ABSTRACT
The appeal of assessing learning styles is simple and intuitive: if we know how students learn best, then we can use this knowledge to improve their performance by matching teaching and learning styles. So why review them here? Because they too, through their assessments and labels, run the risk of creating the kind of learners we are – of ‘making up learners’. Once again, there is a pull towards the biological and ‘fixed’, although some approaches try to resist. Like Multiple and Emotional Intelligences, thousands of teachers and trainers have found them helpful, so it seems that something works. But is it for the reasons claimed? And how much confidence can we put in the assessments that generate these learner labels?
