Learning Style

A learning style is a self-report about presentation preference: whether you would rather see a diagram, hear an explanation, read a description, or work through an example. Coffield, Moseley, Hall and Ecclestone (2004) catalogued 71 distinct learning-styles models in their systematic review for the UK Learning and Skills Research Centre, concluding that most had weak psychometric support.

Two claims travel under the name. The first, that people have consistent preferences about how material reaches them, is not the contested one, though how consistent it is remains unsettled: test-retest reliability was one of that review's four criteria, and only one of the thirteen instruments it examined closely met all four. The second, the meshing hypothesis, is that learning improves when instruction is matched to the preferred mode. Controlled studies have repeatedly failed to confirm it (Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer & Bjork, 2008). What fails is the matching claim, not the preference itself.