Within the perspective of a student-centered approach it is important to consider that not all the students are the same. They have different cognitive abilities or, better, they are more familiar and find it easier to leverage some of their skills to acquire new knowledge and reuse it across the different abilities set by the Bloom’s taxonomy.
Honey and Mumford defined four categories of learners, which are characterized by behavioural characteristics that aim at distinguishing different styles of learning as well as the conditions that favour the acquisition of knowledge and the achievement of learning outcomes.
The four different learning styles are associated to four different profiles of learners: the Activist learner, the Reflector learner, the Theorist learner and the Pragmatist learner.
- Activist learners mostly acquire knowledge and skills through a learning by doing approach, with an active engagement in new activities and experiences, despite they get bored with implementation and longer-term consolidation.
- Reflector learners need to elaborate on what they observe which means that they do not necessarily need to experience in first person new situations and that potentially they mostly benefit from comparing different experiences before they draw definitive conclusions.
- Theorist learners have a natural preference towards more abstract concepts that describe the contents they need to learn, which they assemble into a rational pattern (e.g. a model) that they build with analysis and synthesis.
- Pragmatist learners mostly tend to acquire knowledge and skills if these have a direct and usable implication in the real world and in their own life: they want to check experimentally their applicability and their usefulness through direct practice
These four profiles are not descriptive of every learner. They should be interpreted as general characteristics that describe the four main ways of learning, while every individual has its own style, which could be a blend of the above ones. This also means that the educators have to plan their activities according to these four learning styles in order to be effective with their audience. In other words, the educational approach should be planned and designed so that every individual they are addressing has the opportunities to learn in an effective way, by means of the style he/she is more familiar with.
An educational approach that includes a variety of activities has, therefore, higher opportunities to enable the whole class to learn efficiently and effectively, as it would be impossible to compose classes with learners of just one type.
Moreover it will be extremely important to train the learners to start acquiring knowledge also with the learning styles they are less familiar with, so that these individuals can get the higher educational benefits in a wider variety of conditions and have higher chances of becoming life-long learners.
Sources
Honey, P. and Mumford, A. (1986), The Manual of Learning Styles, Peter Honey Associates
Mumford, A., & Honey, P. (1992), Questions and answers on learning styles questionnaire, Industrial and Commercial Training