learning styles
All learners are different, and all rising to a great place, as Francis Bacon tells us, is by a winding
stair.1
Consider the story of Bruce Hendry, born in 1942, raised
on the banks of the Mississippi north of Minneapolis by a
machinist and a homemaker, just another American kid with
skinned knees and fi re in the belly to get rich. When we talk
about self- made men, the story often sounds familiar. This is
not that story. Bruce Hendry is self- made, but the story is in
the winding stair, how he found his way, and what it helps us
understand about differences in how people learn.
The idea that individuals have distinct learning styles has
been around long enough to become part of the folklore of
educational practice and an integral part of how many people
perceive themselves. The underlying premise says that people
receive and pro cess new information differently: for example,
6
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Make It Stick ê 132
some learn better from visual materials, and others learn better
from written text or auditory materials. Moreover, the theory
holds that people who receive instruction in a manner that is
not matched to their learning style are at a disadvantage for
learning.
In this chapter, we acknowledge that everyone has learning
preferences, but we are not persuaded that you learn better
when the manner of instruction fi ts those preferences. Yet there
are other kinds of differences in how people learn that do
matter. First, the story of Bruce, to help frame our argument.
Active Learning from the Get- Go
Part of the secret to Bruce is his sense, from the earliest age, of
being the one in charge of Bruce. When he was two his mother,
Doris, told him he couldn’t cross the street because a car might
hit him. Every day, Bruce crossed the street, and every day Doris gave him a spanking. “He was born aggressive,” Doris told
friends.
At eight he bought a ball of string at a garage sale for a
dime, cut it up, and sold the pieces for a nickel each. At ten he
got a paper route. At eleven he added caddying. At twelve he
stuffed his pocket with $30 in savings, sneaked out of his bedroom window before dawn with an empty suitcase, and hitchhiked 255 miles to Aberdeen, South Dakota. He stocked up
on Black Cats, cherry bombs, and roman candles, illegal in
Minnesota, and hitched home before supper. Over the next
week, Doris couldn’t fi gure out why all the paperboys were
dropping by the house for a few minutes and leaving. Bruce
had struck gold, but the paper route supervisor found out and
tipped off Bruce Se nior. The father told the son if he ever did
it again he’d get the licking of his life. Bruce repeated the buying trip the following summer and got the promised licking.
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 133
“It was worth it,” he says.2 He was thirteen, and he had
learned a lesson about high demand and short supply.
The way Bruce fi gured, rich people were probably no
smarter than he was, they just had knowledge he lacked.
Looking at how he went after the knowledge he sought will
illustrate some of the learning differences that matter. One,
of course, is taking charge of your own education, a habit
with Bruce from age two that he has exhibited through the
years with remarkable per sis tence. There are other signal
behaviors. As he throws himself into one scheme after another, he draws lessons that improve his focus and judgment.
He knits what he learns into mental models of investing, which
he then uses to size up more complex opportunities and fi nd
his way through the weeds, plucking the telling details from
masses of irrelevant information to reach the payoff at the
end. These behaviors are what psychologists call “rule learning” and “structure building.” People who as a matter of habit
extract underlying principles or rules from new experiences
are more successful learners than those who take their experiences at face value, failing to infer lessons that can be applied
later in similar situations. Likewise, people who single out
salient concepts from the less important information they
encounter in new material and who link these key ideas into a
mental structure are more successful learners than those who
cannot separate wheat from chaff and understand how the
wheat is made into fl our.
When he was barely a teenager, Bruce saw a fl yer advertising
wooded lots on a lake in central Minnesota. Advised that no
one ever lost money on real estate, he bought one. Over four
subsequent summers, with occasional help from his dad, he
built a house on it, confronting each step in the pro cess one at
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a time, fi guring it out for himself or fi nding someone to show
him how. To dig the basement, he borrowed a trailer and
hooked it up to his ’49 Hudson. He paid 50 cents for every
load his friends excavated, shovel by shovel, and then charged
the own er of a nearby lot that needed fi ll a dollar for it. He
learned how to lay block from a friend whose father was in
the cement business and then laid himself a foundation. He
learned how to frame the walls from the salesman at the lumber yard. He plumbed the house and wired it the same way, a
wide- eyed kid asking around how you do that sort of thing.
