Kurtrowley@aol.com
Mon, 8 Feb 1999 15:25:19 EST
From: Kurtrowley@aol.com Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 15:25:19 EST Subject: Are learning styles learned strategies? Do they change?
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I would like to comment on several points raised, and raise one of my own.
1. I enjoyed Lora Kaisler's comments and echo some of the same sentiment.
Individuals are all unique in complex ways that defy broad generalizations
about instructional strategy appropriateness for real-world learning
situations. What works for one student may or may not work for another. I
suspect that some of this is due to variation in prerequisite skills
readiness, some is probably variation in motivation, and some may be due to
the interaction of instructional strategy and content with the student's
favored learning strategies (learning styles, etc.).
2. Dave Merrill has taken the position that learning styles are stable, that
they are somehow DNA-derived. I would like to consider one of the positions in
Dave Merrill's paper.
> "Learners today are not significantly different from those of a decade ago,
a
> generation ago, or a century ago. The basic learning mechanisms by which
>l earners acquire knowledge and skill have remained constant amid societal
> change." (Merrill et al, 1996)
I think that learners today may be VERY different from those of a generation
ago, or even a year ago. Why? Because the brain does not appear to have very
many 'preprogrammed' learning mechanisms. Other than infant survival skills,
first language acquisition and acquiring basic motor functions, most learning
mechanisms are themselves learned. Of course, the 'learned' learning
mechanisms must function within the constraints of the hardware (the neurology
of the brain), but there is great latitude for strategy construction within
those constraints (see connectionism, a good explanation is at
http://www.ex.ac.uk/~jjloose/teaching/pracintro/pracintro.html).
Once students start learning to read, they have left the domain of 'innate'
learning and are using artificial human-engineered strategies to learn about
human artifacts. It is the continual changes in those strategies and
artifacts, as well as the changing human environment (such as contaminants
that effect neurochemistry) that may change basic learning mechanisms from
year to year. Therefore, as educational methods, basic family life, and social
culture change, so do the learning mechanisms. But this is hard to perceive
because we each have limited experience in acquiring our learning style, and
as we all reflect on our own learning mechanisms we may perceive them to be
stable and universal. We don't (and possibly can't under most circumstances)
know any other way to think than our own. This leads me to the idea that
learning styles change as an artifact of the learner's early environment, and
the learner's choices within that environment. Also, we do not perceive those
changes well, as teachers and system designers.
3. If in fact learning styles are largely learned strategies, chaos theory and
complex systems theory could support the argument that learning styles are
constantly changing. These theories suggest that even seemingly insignificant
changes in a highly complex system (such as human systems of learning used in
schools) may have profound effects. Perhaps this is a partial explanation for
the difficulty of measurement of learning styles. There are too many
confounds. It is difficult to measure a moving target, and large changes in
learning styles could be produced by small changes in elementary school
instructional strategies. Consider the different learning styles that might
emerge from exposing students at an early age to whole language, phonics,
cooperative learning, home schooling, Channel 1 educational cable network,
extensive use of videos, computers, or the Internet (these have all been
popular strategies in the US over the past few years).
If each new group of students develops different learning styles in response
to these changing instructional strategies, can we ever untangle the learning
styles that develop in the students? Can we understand the learning styles
well enough to create instructional systems with sufficient flexibility to
accommodate ongoing changes in learning style preferences? How will we
handle the possibility that ten years from now many students who were exposed
to extensive use of videos in their first few years of school (passive
intrapersonal) will be in college, but just twelve years from now the students
who learned to use the Internet in early grades (interactive interpersonal)
will also be in college, and each may have a radically different range of
learning styles that were acquired in their formative years?
Kurt Rowley
Olympia Educational Systems Institute (www.oesi.org)
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