Ideas such as Shaw & Hawes’ (1998) four levels of learning may not be far from the truth, but they rely heavily on a key notion in education – assessment. The only way we can know whether the competence (whether conscious or unconscious) is correctly assumed is if there is sufficient evidence from some form of assessment. In what can be seen as a historical source, written at a time of the many subsequently titled ‘crises in education’, Galton (1995) discusses the ‘mess that is assessment’. This is with direct reference to the government’s presumption that the teaching profession is reluctant to raise national standards. This leaves to a ‘catch 22’ situation where complains about standardised tests being no more valuable than informal judgements of children are juxtaposed with a ‘universal’ (i.e. in the government’s eyes) agreement that national standards do need to be improved. The logician looks at this and notices that the assumption that national standards need to improve must have arisen from some assessment in the past – so is it possible this initial assessment was itself flawed? By examining and accounting for the differences in learning styles among the children of today’s classrooms, we can hopefully highlight prevailing problems in assessment in order to improve the process. Idealistically, the learning process needs to assess its assessment as thoroughly as it should assess children.
Returning to learning styles as studied through their teaching methods, Appelbaum’s (chapter in Kincheloe & Steinburg, 1998) ideas on teaching mathematics illustrate the fact that unless we exhaustively explore all strategies for teaching and learning, the methods and possible flaws in assessing their success are irrelevant. In his writing, he makes distinction between procedural and concept learning, illustrated in a common example – that of vertical addition algorithms. The example in his chapter shows a child with good procedural knowledge, but no grasp of place value, seen in sums like this:
(Adapted from Appelbaum’s chapter in Kincheloe & Steinburg, 1998: 200)
The pupil has applied her knowledge of the procedure ‘add each number at the top to the number below it’, but has gone awry because of lack of place value concept. Rephrased, the child has been an unsuccessful learner because she was unable to integrate fully the concept with the procedural algorithm to solve the problem – the ‘problem’ was actually a mere exercise in the procedure. The most logical argument to this (and one taken up by Appelbaum himself) is the commonsense notion that we should not give such technical conceptual terms to a problem in mathematics – e.g. telling a child of 6 that 3 + 4 is the same as 4 + 3 because addition is commutative – but rather expose the child to the concept through numerous learning paradigms. Tom Lehrer, the renowned Harvard mathematician and entertainer expressed this duality in learning in a satirical way in the introduction to his song ‘New math’:
“…In the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing - rather than to get the right answer.”
(Tom Lehrer, ‘New math’, 1958, from http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom-lehrer/138395.html)
To summarise, the essence of success in learning in this element of mathematics is to acknowledge that perhaps it is the mistake making itself that allows the higher conceptual construct to be integrated, regardless of the child’s learning style.
This essay must focus on the literature surrounding the interaction between learning styles and the reasons for their successes among children. A keyword search for ‘learning styles’ in most library catalogues, search engines or book index will inevitably reference the work of Kolb. Along with numerous collaborators, he developed an inventory for measuring participants’ learning styles, along two dimensions: the abstract conceptualisation – concrete experience continuum; and the reflective observation-active experimentation continuum (Kolb, 1985: cited in Riding & Rayner, 1998). Although not the first (and certainly not the only) learning styles questionnaire/inventory, its design has influenced many subsequent inventories, all with the purpose of articulating the way we assimilate information and experience. Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory may have come under continued criticism as to its reliability (see Riding & Rayner, 1998), yet the only outcome of any argument against attempts to label participants as ‘concrete abstract experimental’ or ‘abstract reflective’ learners is this: how else could we effectively glean this information? Most philosophical and psychological concepts (e.g. personality, aesthetics, memory, and quality) have similar problems to the trouble of defining ‘learning style’ – while it appears obvious we all have a preferred method of learning, striving to measure it is challenging to say the least.
Another significant problem in assessing the success of children’s learning styles comes from the empirical domain’s most fundamental flaw – the Heisenberg principle. Instead of the observed elementary particle being uncontrollably affected by the observation itself, this time it is the method of learning being realised in a pupil being uncontrollably affected by the teacher’s own biases. A dissonance can be set up when a pupil’s preferred learning style is either incorrectly assessed post-hoc by their assessor, or by being presented in a contradictory way pre-hoc. As Vail reminds us:
“Since people are multi-faceted, each person has more than one way of learning. But most have dominant clusters, preferred channels, and secondary, subordinate approaches.”
