Lead Balloons, Stone Canoes, and Learning Styles
By Frank L. Greenagel
The concept of learning styles has gained considerable attention in recent years, but it hasn’t been a generative concept in e-learning. Most of the learning styles research has been in formal (classroom-based) education, which reinforces the idea that learning is basically an information transmission process. Other research in how people learn shows that most job-related proficiencies are learned outside the training room or seminar, and suggests that where the learning takes place and how it’s used is inextricably related to how adults learn. E-learning and blended learning practices ignore this phenomenon, and assume that everyone can learn from the information-transmission model, with the only variables being preparation, IQ, and motivation. The real payoff from the Internet is going to occur when we use it to enlarge and sustain learning communities that develop within an organization or among a cohort.
If you’re writing about how adults learn, you need to address the issue of learning styles. Even though, there’s little agreement about the definition of learning style or a unified theory on which research is based, the term is often bandied about. In fact, a recent search on Google turned up more than 413,000 references. I suspect what brought the concept out of the academic journals and into popular consciousness was Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, promulgated some twenty years ago. The argument goes: If there are multiple intelligences, which is an idea that the education establishment has enthusiastically embraced, then it follows that many competencies might be approached through something other than traditional instructional models of lecture, reading, memorization, and recitation.
Curiously, though, the concept of learning styles seems to have been of little interest to much of corporate training. For example, a Google search on “learning styles” and “corporate training” turned up less than 2400 references, and many of them appeared to be descriptors for specific products. Meanwhile, a search on “learning styles” and “e-learning” yielded almost 11,000 references—many of them from UK sources. Senge’s Fifth Discipline Fieldbook includes only two brief paragraphs on the term, and even Learning Circuit's E-Learning Glossary is guilty of this lack of attention. Indeed, ASTD's definition of e-learning competencies in ASTD Models for Learning Technologies offers several references to “understanding learning styles,” but much less detail than its enumeration of competencies in business knowledge, contracting, project management, cost analysis and ROI of distribution methods, and remote site coordination. So, one might reasonably infer that learning styles hasn’t been a significant generative concept in the e-learning industry.
Indeed, literature describing learning styles is rather confusing and contradictory. Those, including the present writer, not intimately engaged in learning theory enter the territory at some peril. Nevertheless, given the general popularity of the concept, one might expect any developer, purveyor, or consultant operating in the realm of e-learning to have a basic grasp of the concept and how it might be pertinent to the varieties of distance learning. To that end, I offer the barest summary here.
Definition
Let’s begin with definition of the concept of learning styles. The baseline definition posed in Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide says it is “an individual's preferred and consistent set of behaviors or approaches to learning.” This definition isn’t particularly helpful unless you know what the set of behaviors or approaches entails. For example, some teenagers maintain they can learn quite well in front of the TV while on the phone with a classmate, a style most parents view with some skepticism. But that is probably not the sort of behavior academic researchers had in mind.
Some of the learning styles research focuses on personality variables that determine whether a person is ready for self-directed learning, which should be of considerable interest to the e-learning community. Other research looks at differences in the learning styles of Western and non-Western cultures and differences between men and women. Another research study indicates that approximately 30 percent of [American] college students say they learned best by listening to a lecturer, another 30 percent say they would prefer to read and reflect on the material, and the remainder felt they learned unfamiliar topics in some other way—that listening and reading required greater effort to produce the same level of mastery compared to some other approach.
Some research also explores the relationship between achievement, which is largely measured by retention, and the expressed preference for the manner of presentation. Based on that, many have devised their own assessment tools and ways of categorizing learning styles. For example, one assessment includes the activist, reflector, theorist, and pragmatist styles. Another assessment sorts learning styles into direct, spirited, systematic, or considerate modes. Another theorist says there are only two styles: global or analytical, but that there are 21 other elements to determine an individual’s style. Little effort is made to reconcile the findings from one set of tools with those from any other. More important, much of the research was conducted within the context of secondary and post-secondary education, which is rarely representative of adult learning.
Learning styles focus on individual differences
I suspect that the major reason corporate learning has neglected to focus on learning styles is because they usually concentrate on individual differences. For the most part, the learning industry and many e-learning technologies are clearly focused, for all the rhetoric to the contrary, on highly-scalable means of delivery that rarely are adapted—or adaptable—to individual styles of learning. Even the current emphasis on learning objects and standards reinforces the perception that knowledge is somehow disembodied from individuals. Etienne Wenger explains in Communities:
If we believe, for instance, that knowledge consists of pieces of information explicitly stored in the brain, then it makes sense to package this information in well-designed units, to assemble prospective recipients of this information in a classroom where they are perfectly still and isolated from any distraction, and to deliver this information to them as succinctly and articulately as possible. . . . But if we believe that information stored in explicit ways is only a small part of knowing, and that knowing involves primarily active participation in social communities, then the traditional format does not look so productive.
From that perspective, a learning object that is well articulated and packaged should be deliverable to anyone, anywhere, and the only variables affecting learning outcomes are the pre-existing knowledge, IQ, and motivation of the learners. Stated that baldly, I doubt many e-learning developers would assent. The point is that much of e-learning isn’t individualized instruction; it’s Webcasts and electronic page-turners, without even a nod at contingency branching based on the learner’s experience.
