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The Learning Styles Controversy — A “Neuromyth” or the Future of Individualized Education?
Simply defining the term learning style, as it turns out, is more difficult than it may seem.
The term “learning style” began to appear in the educational literature in the 1970s. Since that time, researchers and educators have attempted to determine both a standardized defining construct and a functional assessment instrument. The result has been an inundation of differing models and commercial measurements yielding questionable and inconclusive empirical results.
The terms learning style, cognitive style, and learning strategy are used interchangeably and imprecisely throughout. Keefe (1979) defines learning styles as the “composite of characteristic cognitive, affective, and physiological factors that serve as relatively stable indicators of how a learner perceives, interacts with, and responds to the learning environment” (p. 1). Keefe and Ferrell (1990) later stated that a learning style represented “a complex of related characteristics in which the whole is greater than its parts. Learning style is a gestalt combining internal and external operations derived from the individual’s neurobiology, personality and development, and reflected in learner behavior” (p. 57).
