Instructional Choices: Guide By Content, Not Learning Style

Let the content guide your instructional choices: An alternative to catering to each student’s preferred learning style. 

According to research presented by Rohrer and Pashler (2012), “there presently is no empirical justification for tailoring instruction to students’ supposedly different learning styles”.  Educators should “instead focus on developing the most effective and coherent ways to present particular bodies of content, which often involves combining different forms of instruction, such as diagrams and words, in mutually reinforcing ways” (p.635).

Subject Matter Importance

While an awareness of a student's learning styles and preferences can be considered when planning instruction, the subject matter being taught is more important.  

In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn (2009) writes that evidence seems to support that the topic being studied is possibly a more important factor in determining how to teach it than individual learning styles. 

In a study where students were learning about molecules, evidence showed that learning in a laboratory was the best approach for this topic - regardless of student preference.

Glenn also writes that in a study by Pashler and colleagues, “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence,” that:

“In almost every actual well-designed study, the pattern is similar:  For a given lesson, one instructional technique turns out to be optimal for all groups of students, even though students with certain learning styles may not love that technique.”

“in almost every actual well-designed study, the pattern is similar:  For a given lesson, one instructional technique turns out to be optimal for all groups of students, even though students with certain learning styles may not love that technique”.  

He explains that “teachers should worry about matching their instruction to the content they are teaching.  Some concepts are best taught through hands-on work, some are best taught through lectures, and some are best taught through group discussion”.

What about individual student needs?

Rayner (2007) (as cited in Allcock and Hulme, 2010) states that “good teachers intuitively respond to individual learners' needs by finding the way students respond best and challenging them to adapt in different ways” (p.70). 

Another author, Klein (2003) (as cited in Allcock and Hulme, 2010) offers that different strategies can fulfill different curricular goals by developing and using cognitive skills that might not be available in a single approach (p.70). 

One strategy proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972) (as cited in Allcock and Hulme, 2010) was to help students “create ownership” by “encouraging them to transfer information from one format to another and present it in their own way”. This uses learning strategies such as elaboration, rehearsal, and deep analysis to help improve long-term memory (p.70). 

Allcock and Hulme (2010) cite that research shows that “as long as teachers plan good quality, varied lessons with ways for all students to access the information, students can achieve without one method being superior to another”.  

Resources:

Allcock, S. & Hulme, J. (2010).  Learning styles in the classroom: Educational benefit or planning exercise?  Psychology Teaching Review, 16(2).

Glenn, D. (2009).  Teaching: Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students.  The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Rohrer, D. & Pashler, H. (2012).  Learning Styles: Where’s the evidence? Medical Education, 46, p. 630-635.