(Vail, 1999: cited in Ginnis, 2002)
This quote arises from a reaffirmation of the purpose of learning styles research – we must assume that patterns and consistencies will be formed across a population of learners that can be generalised for study and improvement. By evaluating the different styles and their impact upon a child’s overall learning curve, then we can get that extra few percent achievement from a primary school class. Nevertheless, a dialogue between the evaluation of styles from an unbiased assessor (who preferably has no obvious dominant learning style), and the assessed party is not helped by the unwillingness to stick to one category of learning on both sides. In other words, will the learner make any use of the fact they are classified as an ‘enthusiastic’ learner under the Learning Styles Inventory (Kolb, 1984; cited in Riding & Rayner, 1998). Will the assessment method itself only have a vague surface reliability, or can we take the typology of proof of a more complex cognitive system at work?
At the bare bones of learning theories, opposition to the Piagetian dominance in primary classrooms has taken various forms. One such idea is a theory of knowledge acquisition, supported by studies on domain specific learning. In a landmark paper, Chi (1978: cited in Atkinson, Atkinson, Smith & Bem, 1993) showed that 10 year-old chess masters could recall positions of pieces in chess games significantly better than amateurs (college students of 18-21 years) – despite the fact the college students were significantly better at recalling lists of random numbers. This is explained by the 10 year-olds having a deeper grasp of the ‘underlying structures’ of chess, enabling ‘chunking’ of moves (such as ‘black king attacks white bishop’) into larger meaningful units. In the primary school classroom, this equates to a simple adage – do not expect children to learn successfully unless the information is presented in a meaningful way that lends itself to engagement and purpose. The chess amateurs are more likely to be unaware of the implausible positions of pieces during a game, so irrelevant material is processed when it need not be. When a mathematical problem is presented with irrelevant information (just as in real life, where we seldom think of correcting our multiplication tables before our wallets when purchasing fruit in a market), the problem undoubtedly gets much harder to solve. By chunking information relating to how number systems work, rather than expecting a distinct qualitative shift to being able to process problems of the Piagetian formal operational stage, our evaluation becomes less rigid and stilted. The assessment that moves a child up to the next rung of a Key Stage scale in primary school usually involves some reaffirmation of the skills that should be latent by this time. For example:
Mathematics levels, Ma2, Number and Algebra:
Level 1
Pupils count, order, add and subtract numbers when solving problems up to 10 objects…
Level 2
Pupils count sets of objects reliably…order numbers up to 100.
Up to…
Level 6
Pupils order and approximate decimals when solving numerical problems and equations…
(Department for education and employment & Qualifications and curriculum authority, 1999: 11 of appendix)
In other words, a complex interplay exists between what is necessary and what is assumed to describe and define an acquired skill by a particular stage of development. When a definition is so bound up in the nature of the assessment, only minor differences in language make us see the success of the learning and knowledge in existence. Greeno, Pearson & Schoenfield (1999: cited in McCormick & Paechter, 1999) wrote about this is their description of core literacy skills:
“Describing the knowledge base relevant for literacy is, from one perspective, impossible, because everything students learn in and out of class affects their reading and writing competence. After all, the ‘stuff’ of texts… ought to be the stuff of life”
(Greeno, Pearson & Schoenfield, 1999: cited in McCormick & Paechter, 1999: 140-1)
The success of learning here is heavily dependent on the framework from which the assessment comes, a theme common to much learning styles research. On a similar theme is the area of research connected with gender differences in learning style. Stereotypes prevail in everyday language where women can generally handle more than one simultaneous task better than man does, but at a hormonal and neurological level, basic differences can be seen in the classroom. Shaw & Hawes (1998) map the gender differences onto learning styles, where the male brain has greater compartmentalisation (as opposed to networking across hemispheres), larger area for visual/spatial processing (as opposed to linguistic processing), higher testosterone levels and lower serotonin and dopamine levels than females. One view, shared in a controversially inflammatory publication by Moir & Moir (“Why men don’t iron”: 2000), is that there has been a ‘feminisation’ of the classroom at all levels of schooling, with an emphasis on reading and writing skills combined with tasks that are co-operative and non-competitive, sedentary and requiring sustained attention or effort’ (Shaw & Hawes, 1998: 67). This could certainly account for the dominance of girls in attainment tests at all ages, most notably in literacy. However, is the male/female distinction a dichotomy that only maps onto learning style theory because of the polarised nature of any research? Differences are bound to show up when looking at males & females, as the subject matter is so ingrained in every opposite we look for in groups. Nonetheless, a dominance of one particular style of teaching, regardless of whether it maps onto a gender bias, is bound to significantly affect learning success. As educators, we have to ensure that even if the learning styles of pupils can be changed over time, perhaps their underlying cognitive style cannot.