“The electrical inspector disapproved it,” Bruce recalls. “At
the time, I fi gured it was because they wanted a union guy to
do it, so I popped for a union guy to come up from the Cities
and redo all my wiring. Looking back, I’m sure what I had
done was totally dangerous.”
He was nineteen and a university student the summer he
traded the house for the down payment on a fourplex in Minneapolis. It was a simple premise: four apartments would generate four checks in the mail, month in and month out. Soon,
besides his studies at university, he was managing the rental
property, paying on the mortgage, answering midnight calls
over broken plumbing, raising rents and losing tenants, trying
to fi ll vacant units, and pouring in more money. He had learned
how to parlay a vacant lot into a house, and a house into an
apartment complex, but in the end the lesson proved a sour
one, yielding more headache than reward. He sold the fourplex and swore off real estate for the next two de cades.
Out of college, Bruce went to work for Kodak as a microfi lm salesman. In his third year, he was one of fi ve top salesmen in the country. That was the year he found out how
much his branch manager was making: less than Bruce made
as a salesman, if he factored in his company car and expense
account. It pays better to be a rainmaker than a manager:
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 135
another lesson learned, another step up Bruce’s winding stair.
He quit to join a brokerage fi rm and sell stocks.
From this new vantage point, more lessons: “If I brought a
dollar into the fi rm in trading commissions, half went to the
fi rm and half of the remaining half went to the IRS. To make
real money, I had to focus more on investing my own money
and less on making sales commissions.” Oops, another lesson:
investing in stocks is risky. He lost as much investing his own
money as he earned in commissions selling investments to
his clients. “You have no control of the down side. If a stock
drops 50 percent, it has to go up by 100 percent just to break
even. A hundred percent is a lot harder to make than fi fty is to
lose!” More knowledge banked. He bided his time, casting his
eyes about for the insight he was after.
Enter Sam Leppla.
As Bruce tells it, Leppla was just a guy who roamed the
Minneapolis skyways in those days, from one investment fi rm
to another, talking deals and giving advice. One day he told
Bruce about some bonds in a distressed company that were
selling for 22 cents on the dollar. “There were twenty- two
points of unpaid back interest on these bonds,” Bruce recalls,
“so when the company came out of bankruptcy, you’d collect
the back interest— in other words, 100 percent of your investment cost— and you’d still own a paying bond.” It amounted
to free money. “I didn’t buy any,” Bruce says. “But I watched
it, and it worked out exactly like Sam predicted. So, I called
him up and said, ‘Can you come down and tell me what you’re
doing?’ ”
Leppla taught Bruce a more complex understanding of the
relationships between price, supply, demand, and value than
he’d learned from a suitcase full of fi reworks. Leppla’s modus
operandi was drawn from the following precept. When a company runs into trouble, the fi rst claim on its assets belongs not
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to its own ers, the shareholders, but to its creditors: the suppliers and bondholders. There’s a pecking order to bonds. Those
bonds paid fi rst are called se nior bonds. Any residual assets
after the se nior bonds are paid go to pay off the ju nior bonds.
Ju nior bonds in a troubled company get cheap if investors
fear there won’t be enough assets left over to cover their value,
but investors’ fear, laziness, and ignorance can depress bond
prices far below the worth of the underlying assets. If you can
ascertain that actual worth and you know the price of the
bonds, you can invest with very little risk.
Here was the kind of knowledge Bruce had been seeking.
Florida real estate investment trusts were distressed at the
time, so Sam and Bruce started looking into those, buying
where they could see that the fi re- sale prices signifi cantly discounted the underlying values. “We’d buy these for 5 dollars
and sell them for 50. Everything we bought made money.”
They had a good run, but market prices caught up with values,
and soon they were in need of another idea.
