They Call It Learning Style But It’s So Much More

The questions of how important a learner’s ‘learning style’ is for the learning outcome needs to be investigated for learning environments: (1) for a didactically flexible design and possibly for an adaptation to the individual learner and (2) for a differential evaluation of learning systems. Many dichotomies of learning styles have been investigated empirically. For several reasons, the implications for education systems are not straightforward, however: learning outcomes are influenced by many variables, some of which seems more relevant than learning styles. Learning styles in turn depend on variables such as learning situation and domain. As a conclusion we suggest an open learning environment that offers a variety of learning objects (LO) and can serve several learning strategies. This is in line with research on learning events and their balancing as well as with using ‘learning styles’ as a metaphor for facilitating communication between teachers and learners.