Carl Dowse's List: Learning styles

• When he reviewed studies of learning styles, he found no scientific evidence backing up the idea. "We have not found evidence from a randomized control trial supporting any of these," he says, "and until such evidence exists, we don't recommend that they be used."

• “our search of the learning-styles literature has revealed only a few fragmentary and unconvincing pieces of evidence that meet this standard, and we therefore conclude that the literature fails to provide adequate support for apply in learning-style assessments in school settings.”

• The assumption underlying the approach taken here is that the way we teach should be adapted to the way learners from a particular community learn
• In East Asia, most students see knowledge as something to be transmitted by the teacher rather than discovered by the learners.
• closure-oriented style for most East Asian students. These closure-oriented students dislike ambiguity, uncertainty or fuzziness.
• Korean students insist that the teacher be the authority and are disturbed if this does not happen
• Another characteristically East Asian learning style is visual learning.
• lectures, conversations, and oral directions without any visual backup are very confusing and can be anxiety-producing
• concrete-sequential, analytic and field-independent styles
• They typically base judgement on logic and analysis rather than on feelings of others, the emotional climate and interpersonal values. Compared with American students, Japanese students, like most Asians, show greater reflection (Condon, 1984), as shown by the concern for precision and for not taking quick risk in conversation
• • Diagnosing learning styles and developing self-aware EFL learners 
  • Altering the teaching style to create teacher-student style matching 
  • Encouraging changes in students' behavior and fostering guided style-stretching 
  • Providing activities with different groupings 
• ffective matching between teaching style and learning style can only be achieved when teachers are, first of all, aware of their learners' needs, capacities, potentials and learning style preferences in meeting these needs.
• In all academic classrooms, no matter what the subject matter, there will be students with multiple learning styles and students with a variety of major, minor and negative learning styles. An effective means of accommodating these learning styles is for teachers to change their own styles and strategies and provide a variety of activities to meet the needs of different learning styles.

9 more annotations...