At the time, eastern railroads were going bankrupt, and the
federal government was buying their assets to form Conrail
and Amtrak. As Bruce tells it, “One day Sam said, ‘Railroads
go bankrupt every fi fty years and no one knows anything about
them. They are real complicated and they take years to work
out.’ So we found a guy who knew about railroads. Barney
Donahue. Barney was an ex– IRS agent and a railroad buff. If
you’ve ever met a real railroad buff, they think it, they breathe
it, they can tell you the weight of the track and they can tell
you the numbers on the engines. He was one of those guys.”
A central tenet of their investment model was to discover
more than other investors knew about residual assets and the
order in which the bonds were to be honored. Armed with the
right knowledge, they could cherry- pick the underpriced junior bonds most likely to be paid off. Donahue checked out
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the different railroads and decided that the best one to invest
in was the Erie Lackawanna, because it had the most modern
equipment when it fi led for bankruptcy. Hendry, Leppla, and
Donahue dived in for a closer look. They traveled the entire
length of the Erie’s track to check its condition. They counted
the equipment that remained, looked at its condition, and
checked in Moody’s transportation manuals to calculate values. “You just do the arithmetic: What’s an engine worth?
A boxcar? A mile of track?” The Erie had issued fi fteen different bonds over its 150 years in operation, and the value of each
bond was dependent in part on where it stood in se niority
compared to the others. Bruce’s research turned up a little
document in which the fi nancial institutions had agreed to the
sequence in which bonds were to be paid off when the assets
were liquidated. With a fi x on the value of the company’s assets, liabilities, and the bond structure, they knew what each
class of bonds was worth. Bondholders who hadn’t done this
homework were in the dark. Ju nior bonds were selling at
steeply discounted prices because they were so far down the
food chain that investors doubted they would ever see their
money. Bruce’s calculations suggested otherwise, and he was
buying.
It’s a longer story than we have space to tell. A railroad
bankruptcy is an astonishingly convoluted affair. Bruce committed himself to understanding the entirety of the pro cess
better than anybody else. Then he knocked on doors, challenged the good- old- boys’ power structure that was managing the proceedings, and eventually succeeded in getting appointed by the courts to chair the committee that represented
the bondholders’ interests in the bankruptcy pro cess. When
the Erie came out of bankruptcy two years later, he was made
chairman and CEO of the company. He hired Barney Donahue to run it. Hendry, Donahue, and the board guided the
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surviving corporation through the remaining lawsuits, and
when the dust settled, Bruce’s bonds paid twice face value,
twenty times what he paid for some of the ju nior bonds he
had purchased.
The Erie Lackawanna, with all its complexity and David
versus Goliath qualities, was just the kind of mess that became Bruce Hendry’s bread and butter: fi nding a company in
trouble, burrowing into its assets and liabilities, reading the
fi ne print on credit obligations, looking at its industry and
where things are headed, understanding the litigation pro cess,
and wading into it armed with a pretty good idea of how
things were going to play out.
There are stories of other remarkable conquests. He took
control of Kaiser Steel, staved off its liquidation, guided it
out of bankruptcy as CEO, and was awarded 2 percent ownership of the new corporation. He interceded in the failure of
First RepublicBank of Texas and came out the other side with
a 600 percent return on some of his fi rst investments in the
company. When manufacturers stopped making railroad boxcars because they were in oversupply, Bruce bought a thousand of the last ones built, collected 20 percent on his investment from lease contracts that the railroads were bound to
honor, and then sold the cars a year later when they were in
short supply and fetching a handsome price. The story of Hendry’s rise is both familiar and par tic u lar; familiar in the nature of the quest and par tic u lar in the ways Bruce has “gone
to school” on his ventures, building his own set of rules for
what makes an investment opportunity attractive, stitching the
rules into a template, and then fi nding new and different ways
to apply it.
When he is asked how he accounts for his success, the lessons he cites are deceptively simple: go where the competition
isn’t, dig deep, ask the right questions, see the big picture, take
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 139
risks, be honest. But these explanations aren’t very satisfying.
Behind them is a more interesting story, the one we infer from
reading between the lines: how he fi gured out what knowledge he needed and how he then went after it; how early setbacks helped seed the skills of shrewder judgment; and how
he developed a nose for value where others can only smell
trouble. His gift for detecting value seems uncanny. His stories bring to mind the kid who, waking up on his fourth birthday to fi nd a big pile of manure in the yard, dances around it
crying, “I’m pretty sure there’s a pony in there somewhere!”
