A reflection on the principles of learning styles

The Core Content Framework (Department for Education (DFE), 2019) sets down the foundational knowledge that trainee teachers in England should acquire during their initial teacher education. In the ‘adaptive teaching’ section of this document, it states that:

"There is a common misconception that pupils have distinct and identifiable learning styles. This is not supported by evidence and attempting to tailor lessons to learning styles is unlikely to be beneficial" (pp. 20–21).

This position presents a significant diversion from approaches to pedagogy in all age phases and contexts in the 1990s and 2000s, when identifying and catering to learners’ preferred learning styles was recognised as good practice. In many cases, teachers would support students to identify themselves as either visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic learners (Dunn and Dunn, 1992; 1993) but this was just one of many categorisations. Indeed, Given and Reid (1999) inventoried over 100 different learning style instruments (for example, Gregorc’s Mind Styles Delineator (1985), Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles Questionnaire (1992), Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory (1999), Jackson’s Learning Styles Profiler (2002) and Sternberg’s Thinking Styles Inventory (1999) are among the most well-known). These varied in how learners were classified: some were linked to fixed elements of personality; others were, more flexibly, related to learner preference. However, they all, in some way, indicated that pedagogy would be made more effective by diagnosing learning styles, encouraging learners to reflect on these styles in an age-appropriate way, and then designing teaching and learning activities around them. This paper revisits some of the underlying principles of learning styles and provides a reflection on their potential value to educators and learners by considering which of these elements are pedagogically impactful while acknowledging the limitations of learning styles as a whole.