Week 4: Learning styles

Useful post by tutor Don Passey summarising learning styles:

"For me there are at least three sets of processes to consider when we are discussing or thinking about 'learning styles':

• The ways we engage with information, ideas, and the outside world, whether we acquire information through visual, auditory, emotional, social, or through other sensory routes;
• The ways we handle information internally, whether we are concerned with concepts and a big picture, or a more detailed or atomistic approach, whether we are positivistic or pragmatic, for example;
• The ways we hold information or details or ideas in mind, in mental schema formats, whether these are in moving colour imagery forms, or sounds, and how ideas are associated and linked to these mental schema so that when we remember some details, we are taken to other ideas associated with them as well.

For me, when I'm considering 'learning styles' it is a matter of trying to see what is happening across all of those dimensions, and individuals do differ quite a lot. We also know at a neurobiological level that mental schema develop or shift (language learning, for example, is different for younger children because of the neurobiological schema that are accessible at an earlier stage in life), but we also know that mental schema can be created when they are lost for some reason (following trauma or brain injury, for example).

For me 'learning styles' is something I consider as highly multidimensional. All of the features and factors you have described are important contributors, and different research studies point to these clearly.

If this is an area of interest, it might be worth looking at some of the literature on mental schema - I think that provides an important neurobiological perspective that helps to see how the psychological and cognitive might relate at an individual level.

This might offer a starting point: Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social
cognition (2nd ed.).New York, NY: McGraw Hill International Editions"