All people are different, a truism we quickly discern as
children, comparing ourselves to siblings. It’s evident in grade
school, on the sports fi eld, in the boardroom. Even if we shared
Bruce Hendry’s desire and determination, even if we took his
pointers to heart, how many of us would learn the art of knowing which pile had a pony in it? As the story of Bruce makes
clear, some learning differences matter more than others. But
which differences? That’s what we’ll explore in the rest of this
chapter.
One difference that appears to matter a lot is how you see
yourself and your abilities.
As the maxim goes, “Whether you think you can or you
think you can’t, you’re right.” The work of Carol Dweck, described in Chapter 7, goes a long way toward validating this
sentiment. So does a Fortune article of a few years ago that tells
of a seeming contradiction, the stories of people with dyslexia
who have become high achievers in business and other fi elds
despite their learning disabilities. Richard Branson, of Virgin
Rec ords and Virgin Atlantic Airways, quit school at sixteen to
start and run businesses now worth billions; Diane Swonk is
one of the top economic forecasters in the United States; Craig
Make It Stick ê 140
McCaw is a pioneer of the cellular phone industry; Paul Orfalea founded Kinko’s. These achievers and others, when asked,
told their stories of overcoming adversity. All had trouble in
school and with the accepted methods of learning, most were
mislabeled low IQ, some were held back or shunted into
classes for the mentally retarded, and nearly all were supported by parents, tutors, and mentors who believed in them.
Branson recalled, “At some point, I think I decided that being
dyslexic was better than being stupid.” There, in a phrase,
Branson’s personal narrative of exceptionalism.3
The stories we create to understand ourselves become the
narratives of our lives, explaining the accidents and choices
that have brought us where we are: what I’m good at, what I
care about most, and where I’m headed. If you’re among the
last kids standing on the sidelines as the softball teams are
chosen up, the way you understand your place in the world
likely changes a little, shaping your sense of ability and the
subsequent paths you take.
What you tell yourself about your ability plays a part in
shaping the ways you learn and perform– how hard you apply
yourself, for example, or your tolerance for risk- taking and
your willingness to persevere in the face of diffi culty. But differences in skills, and your ability to convert new knowledge
into building blocks for further learning, also shape your routes
to success. Your fi nesse at softball, for example, depends on a
constellation of different skills, like your ability to hit the ball,
run the bases, and fi eld and throw the ball. Moreover, skill on
the playing fi eld is not a prerequisite for becoming a star in
the sport in a different capacity. Many of the best managers
and coaches in pro sports were mediocre or poor players but
happen to be exceptional students of their games. Although
Tony LaRussa’s career as a baseball player was short and undistinguished, he went on to manage ball teams with remark-
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 141
able success. When he retired, having chalked up six American and National League championships and three World
Series titles, he was hailed as one of the greatest managers of
all time.
Each of us has a large basket of resources in the form of
aptitudes, prior knowledge, intelligence, interests, and sense
of personal empowerment that shape how we learn and how
we overcome our shortcomings. Some of these differences
matter a lot— for example, our ability to abstract underlying
principles from new experiences and to convert new knowledge into mental structures. Other differences we may think
count for a lot, for example having a verbal or visual learning
style, actually don’t.
On any list of differences that matter most for learning, the
level of language fl uency and reading ability will be at or near
the top. While some kinds of diffi culties that require increased
cognitive effort can strengthen learning, not all diffi culties we
face have that effect. If the additional effort required to overcome the defi cit does not contribute to more robust learning,
it’s not desirable. An example is the poor reader who cannot
hold onto the thread of a text while deciphering individual
words in a sentence. This is the case with dyslexia, and while
dyslexia is not the only cause of reading diffi culties, it is one
of the most common, estimated to affect some 15 percent of
the population. It results from anomalous neural development during pregnancy that interferes with the ability to read
by disrupting the brain’s capacity to link letters to the sounds
they make, which is essential for word recognition. People
don’t get over dyslexia, but with help they can learn to work
with and around the problems it poses. The most successful
programs emphasize practice at manipulating phonemes,
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building vocabulary, increasing comprehension, and improving fl uency of reading. Neurologists and psychologists emphasize the importance of diagnosing dyslexia early and working
with children before the third grade while the brain is still
quite plastic and potentially more malleable, enabling the rerouting of neural circuits.