A reconsideration of learning styles
Rather than expending additional effort examining how people learn in formal instruction, I propose that the industry should pay more attention to where they learn and the concept of communities of practice. The emphasis on classroom learning styles may have led many practitioners to expect that most forms of knowledge and competencies can only be acquired through formal instruction, and the underlying premise of most corporate training is that learning is the result of teaching. However, in Frames of Mind, Gardner takes a contrary position:
Outside of school settings, children acquire skills through observation and participation in the contexts in which these skills are customarily invoked. In contrast, in the standard classroom, teachers talk, often presenting material in abstract symbolic form and relying on books and diagrams in order to convey information.”
Consider how competencies in the corporate world are acquired. A generation ago, I was responsible for a department that trained several hundred typewriter and copier servicemen annually—they were all males in those years. Even a cursory look at the tasks that they needed to perform and how formal classroom training could teach those skills led to a radical change in training philosophy and methods. We accepted the fact that the best we could do was to prepare service reps to learn from their experiences in the field. In retrospect, that was a wise decision.
Similarly, in Communities of Practice, Wenger describes how learning occurred in a claims processing unit of a large insurance firm. There was classroom instruction, of course, but that was barely more than a prerequisite for introduction into the community of claims processors within the company. Competency was acquired not through the curriculum, but through “modified forms of participation that are structured to open the practice [of claims processing] to non-members [of the community].” Participation included processing claims, listening to discussions about particular claims, asking for help with a medical term or database field, and so forth.
If you had confronted those claims processors after a few months on the job and asked what their preferred learning style was, it’s likely that you would have drawn a blank stare. They knew their formal training was inadequate to prepare them for their work, but they might not have been able to articulate how they learned—except by processing claims. Much of their understanding was tacit; they didn’t know what they knew until they were called upon to use it.
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid call attention to another example of this kind of tacit learning in their book, The Social Life of Information, in which they relate some fascinating research about Xerox‘s technical (copier) service reps.
What looked quite clear and simple from above (i.e., to management) was much more opaque and confusing on the ground. Tasks were no longer so straightforward, and machines, despite their elegant circuit diagrams and diagnostic procedures, exhibited quite incoherent behaviors. Consequently, the information and training provided to the reps was inadequate for all but the most routine of the tasks they faced.
But the reps get together daily for breakfast, coffee, lunch, or at the end of the day, (an activity the corporation would have said did not add value).
At these meetings, while eating, playing cribbage, and engaging in what might seem like idle gossip, the reps talked work, and talked it continuously. They posed questions, raised problems, offered solutions, constructed answers, and discussed changes in their work, the machines, or customer relations. In this way, both directly and indirectly, they kept one another up to date with what they knew, what they learned, and what they did.
By participating in this community of practice, service reps picked up the kind of knowledge they needed to perform their job. This sort of learning model is commonly called situated learning, which posits that there’s no firm separation between what is learned and how it is learned and used.
By now, it’ should be clear that my intention is not to make an argument for more attention to learning styles. Frankly, my own view of learning styles is that although much of the research and theorizing is fascinating, it’s essentially a red herring—because so much of how people learn is (1) a function of where they are learning, and (2) dependent upon what competency they are trying to learn. Nearly 40 years ago, Robert Gagne sketched out the latter concept in his book Conditions of Learning, which maintains that different skills or competencies required different internal and external conditions.
The Internet's neglected promise
The ascendant practice today is an e-learning model built around a traditional classroom presentation—one that seems to equate information transfer with knowledge assimilation—highly scalable, but not individualized. On the other hand, there’s a good reason to believe that many competencies in the workplace—in lower level work and in the rarefied advanced physics and medical labs—are gained through participation in communities of practice. Is much of adult learning, therefore, simply, as Robert Frost put it, “hanging around until you’ve caught on?” Not quite. Observation (lurking, in online parlance) isn’t enough. There has to be what Lave and Wenger call legitimate peripheral participation in the work of the community for learning to happen.
If you will grant that premise, then the promise of Internet technologies lies in the ability to build and sustain communities, for in the interaction among members and the reciprocity of participation will emerge the tacit learning that is the basis of most competencies. The promise of the Internet lies less in the reach it affords—the scalability of Webcasts and textbooks saved as HTML—and more in the possibilities of multipoint communications that may help build communities of practice and other cohorts of learners.
What, then, is the salience of what is known about how people learn from formal instruction? Likely to remain of marginal significance compared to the importance of an understanding of what can be done to nurture the development of learning communities.
An understanding of where and how learning occurs ought to lead to a revision of most e-learning models. It’s not that hanging around is better than e-learning, or that a blended solution combines the best of live seminars and e-learning. The revision of e-learning models probably has to begin by acknowledging that information transmission isn’t the same thing as knowledge assimilation—a stream of information pumped through the Internet is more likely to result in a puddle of incomprehension than any real competency. We will have to acknowledge that a significant percent, perhaps even most learning, is going to develop among people, among community—as it has in the past. The real payoff from the Internet is going to come when we use it to enlarge and sustain those communities—not from extending the reach of information transmission.
The competencies required of the instructional designer and e-learning developer will have much less to do with articulating and packaging information and much more with ways of encouraging participation and building online communities of learners. Those communities will have in common the nature of their work—as coaches, fundraisers, programmers, and so forth—rather than their location or their employer. And the matter of their learning styles will be largely irrelevant because such communities, by their nature, encompass a variety of styles.
Frank Greenagel is managing director of Guided Learning Strategies; he can be reached at flg@guidedlearning.com. The article has been adapted from Greenagel and Lagay’s forthcoming book, Wired Seminars. Visit their websites, www.guidedlearning.com and www.wiredseminars.com.