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be able to explore different perspectives on a topic, stretch each other’s skills and knowledge in different ways through scaffolding, and provide each other with useful feedback to facilitate your progress collaboratively. Individual Differences in Learning So far, we’ve thought about learning from the perspectives of behaviourist, cognitive, and social and developmental psychology. All of these approaches suggest that there are common influences on learning that apply to all of us. In this section, we are going to explore whether individual differences might influence our learning. The thorny issue of learning styles According to some educationalists, learners have been suggested to differ in terms of their personality traits, brain function, and preferred learning environment, meaning that they process information in different ways. Within this framework, students are said to have different ‘learning styles’. A multitude of different learning styles models have been proposed by different authors. One of the most popular models is the Visual Auditory Kinaesthetic (VAK) model, which proposes that learners are predisposed to prefer to learn using information presented through sight, hearing or physical touch (Barbe, Swassing & Milone, 1979). Peter Honey and Alan Mumford (1992) proposed an alternative model, suggesting that students had one of four different learning styles, which they called: Activist (people who learn by doing); Theorist (people who learn by analysing and organising information); Pragmatist (people who like to see how they can apply their knowledge in the real world); and Reflector (people who like to observe and think things through). The majority of learning styles models suggest that students learn best when they understand their own learning style, and when they are taught and encouraged to learn in a way that matches their style. This way of thinking about teaching and learning has become popular amongst teachers and education policy makers around the globe, with some requiring that teachers should teach students according to their preferred learning style. Have you ever tested your own learning style? What sort of learning did the test say was best for you? According to a critical review published by Coffield, Moseley, Hall and Ecclestone, in 2004, there were at least 71 known different learning styles theories. At the very least, this makes it challenging for students and teachers to know which model they should use to test individual learning styles, and to adapt learning materials towards. However, learning styles theory is not only disputed because of the number of models available; there is some considerable evidence suggesting that learning styles theory is inaccurate. In 2010, working with an A-level psychology teacher, Sarah Allcock, I carried out some research to find out more about whether teaching students differently according to their learning styles could help them to learn. One class of students was split into three groups, based on their classification as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners, whilst another class was split into three based on their classification as high, medium or low ability learners, according to their previous academic performance. All of the students were tested using a mock A-level examination paper, and were then taught the same psychological content from the syllabus, differentiated either by learning style or by ability, before being tested again to determine how much they had learned. The good news was that all of the students performed better on the second test than they had on the first, suggesting that they had learned about the topic, however they were taught. However, if differentiating by learning style really does facilitate learning, then you might expect that students in the class that was split according to visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic preferences, might have performed better on this test than their peers who had been differentiated by ability only. This was not the case, and we found that there was no benefit at all for the students whose learning style had been taken into account. Instead, we suggested that, rather than providing

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