This piece [PDF] from the Learning Research Centre is one of the finest educational research articles I have read in a long time. To begin with, their literature review of the research to-date is superb. They break down each major theoretical school with its strengths and weaknesses, as well as weaknesses in research and methodology. These guys really get the science and understand why it’s so hard to produce meaningful, reliable answers. To wit, here’s the first paragraph under the subhead in their conclusions section entitled “No clear implications for pedagogy:”
There are two separate problems here. First, learning style researchers do not speak with one voice; there is widespread disagreement about the advice that should be offered to teachers, tutors or managers. For instance, should the style of teaching be consonant with the style of learning or not? At present, there is no definitive answer to that question, because –and this brings us to the second problem– there is a dearth of rigorously controlled experiments and of longitudinal studies to test the claims of the main advocates. A move toward more controlled experiments, however, would entail a loss of ecological validity and of the opportunity to study complex learning in authentic, everyday educational settings.
In other words, one of the reasons that some of the central theoretical claims have not been tested is that, in order to do so, you have to isolate the variable you are testing in a controlled experiment. But a controlled experiment is not like a classroom, and we don’t know how stripping away the other variables impacts the holistic learning process.
Nevertheless, all is not lost. The authors do offer some some good suggestions about how existing research can be used to enhance education as well as how to go about deciding which research to use in what ways.
Hot stuff.
Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.
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