Dyslexia is far more common among prison inmates than
the general population, as a result of a series of bad turns that
often begin when children who can’t read fall into a pattern
of failure in school and develop low self- esteem. Some of
them turn to bullying or other forms of antisocial behavior to
compensate, and this strategy, if left unaddressed, can escalate
into criminality.
While it is diffi cult for learners with dyslexia to gain essential reading skills and this disadvantage can create a constellation of other learning diffi culties, the high achievers interviewed for the Fortune article argue that some people with
dyslexia seem to possess, or to develop, a greater capacity for
creativity and problem solving, whether as a result of their
neural wiring or the necessity they face to fi nd ways to compensate for their disability. To succeed, many of those interviewed reported that they had to learn at an early age how to
grasp the big picture rather than struggling to decipher the
component parts, how to think outside the box, how to act
strategically, and how to manage risk taking— skills of necessity that, once learned, gave them a decided leg up later in
their careers. Some of these skills may indeed have a neurological basis. Experiments by Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that individuals with dyslexia do poorly at interpreting information
in their visual fi eld of focus when compared to those without
dyslexia. However, they signifi cantly outperform others in their
ability to interpret information from their peripheral vision,
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 143
suggesting that a superior ability to grasp the big picture
might have its origins in the brain’s synaptic wiring.4
There’s an enormous body of literature on dyslexia, which
we won’t delve into here beyond acknowledging that some
neurological differences can count for a lot in how we learn,
and for some subset of these individuals, a combination of
high motivation, focused and sustained personal support, and
compensating skills or “intelligences” have enabled them to
thrive.
Belief in the learning styles credo is pervasive. Assessing students’ learning styles has been recommended at all levels of
education, and teachers are urged to offer classroom material
in many different ways so that each student can take it in the
way he or she is best equipped to learn it. Learning styles
theory has taken root in management development, as well as
in vocational and professional settings, including the training
of military pi lots, health care workers, municipal police, and
beyond. A report on a 2004 survey conducted for Britain’s
Learning and Skills Research Centre compares more than seventy distinct learning styles theories currently being offered in
the marketplace, each with its companion assessment instruments to diagnose a person’s par tic u lar style. The report’s authors characterize the purveyors of these instruments as an
industry bedev iled by vested interests that tout “a bedlam of
contradictory claims” and express concerns about the temptation to classify, label, and ste reo type individuals. The authors relate an incident at a conference where a student who
had completed an assessment instrument reported back: “I
learned that I was a low auditory, kinesthetic learner. So
there’s no point in me reading a book or listening to anyone
for more than a few minutes.”5 The wrongheadedness of this
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conclusion is manifold. It’s not supported by science, and it
instills a corrosive, misguided sense of diminished potential.
Notwithstanding the sheer number and variety of learning
styles models, if you narrow the fi eld to those that are most
widely accepted you still fail to fi nd a consistent theoretical
pattern. An approach called VARK, advocated by Neil Fleming, differentiates people according to whether they prefer to
learn through experiences that are primarily visual, auditory,
reading, or kinesthetic (i.e., moving, touching, and active exploration). According to Fleming, VARK describes only one
aspect of a person’s learning style, which in its entirety consists
of eigh teen different dimensions, including preferences in temperature, light, food intake, biorhythms, and working with
others versus working alone.
Other learning styles theories and materials are based on
rather different dimensions. One commonly used inventory,
based on the work of Kenneth Dunn and Rita Dunn, assesses
six different aspects of an individual’s learning style: environmental, emotional, so cio log i cal, perceptual, physiological, and
psychological. Still other models assess styles along such dimensions as these:
• Concrete versus abstract styles of perceiving
• Active experimentation versus refl ective observation
modes of pro cessing
• Random versus sequential styles of or ga niz ing
The Honey and Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire,
which is pop u lar in managerial settings, helps employees determine whether their styles are predominantly “activist,” “refl ector,” “theorist,” or “pragmatist” and to improve in the areas
where they score low so as to become more versatile learners.
