Learning Styles Debunked

Friedman, P., & Alley, R. (1984). Matching Teaching and Learning Styles. In Theory

Into Practice (Vol. 23, pp. 77-81). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved from,

http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.plymouth.edu/stable/1476742?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

This chapter of the, Theory In Practice book focuses on learning and teaching styles. The author has broken the learning styles into 6 principals to help assist teachers and understand the process. They state that these findings were from case studies that are useful for schools and teachers, they do not, however, go into detail about any of these case studies, which I would have found to be much more beneficial being able to determine where and how the principals emerged.

This chapter goes on to explain that one of the principals indicates that teachers have their own style of teaching that correlate with their own “learning styles” rather than ones that benefit the students. Due to the lack of evidence and information to support these claims, I find the information to be quite irrelevant and when researching learning styles theories.

As I continue to read, the author explains that students do not learn only through their preferred learning styles. According the fifth principal, “students should be encouraged to diversify their style preferences.” Which through previous research, I would have to agree, but without prior research I found on my own, this article does not give enough information to support its claim.

After reading the 6 principals the author goes on to explain more about each “learning style” and how they are measured on a self-scoring instrument. The author explains that, “…results can be reported on a bar graph to identify the relative strength of each of the dimensions for each student.” I would have found it beneficial if the author would have included a case study and the findings in a bar graph so that the readers can easily access and read the information.

The author goes on to explain different cases where learning styles were implemented in schools, which sounds promising, but there is still a lack of scientific and researched based information. The author incorporated many examples of learning styles within schools and there reported outcomes, but there still seems to be a significant lack of reliable and researched based information. Overall, I do not find this resource to be all that beneficial because of the lack of researched based information. I did like how the author included examples and cases of implementing learning styles in schools, and I do think that we could incorporate some of those examples in our other findings, but due to the lack of research to support the arguments it is hard to find the source reliable. In order to use this resource, using Willingham’s process of “tracing it” would be very extensive and I believe it would be less time consuming to find a new article or look more deeply into another one we already know is useful.