Cognitive Learning Styles

As you read through the table, which shows just a fraction of the dozens of classification schemes that have been proposed, you'll probably think that many of the schemes sound at least plausible. How can we know which one is right, or if several of them are right?

Psychologists have a few ways to test these proposals. First, they try to show that cognitive style is stable within an individual. In other words, if I say you have a particular cognitive style, that style ought to be apparent in different situations and on different days; it should be a stable part of your cognitive makeup. Cognitive styles should also be consequential; that is, using one cognitive style or another ought to have implications for the important things we do. If I claim that some people think serially and other people think holistically, then these two types of people ought to differ in how they learn mathematics, for example, or history, or in how they understand literature. Finally, we have to be sure that a cognitive style is not really an ability measure. Remember, styles are supposed to represent biases in how we prefer to think; they are not supposed to be measures of how well we think.

This last point seems kind of obvious, but it has been an issue for some of the distinctions made in Table 1. For example, people who are more likely to evaluate something they see independently of the object's relationship to other objects are called field independent, whereas field dependent people tend to see an object in terms of its relationship to other things (Figure 2).

People are classified as field dependent or independent only on the basis of visual tests, which don't seem to be very cognitive. But it seems plausible that what's true of vision—that field-dependent people see relationships whereas field-independent people see individual details—may also be true for all sorts of cognitive tasks. That's a neat idea, but the problem is that field-independent people tend to outperform field-dependent people on most cognitive measures. Now, remember that field dependence is supposed to be a cognitive style, and that, on average, people with different styles are not supposed to differ in ability. The fact that they do implies that the tests shown in Figure 2 actually measure ability in some way rather than style, although we may not be sure what the mechanism is.

I've mentioned that a cognitive styles theory must have the following three features: it should consistently attribute to a person the same style, it should show that people with different styles think and learn differently, and it should show that people with different styles do not, on average, differ in ability. At this point there is not a theory that has these characteristics. That doesn't mean that cognitive styles don't exist—they certainly might; but after decades of trying, psychologists have not been able to find them. To get a better sense of how this research has gone, let's examine one theory more closely: the theory of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners.