Learning Style

Theories Gardner’s
Carl Jung Kolb’s “Multiple Felder-
VAK/VARK
Myers-Briggs ELT Intelligences Silverman
”
Carl Gustave Jung
Katherine Cook Walter Burke Barbe Richard Felder
David Kolb Howard Gardner
Briggs Neil D. Fleming Linda Silverman
Isabel Briggs Myers

1979 1983 1988

1913 1974 1995 1991
1987 1999 1997
1921 2011
1992 2016 2002

Intelligence Receive +
Personality Experience Strategy
s Process
1913 Carl Gustave Jung gave a talk on psychological types in
analytical psychology at the Fourth International Psychoanalytical
Congress in Munich.
1917 Katherine Cook Briggs identifies 4 main personality
types.

1921 Jung published Psychological Types

1923 Psychological Types was translated to English and published

in London and NY. Briggs read the work of Carl Jung and
introduced it to her daughter.
In 1945, Katherine and Isabel, with the help of Lyman Briggs, ran
the first assessment on George Washington Medical School
students.

1962 MBTI is added to ETS’s tests and has been taken by 50 million
people since.
 2011
1970s
1974 The Kolb Learning
David Kolb and Ron 1971
Kolb’s Learning Toward an Applied Style Inventory 4.0
Fry developed the
Style Inventory was Theory of is the latest
Experiential
published. Experiential revision. By Prof.
Learning Model
Learning David and Dr. Alice
(ELM)
Kolb
1979
Walter Burke Barbe and colleagues proposed three
learning modalities (often identified by the acronym
VAK)

1987
• Neil Fleming expanded VAK by dividing visual mode into Visual
(pictures, graphs, colors, symbols) and Read/Write (printed info) thus
creating VARK.

1992
The article that launched VARK: Fleming, N.D. & Mills, C.
(1992). Not Another Inventory, Rather a Catalyst for
Reflection.

Neil D. Fleming + Coleen E. Mills

• Divided between secondary, teacher education and university (Lincoln
University, New Zealand).
 Howard Gardner

1983 – Published “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple

Intelligences”. 

1995 – He added naturalistic intelligence

1999 – He added existential intelligence

2016 – He mentioned considering adding teaching-pedagogical

intelligence.
 Richard Felder + Linda
Silverman

1988 – Richard Felder teamed up with educational psychologist Dr. Linda

Silverman to write an article called "Learning and Teaching Styles in
Engineering Education."

1991 Index of Learning Styles (ILS) by Richard Felder and Barbara

Soloman of North Carolina State University.

1997 Soft copy version of the instrument was placed on the World
Wide Web.

2002 – Deletion of the inductive/deductive dimension and change of the

visual/auditory dimension to the visual/verbal dimension
Timeline of Learning Style Theories
Deletion of the inductive/deductive dimension
I have come to believe that while induction and deduction are indeed different
learning preferences and different teaching approaches, the “best” method of
teaching—at least below the graduate school level—is induction, whether it be
called problem-based learning, discovery learning, inquiry learning, or some
variation on those themes. On the other hand, the traditional college teaching
method is deduction, starting with "fundamentals" and proceeding to applications.
The problem with inductive presentation is that it isn't concise and prescriptive—you
have to take a thorny problem or a collection of observations or data and try to make
sense of it. Many or most students would say that they prefer deductive
presentation—“Just tell me exactly what I need to know for the test, not one word
more or less.” (My speculation in the paper that more students would prefer
induction was refuted by additional sampling.)
I don't want instructors to be able to determine somehow that their students prefer
deductive presentation and use that result to justify continuing to use the traditional
but less effective lecture paradigm in their courses and curricula. I have therefore
omitted this dimension from the model.
Change of the visual/auditory dimension to the visual/verbal
dimension
“Visual” information clearly includes pictures, diagrams, charts, plots, animations, etc., and
“auditory” information clearly includes spoken words and other sounds. The one medium of
information transmission that is not clear is written prose. It is perceived visually and so
obviously cannot be categorized as auditory, but it is also a mistake to lump it into the visual
category as though it were equivalent to a picture in transmitting information. Cognitive
scientists have established that our brains generally convert written words into their spoken
equivalents and process them in the same way that they process spoken words. Written
words are therefore not equivalent to real visual information: to a visual learner, a picture is
truly worth a thousand words, whether they are spoken or written. Making the learning style
pair visual and verbal solves this problem by permitting spoken and written words to be
included in the same category (verbal).

For more details about the cognition studies that led to this conclusion, see R.M. Felder and E.R. Henriques, “Learning and Teaching Styles in Foreign and Second Language Education,” Foreign
Language Annals, 28 (1), 21–31 (1995). <http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/FLAnnals.pdf>.