Learning Styles and Willingham's learning theory
Strength of Willingham's learning theory
- Willingham's approach is that all the concepts are drawn from scientific research and so his conclusions and recommendations are based on respected scientific research increasing their reliability. - specifically focused on applications to learning, and his criticism of the learning styles approach is that it does not better school performance, and instead he puts forward other concepts that will better school performance and are supported by scientific research; his research has external validity.
Kinaesthetic learners
- a person who prefers to learn through physical activities and direct experience rather than demonstrations and written texts.
Visualisers
- a person who prefers to process information in terms of pictures or diagrams and the inter-relationships between objects.
Verbalisers
- a person who prefers to process information through words and sounds.
Willingham's learning theory
- a strong critic of the learning styles approach - his approach is to look for evidence about study habits from scientifically sounds studies - argues that learning can be improved through the application of results from cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
self-regulation
- being able to control your behaviour - assessed by the marshmallow effect - young children who show a high ability to delay gratification later perform better in school.
Memory and Forgetting
- cognitive psychologists study memory and have produced a lot have evidence that can be applied to learning, such as: - using cues (associated cues help you remember information) - practicing retrieval rather than completely focusing on memorising.
Strength of Learning Styles
- encourages teachers to focus on how they teach which. leads to a more varied approach since traditional teaching styles had always focused too much verbal methods alone, and given the general agreement that a mixed approach is the best strategy for learning, the focus on different learning styles has been beneficial.
Neuroscience
- learning disorders such as dyslexia have been associated with poor function of specific areas of the brain (the pattern of brain waves in people with dyslexia is different from that of people without dyslexia) - If a specific pattern is linked with dyslexia, children would be able to receive appropriate help early on which benefit their progress.
Weakness of Learning Styles
- little evidence to suggest that learning styles work; Pasher et al reviewed many studies and found no support which challenges the claim that learning styles improve learning performance. - there are too many learning styles; Coffield et al identified 71 different learning styles which suggests that there are simply too many and they (coffield et al) concluded that the vast number of learning styles makes the concept unworkable.
Praise according to Willingham
- presses on how praise should be unexpected. - Based on the study by Lepper et al where they found that praise/rewards before undertaking a task led to reduced motivation in the future. - The performance of tasks should not depend on extrinsic rewards because that destroys your intrinsic motivation.
Weakness of Willingham's learning theory
- the diagnosis on the basis of the brain may not be possible as it is unlikely there will ever be a clear correspondence between certain kinds of activity in the brain and behaviours like dyslexia. Learning disorders are likely to have a number of causes rather than one source such as the poor functioning of an area of the brain and basing a diagnosis on one source isn't very reliable or specific, because everyone with that brain wave may not be dyslexic meaning that the diagnosis of a condition such as dyslexia is unlikely and may actually be misleading.
effect of learning styles
by matching teaching to a students' preferred way of learning should improve learning.
learning style
refers to a person's relatively consistent or preferred method of processing and remembering information.