ABSTRACT
There have been numerous attempts to classify and organize the basic ways in which cognitive or learning styles differ (see Curry, 2000; Grigorenko and Sternberg, 1995; Rayner, 2000; Riding and Cheema, 1991). Cassidy (2004) tabulates twenty-three approaches to cognitive and learning styles, each type being supported by a range of research articles and theoretical papers. A casual glance reveals that cognitive and learning styles are typically represented as polar opposites of a single dimension so that a person is described as field dependent or independent, reflective or impulsive, serialist or holist, a converger or a diverger, a leveller or a sharpener, a vebalizer or a visualizer and so on (for a comprehensive list of up to thirty bipolar dimensions see Coffield et al., 2004: 136). These varied approaches to cognitive style should not be seen as mutually exclusive, rather they support the reasonable expectation that people differ in their learning styles in a number of ways. Because of this it would be naive to expect that adult educators could systematically design and deliver a course to fit the learning style needs of their students. This chapter, in part, addresses the issue of how learning style information should be used in the adult classroom. However, this will be done in the context of describing and evaluating two dominant approaches to categorizing cognitive styles, the field dependence/independence dimension identified by Witkin, and the Learning Style Inventory developed by Kolb and Fry. These are arguably the two most influential theorists in the area: Desmedt andValcke (2004), in a study of the citation rates of learning and cognitive style literature from 1972 to 2004, found they were the most cited researchers. A more comprehensive
treatment of learning style models and instruments can be found in Cassidy (2004) and Coffield et al. (2004).
