Honey And Mumford's Learning Theory, Style And Environment

1.0 Learning Theory, Style and Environment

1.1 Learning Theory

We all have distinct ways of perceiving, organizing and retaining knowledge. Behaviours, attitude, environmental and development factors combine to facilitate our ability to learn in everyday situations. There is no principal definition of learning, merely different theories of understanding how the learning process works. There are four accepted key Learning Theories (Armstrong and Taylor 2014);

The Reinforcement Theory coveys the belief that we learn through experiencing events and evaluating the consequences or results of our actions. Should the result be positive, we can condition our behaviour to repeat similar actions and conversely should the consequences be adverse,

3) Reflectors are observers, cautious, knowledge based.

4) Pragmatists are experimenters, put ideas into action, problem solvers.

The basis of their theory was that learners are likely to be a combination of all four learning styles. Through their research, they found that the more mature the learner, the more likely they could adopt any of the four learning styles when appropriate. I believe, there are very strong similarities and little tangible difference between Kolb’s and Honey & Mumford’s learning styles. An ‘Activist’ as defined by Honey & Mumford could correspond and be described as ‘Accommodating’ within Kolb’s model. Similarly, a Reflector style could correspond to Diverging, Theorist to Assimilating and Pragmatist to Converging.

Honey & Mumford’s Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ) asks a series of questions on preferences, the results culminating in plotting preferences on four axes of a graph with the four learning styles on each axis. Ultimately a kite diagram is generated to visualise the scale of preference towards a particular learning style, if any.

2.3 VARK Learning Style

This is an interesting concept. Whilst a learner may have a preference for a more extroverted style of information collection and processing, which theoretically could be a practical, visual and verbal; their preferred learning style could still be to self-study through discretionary learning (Armstrong and Taylor 2014). This resonates with me highly as I would describe by learning style to process and retain information as being solitary, however I accept information collection and input from a range of styles such as linguistic, interpersonal and visual. Utilising Gardner’s MI test is less likely to produce distorting results, as it considers multiple modality of learning styles through simple reflective