learning styles and mutiple intelligences

image wikipedia

Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences  has a problematic history in teaching. For decades teachers have been told to adapt their teaching style to suit the audio, visual or kinesthetic preference of the learner in the belief that this will enhance their understanding. The belief has become deeply entrenched, almost a dogma in teaching. Yet I would suggest any dogma should be resisted, particularly in a profession that should be centred around critical thinking !  

The truth is that Gardner's theory has never been rigorously tested or proven to enhance understanding. At the most, it has been shown to help student engagement, and there is considerable evidence to show that actually students do not grow intellectually if they do not test their other learning preferences. The available evidence suggests all learning styles, if they exist, should be challenged by a variety of teaching methods, much as students should grow by trying and testing different skills.  Spend your school time avoiding listening because you don't do well with audio learning, and you never will be a decent listener. Gardner himself denied that his work should be interpreted so as to mean students should be taught according to their own individual learning style. Somehow his theory of multiple intelligences was adopted by the teaching profession to become a dogma around learning styles and how they should be catered to. Historically there has been a problematic disconnect between teaching and psychology, and psychology itself is undergoing a crisis as many of its theories fail the reproducability test of science rigour.

Ultimately perhaps all teachers should aim to incorporate a mix of teaching styles to challenge all students in all learning styles,  rather than differentiate according to Gardner's theory, or rather the interpretation of Gardner's theory. Gardner himself suggested teaching important material in multiple ways, ( again, where is the evidence for this ? ) yet confusingly also advocated  'indivisualising the teaching style '. Actually evidence suggests  differentiating according to learning style preference may have inadvertently contributed to a lack of challenge, and ultimately a lack of growth in many of today's students. Have we avoided student's weaknesses rather than try to rectify them ? If a student is a weak visual learner and has a preference for kinesthetic learning,  we should really be more concerned with rectifying their weakness rather than pandering to their preferences. We owe it to them.

This approach of pandering to student preference can be appealing because it raises engagement, a good thing in itself, and it appeals to the modern sense of the individual customer getting what they need. However like all teaching theories, it should have been subjected to much more rigorous scrutiny before it became accepted practice in the profession. In the case of learning styles, it seems an unproven theory of multiple intelligences was not only adopted by the teaching profession but even misunderstood and applied without evidence of effectiveness. In such an important profession, with limited resources, this is a practice which must change. Mounting evidence suggests the style of teaching should fit the subject ; e.g.  in French students should speak, read, and write, in Science they should hypothesise, observe and test, etc,

More reading here :  
http://steinhardtapps.es.its.nyu.edu/create/courses/2174/reading/Pashler_et_al_PSPI_9_3.pdf
link : http://steinhardtapps.es.its.nyu.edu/create/courses/2174/reading/Pashler_et_al_PSPI_9_3.pdf