Personality theories based on learning theory provide us with some insight into gender differences in learning styles. Bandura strived to continue the ever-developing shift against conditioned learning theory in psychology with his cognitive social learning theory. Monte (1999) describes some of the main features of the paradigm, including a section arguing against exclusively conditioning in learning:
“…the medical resident [does not] learn surgery by being permitted to cut into human flesh until he or she gets one operation right…”
(Monte, 1999: 838)
Bandura is instead advocating learning where we also learn by imitating other successful attempts at a task, or by encoding information (from visual or auditory sources) to help us imitate the success. We must not forget that although the classroom environment in primary schools may remind us of, and much empirical work in learning theories was pioneered on animals (i.e. the clichés of Pavlov’s dogs and Skinner’s rats), learning styles are more complex and likely model-based for most experience. Bandura states that in complex learning, the learner must:
“Attend to the model,
Remember what is seen & heard
Reproduce the memory during imitation and expect
Reinforcement for accurate performance”
(Monte, 1999: 838)
In terms of success of learning, the assessment is in this case built into the learning process, as shown in the reproduction and reinforcement sections, and while this is in no way ground breaking, it reconfirms the connection that must exist between learning and instant assessment. Gender differences from Shaw & Hawes (1998) in learning styles tell us that as well as nurtured sex roles, there exist biological (chiefly neurological) differences between the sexes, and a scan through key words of Bandura’s cognitive social learning theory highlights a female bias in correctly performing complex learning. This is chiefly in the attention paying and the reinforcement or networking of the female’s larger linguistic area and more effective corpus callosum respectively.
Sticking with established social psychological theorists, a look at the implications for education in Vygotskian/Brunerian thought gives an illuminating aspect on the success of learners. While Piaget asserts that the school environment should allow ‘discovery’ learning as much as possible, the developed ideas of Vygotsky/Bruner are that the adult (teacher) acts as a scaffolder of schemas in instruction (Smith, Cowie & Blades, 1998: 436). The school and surrounding environment are a physical embodiment of the Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (Z.P.D.), the area and scope of which are very individual to the learner. Ultimately, the way in which we learn is seen by Bruner as continuing the essentials of instruction and modelling, linking this with Bandura’s cognitive social learning theory. Taking this down to the micro level of the pupil in the primary classroom, we can give a simplistic answer as to the success question at hand – if the child is not properly scaffolded to learning, their experience of the classroom will not be fully realised.
The value in taking a theoretical approach to conditions of learning is that it gives education and educators goals to strive for, provided the majority of the system is continuous and standardised. One huge practical problem with initialising a learning framework based on Brunerian instruction and action from scaffolders, and acknowledging Vygotsky’s Z.P.D is that the children brought up with the system will arguably do better out of the system than those who have it thrust upon them. The next logical question from this is would children benefit from changing their teaching method by consciously choosing a particular method of knowledge and skill acquisition? Could they be effective meta-learners? This essay would have to be extended dramatically to argue any case for the existence of meta-knowledge and meta-cognition, but the educational researcher, Driscoll, provides a useful summary for us:
“Metacognition refers to one’s awareness of thinking and the self-regulatory behaviour that accompanies this awareness.”
