Hello Tom:

You say:  "It is not even certain that a learning style stays the same from 
the beginning of a course to the end of the course."

If you are interested, they don't stay the same and are not expected to. 
One of the points to understanding (1) a range of learning styles and (2) a 
single student's learning style, is to teach them **FIRST through their own 
learning style,** while then helping them expand to incorporate other styles 
in the process, thereby, over time, expanding the students ability to learn 
across a range of styles.

But knowing the given learning style of one student who enters a classroom 
enables a teacher to ameliorate fear and to give them the attention they 
need, to "know where they are at" in their immediate needs, to help them 
begin by loving learning, and to go from there.

Most if not all teachers know how quickly a student can be turned off to 
learning if they get lost, for instance, in the method of direct 
instruction; when they are not ready for that kind of teaching; when they do 
not, and sometimes developmentally cannot, respond to it; and when they 
begin by feeling that school is not for them, while others seem to zoom 
ahead.

As an aside,  my guess is that if many of our adult education students had 
this kind of training available early on, they wouldn't need adult education 
today?

Regards,

Catherine King
Adjunct Instructor
Department of Education
National University
San Diego, CA

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <tsticht at znet.com>
To: <professionaldevelopment at nifl.gov>
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 4:37 PM
Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 1926] Debunking Multiple Intelligences 
andLearning Styles



> Colleagues: I have followed discussions on several NIFL-sponsored 

> discussion

> lists recently in which people have advocated teaching to learning styles 

> or

> to multiple intelligences. This is strange to me given that the federal

> government has argued for the use of evidence-based, scientifically

> validated approaches to adult literacy education (see the What Works

> Clearinghouse sponsored by the U.S Department of Education). But by even

> loose standards of evidence, there is no credible evidence to support

> teaching to a person's learning style, preferred learning modality (i.e.,

> visual, auditory, kinesthetic), multiple intelligences, right brain-left

> brain preference, or other very malformed ideas. Indeed, there are a wide

> variety of so-called learning styles (impusive vs reflective; introverted

> vs extroverted; field dependent vs field dependent and on and on)and no

> research on how a teacher can take all of them into account everyday and

> over weeks and months. It is not even certain that a learning style stays

> the same from the beginning of a course to the end of the course. While I

> understand the desire of the NIFL to promote useful discussions among 

> adult

> literacy educators, with only a minimum of censorship, it strikes me as

> counter productive to advocate for evidence-based, scientifically 

> validated

> teaching while also permitting the advertisement of commercial workshops

> that are based on poorly formed concepts and devoid of empirical evidence

> for the efficacy of such ideas and the practices based on them. Tom Sticht

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