Forget Learning Styles, Focus on Knowledge Types

The notion of learning styles came of age concurrently with the maturation of multimedia technology. At roughly the same time that educators were running with Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, concluding that teaching should be tailored to an individual child’s learning style, new technologies were making it ever easier to weave images, audio, video, animation, and interactive multimodal experiences. It was a symbiotic and mutually reinforcing coupling of technology and learning theory that explained and justified each other.

Unfortunately, the notion of learning styles has not stood up to closer inspection. Gardner, himself, has said that the theory of multiple intelligences does not lead to the existence of learning styles, and there is little evidence in the research literature that support the idea that tailoring instruction to learning a student’s particular learning style improves outcomes. Individuals may well have preferences for how they like to consume content. But even preferences are often contextual. Driving home in traffic one is likely to prefer to hear an article read aloud as a podcast. Once at home, however, the commuter may well prefer to read the article so they can more closely inspect the charts and graphs supporting the author’s arguments. More often than not, material conditions and environmental factors trump learner preferences.

Rather than learning styles, instructors and learning experience designers would do well to focus on knowledge types in the early stages of the planning, especially when the knowledge type informs a well thought out learning objectives. Knowledge types were a core component of Bloom’s original taxonomy, although they are often omitted from the many contemporary representations that focus on the hierarchical (the ubiquitous pyramid) nature of cognitive dimensions and the learner actions that reflect them. 

Robert Horn’s Information Mapping system for structured documentation is also based on knowledge types, as are other frameworks. Commonly cited knowledge types are Facts, Concepts, Principles, Processes, Procedures, and Structures. These types of knowledge can be described by their properties:

The properties that describe different knowledge types are important to consider when choosing the modality for representing them. Knowledge may be represented as written text, spoken text, static images, moving images, sounds, physical sensation, or a combination thereof. (These categories can be broken down further to distinguish, for example, graphs from diagrams among various image types.) As with knowledge types, these different modes of representations reflect their own varied properties:

Representational properties are not fixed (nor are the properties of knowledge types). They can be foregrounded or backgrounded by the context established by the properties of the particular knowledge type. They can and should also be combined to expand the utility each has in isolation (e.g., infographics). These qualifications notwithstanding, aligning the properties of knowledge types with the properties of representational modalities from the outset, as summarized in the table below, will help guide and optimize the design process.

It is important to note that a representational modality is not an instructional strategy. A lecture experienced via video is still a lecture. However, the properties of representational modalities can support, enhance, or dictate one instructional strategy over another. For example, video/animation facilitates direct observation of processes that take place in extremely short or long durations because of its temporal property, e.g., the ability the speed up very slow processes and slow down very fast ones. The ability for the learner to control and interact with the representations adds another dimension and greatly expands the designer’s pedagogical toolbox. The choice of modality, however, should not be based on unsubstantiated learning styles, but rather the underlying properties of the content to be learned.