(Driscoll, 1994: 103)
This area has considerable implications for further research, not least in the practical application of the brand of self-assessment that has become very popular in many primary schools. The much used triad of visual, auditory or kinaesthetic (VAK) learners has been consistently dragged out wherever an undemanding start to a paper on learning styles is needed, as the terms are inclusive and, to an extent, mutually exclusive (i.e. you are one of the three, or you have no learning style at all)/ A brief look at some learning styles ‘quizzes’ from the world wide web provides some great angles for criticism. ‘Familyeducation.com’ has a selection of selection-style quizzes for parents’ use, including one entitled ‘What is your child’s primary learning style?’. Questions from this include:
Q. 3 Your child learns best:
a) from verbal instruction
b) when you show him something
c) by doing
Q. 5 Your child enjoys:
a) going to plays
b) using color (sic)
c) attacking things, i.e. fighting, kicking, pounding.
(Source: http://www.familyeducation.com/quiz/0,1399,3-2740,00.html)
The sheer idea that children could be labelled as one of the VAK tags after the ‘subtleties’ of Q. 3, or the baffling admissions of Q. 5 (a child can only enjoy plays, colours or fighting), shed light on a world of misdiagnosis in education. The success of learning may indeed be hindered by an incongruous teaching technique to the child’s learning style, but when such transparent and bizarre assessments allow parents to dictate the preferred style of a young child (who knows no better), the situation only invites confusion.
In assessing the success of learning, we have go to be aware of the main threads underlying how we evaluate success in the classroom. The simple answer to the essay title would be to say that it is the ‘variety of different ways’ that causes the varying success, and it appears that from a critical standpoint, the methods of assessing the success are flawed. Shaw & Hawes (1998) tell us that moving between the level of unconscious and conscious competence is the key to correctly acquiring a skill, where as this meta-cognition of action is not so explicit in the vicarious nature of learning in Bandura’s cognitive social learning theory. However, Bandura’s ideas do correlate to some extent with the Brunerian stress on modelling and instruction (through scaffolding techniques), as they both have their roots in social constructivism. The child benefits from being reflectively questioned about her own action with critical questions in the development of their own world ideas, without the adult scaffolder being too invasive. This leads to successful learning regardless of the naïve paradigm of VAK, or the learning styles that correspond to gender roles. Children learn in a variety of ways, all of which must be self-selected in some way to be as much a part of them as their own sense of sight, hearing or touch, but that does not mean we could approximate a child’s learning experience as being just the information they glean from these senses. Success is too much of a qualitative and abstract entity to associate with absolute learning (i.e. ‘amount’ of learning), so as well as the child’s relative capabilities before an assessment, we must also take into account their relative styles of learning leading up to the test, all of which could bias the marker, who themselves have a unique learning style.
References
Atkinson, R. L., Atkinson, R. C., Smith, E.E., Bem, D. J. (1993) Introduction to Psychology (11th ed.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: Orlando.
Driscoll, M. P. (1994) Psychology of learning for instruction. Allyn & Bacon Publishers: Boston.
Galton, M. (1995) Crisis in the primary classroom. David Fulton Publishers: London.
Ginnis, P. (2002) The teacher’s toolkit. Crown House Publishing: Wales.
Joyce, B. R., Calhoun, E. & Hopkins, D. (1997) Models of learning : tools for teaching. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Kincheloe, J. L. & Steinburg, S. R. (1998) Unauthorized Method: Strategies for critical teaching. Routledge: London
McCormick, R. & Paechter, C. (1999) Learning & knowledge. Paul Chapman Publishing: London
Monte,C. F. (1995) Beneath The Mask: An Introduction to Theories of Personality. (5th ed.) Orlando: Harcourt Brace.
Muijs, D. & Reynolds, D. (2001) Effective teaching: evidence and practice. Paul Chapman Publishing: London.
Riding, R. J. & Rayner, S. (1998) Cognitive styles and learning strategies. David Fulton: London.
Shaw, S. & Hawes, T. (1998) Effective teaching and learning in the primary classroom. Optimal Learning: Leicester.
Smith, P. K., Cowie, H. & Blades, M. (1998) Understanding children’s development. (3rd ed.) Blackwell publishers: London.
Websites
http://www.familyeducation.com/quiz/0,1399,3-2740,00.html
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom-lehrer/138395.html
