Bob Leamnson (RLEAMNSON@umassd.edu)
Sat, 06 Feb 1999 09:09:20 -0500 (EST)
Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 09:09:20 -0500 (EST) From: Bob Leamnson <RLEAMNSON@umassd.edu> Subject: Learning Styles: Misplaced Mapping
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While reading some of the responses to David Merrill's position
paper on learning styles I was reminded of a recording that came out
in the 1960s called "The Point." In it a character repeats several
times, "You sees what you wants to see, and you hears what you
wants to hear." I will join the fray.
I think David should bite the bullet. Several "yes and no"
answers and a clear admission that instructional "transaction can be
arranged so as to adapt...to the individual learning needs of each
student" are not consistent with the general tone of the paper, which
is that "the goals of instruction are primary in determining an
appropriate instructional strategy." This bit of waffling is explained
by stating that individual differences in learning styles constitute a
"secondary" element. I think the ideas here begin to lose
practicality. Isolating primary and secondary elements in instruction
is an interesting concept, but not one that has meaning for me when
I'm in the classroom. I think David should hold the fort on his main
point (Reclaiming Instructional Design) and not dismember it by
trying to accommodate the questionable notion of biologically
determined learning styles.
Like David, I must believe that learning styles exist for the
simple reason that people have found them. I remain to be
convinced that they provide any useful information for teachers in
the ordinary disciplines, with the possible exception of one-on-one
tutoring, and even there I still believe the better "instructional
strategy" is the one most appropriate for the content in question.
My argument with learning styles is that they constitute an
example of what I have elsewhere called "misplaced mapping."
What we call multi-talented people are those who for various
reasons have become knowledgeable, even expert, in several areas--
physicists who play chamber music; chemists who write poetry;
historians who are expert water-colorists; psychologists who are
fencing masters. Mastering the nuances of cadence, meter, and
rhyme requires a learning style quite different from that needed to
understand the quantum energy levels of electrons. Whoever can do
both well (and probably several other things as well) did not go
through life indulging one learning style.
I agree with David when he quotes Zemke, "At the deep structure
level, we have the same [learning] mechanisms." But this is a
powerful and useful statement only if we really do go "deep," and
that means going to the brain and the stabilization of synaptic
junctions. At that level we all do learn in exactly the same way.
(This biological basis of learning will be an ifets topic in August.)
But what we do in a behavioral sense to stabilize synapses is what
constitutes a learning style.
My argument continues to be that such learning behaviors are not
genetically or physiologically fixed, but are in fact learned. And if
we demand, as we do, that college students become reasonably adept
in five or six disciplines, we are also requiring that they "learn"
about as many learning styles. Is this bad? I think not. Is it
possible? We know from our own experience that it is. Is the
student better off for having done it? Who could doubt it?
I continue to harp on this idea of mapping learning styles onto
content and not onto people in the hope that its acceptance might
affect the way we teach. Were teachers to realize and accept that
various disciplines require for mastery a particular way of learning (a
learning style) then we might teach our students not just the "what"
of our discipline, but "how" it is learned as well. We would also
disabuse them of the terrible idea that they can go through life with
only one learning style.
Finally, I think we should be indebted to David for helping nudge
us back from one of the extremes that the educational world seems
always to be gravitating toward. The many articles and books on
"learner-centered" teaching and "learner-centered" classrooms that
have occupied our attention for past several years have, I suggest,
long ago fulfilled their purpose of reminding us that the real and
obvious goal in any classroom is that students learn. What seems to
have gotten lost in the enthusiasm, and what writers like David
Merrill, and I hope others, need to draw attention to, is that the goal
of learning in the classroom cannot be reached except through the
means, i.e. through good teaching. "Reclaiming Instructional
Design" is something we should hear a lot more about.
[Some ideas here are excerpted from "Thinking About Teaching and
Learning" to be published in March by STYLUS publishing.]
Bob Leamnson
rleamnson@umassd.edu
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