being challenged.
One countervailing idea, put forward by the psychologist Howard Gardner to account for the broad variety in people’s abilities, is the hypothesis that humans have as many as eight different kinds of intelligence:
Logical- mathematical intelligence: ability to think critically, work with numbers and abstractions, and the like; Spatial intelligence: three- dimensional judgment and the ability to visualize with the mind’s eye; Linguistic intelligence: ability to work with words and languages;
Kinesthetic intelligence: physical dexterity and control of one’s body;
Musical intelligence: sensitivity to sounds, rhythms, tones, and music;
Interpersonal intelligence: ability to “read” other people and work with them effectively;
Intrapersonal intelligence: ability to understand one’s self and make accurate judgments of one’s knowledge, abilities, and effectiveness;
Make It Stick ê 148
Naturalistic intelligence: the ability to discriminate and relate to one’s natural surroundings (for example, the kinds of intelligence invoked by a gardener, hunter, or chef).
Gardner’s ideas are attractive for many reasons, not the least because they attempt to explain human differences that we can observe but cannot account for with modern, Western defi nitions of intelligence with their focus on language and logic abilities. As with learning styles theory, the multiple intelligences model has helped educators to diversify the kinds of learning experiences they offer. Unlike learning styles, which can have the perverse effect of causing individuals to perceive their learning abilities as limited, multiple intelligences theory elevates the sheer variety of tools in our native toolkit. What both theories lack is an underpinning of empirical validation, a problem Gardner himself recognizes, acknowledging that determining one’s par tic u lar mix of intelligences is more an art than a science.8
While Gardner helpfully expands our notion of intelligence, the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg helpfully distills it again.
Rather than eight intelligences, Sternberg’s model proposes three: analytical, creative, and practical. Further, unlike Gardner’s theory, Sternberg’s is supported by empirical research.9
One of Sternberg’s studies of par tic u lar interest to the question of how we mea sure intelligence was carried out in rural Kenya, where he and his associates looked at children’s informal knowledge of herbal medicines. Regular use of these medicines is an important part of Kenyans’ daily lives. This knowledge is not taught in schools or assessed by tests, but children who can identify the herbs and who know their appropriate uses and dosages are better adapted to succeed in their environment than children without that knowledge. The children who performed best on tests of this indigenous informal knowledge did worst relative to their peers on tests of the
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 149
formal academic subjects taught in school and, in Sternberg’s words, appeared to be “stupid” by the metric of the formal tests. How to reconcile the discrepancy? Sternberg suggests that the children who excelled at indigenous knowledge came from families who valued such practical knowledge more highly than the families of the children who excelled at the academics taught in school. Children whose environments prized one kind of learning over another (practical over academic, in the case of the families who taught their children about herbs) were at a lower level of knowledge in the academic areas not emphasized by their environment. Other families placed more value on the analytic (school- based) information and less on the practical herbal knowledge.
There are two important ideas here. First, traditional mea-sures of intelligence failed to account for environmental differences; there is no reason to suspect that kids who excelled at informal, indigenous knowledge can’t catch up to or even surpass their peers in academic learning when given the appropriate opportunities. Second, for the kids whose environments emphasized indigenous knowledge, the mastery of academics is still developing. In Sternberg’s view, we’re all in a state of developing expertise, and any test that mea sures only what we know at any given moment is a static mea sure that tells us nothing about our potential in the realm the test mea sures.
Two other quick stories Sternberg cites are useful here.
One is a series of studies of orphaned children in Brazil who must learn to start and run street businesses if they are to survive. Motivation is high; if they turn to theft as a means to sustain themselves, they risk running afoul of the death squads.
