Education: Learning styles debunked
Summary of a new report criticizing the lack of validity and reliability in learning styles research
20 reasons why students should blog « On an e-journey with generation Y
A nice summary of reasons for students to blog. Even if you don't agree with everything (for example, the digital natives bit in #16), this is a good place to start answering the question.
Donald Clark Plan B: Amazing learning styles research
I agree with the commenters who suggested this post would have been better on April 1, but it's a nice test of information literacy and common sense for people to read it now. How many teachers, trainers, and administrators do you think you could fool with this fake research?
Mind Hacks: The Straight Dope on Learning Styles
Interesting perspective on learning style theories, arguing that they may be useful because they help teachers become more aware of how they're teaching, even if the research support for any given theory is lacking
Learning styles seem intuitively sensible. Having thought about learning styles helps teachers improve their teaching and also helps increase their confidence and motivation. But there is no strong evidence that any one theory of learning styles is the best, or most true, compared to the others. Learning style theories can be useful without being true, and it isn't clear that knowing the truth about the differences in how people learn will be immediately useful or produce a more useful theory of learning styles. This difference between truth and utility is a typical dilemma of psychology.
Using a learning style theory is great, but you lose a lot of flexibility and potential for change if you start to believe that the theory is based on proven facts about the way the world is, rather than just being a useful set of habits and suggestions which might, sometimes, help guide us through the maze of teaching and learning.
Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning
Book-length literature review on learning styles research, concluding that the usefulness of learning styles of pedagogy depends greatly on what model you use.
New link: https://crm.lsnlearning.org.uk/user/order.aspx?code=041543
Should we be using learning styles? What research has to say to practice
Long PDF (84 pages) on learning styles research and how it can--and should--influence pedagogy. Examines 13 learning style models and finds a lot of variety in relability, validity, and general usefulness of the models.
New link 6/29/12 http://www.arasite.org/RMdatabase/Coffield.pdf
YouTube - Learning Styles Don't Exist
A cognitive psychologist argues that learning styles, as the theory is generally understood, don't exist and aren't supported by research. He acknowledges that there are differences in visual and auditory memory, but says the research doesn't show that differentiating instruction based on learning styles actually has any effect.
Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction?
Examines what cognitive science actually tells us about different learning styles and argues that the best answer is to choose the modality that best suits the content rather than adapting to the student.