The simple fact that different theories embrace such wildly
discrepant dimensions gives cause for concern about their
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 145
scientifi c underpinnings. While it’s true that most all of us
have a decided preference for how we like to learn new material, the premise behind learning styles is that we learn better
when the mode of pre sen ta tion matches the par tic u lar style in
which an individual is best able to learn. That is the critical
claim.
In 2008 the cognitive psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark
McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Bob Bjork were commissioned
to conduct a review to determine whether this critical claim is
supported by scientifi c evidence. The team set out to answer
two questions. First, what forms of evidence are needed for
institutions to justify basing their instructional styles on assessments of students’ or employees’ learning styles? For the results
to be credible, the team determined that a study would need
to have several attributes. Initially, students must be divided
into groups according to their learning styles. Then they must
be randomly assigned to different classrooms teaching the
same material but offering it through different instructional
methods. Afterward, all the students must take the same test.
The test must show that students with a par tic u lar learning
style (e.g., visual learners) did the best when they received instruction in their own learning style (visual) relative to instruction in a different style (auditory); in addition, the other types
of learners must be shown to profi t more from their style of
instruction than another style (auditory learners learning better from auditory than from visual pre sen ta tion).
The second question the team asked was whether this kind
of evidence existed. The answer was no. They found very few
studies designed to be capable of testing the validity of learning styles theory in education, and of those, they found that
virtually none validate it and several fl atly contradict it. Moreover, their review showed that it is more important that the
mode of instruction match the nature of the subject being
Make It Stick ê 146
taught: visual instruction for geometry and geography, verbal
instruction for poetry, and so on. When instructional style
matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better,
regardless of their differing preferences for how the material
is taught.
The fact that the evidence is not there to validate learning
styles theory doesn’t mean that all theories are wrong. Learning
styles theories take many forms. Some may be valid. But if so,
we can’t know which: because the number of rigorous studies
is extremely small, the research base does not exist to answer
the question. On the basis of their fi ndings, Pashler and his colleagues argued that the evidence currently available does not
justify the huge investment of time and money that would be
needed to assess students and restructure instruction around
learning styles. Until such evidence is produced, it makes more
sense to emphasize the instructional techniques, like those outlined in this book, that have been validated by research as benefi ting learners regardless of their style preferences.6
Successful Intelligence
Intelligence is a learning difference that we do know matters,
but what exactly is it? Every human society has a concept that
corresponds to the idea of intelligence in our culture. The
problem of how to defi ne and mea sure intelligence in a way
that accounts for people’s intellectual horse power and provides a fair indicator of their potential has been with us for
over a hundred years, with psychologists trying to mea sure
this construct since early in the twentieth century. Psychologists today generally accept that individuals possess at least
two kinds of intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to
reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold informa-
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 147
tion in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the
procedures or mental models one has developed from past
learning and experience. Together, these two kinds of intelligence enable us to learn, reason, and solve problems.7
Traditionally, IQ tests have been used to mea sure individuals’ logical and verbal potential. These tests assign an Intelligence Quotient, which denotes the ratio of mental age to
physical age, times 100. That is, an eight- year- old who can
solve problems on a test that most ten- year- olds can solve has
an IQ of 125 (10 divided by 8, times 100). It used to be thought
that IQ was fi xed from birth, but traditional notions of intellectual capacity are being challenged.
One countervailing idea, put forward by the psychologist
Howard Gardner to account for the broad variety in people’s
abilities, is the hypothesis that humans have as many as eight
different kinds of intelligence:
Logical- mathematical intelligence: ability to think critically,
work with numbers and abstractions, and the like;
Spatial intelligence: three- dimensional judgment and the
ability to visualize with the mind’s eye;
Linguistic intelligence: ability to work with words and
languages;
Kinesthetic intelligence: physical dexterity and control of
one’s body;
Musical intelligence: sensitivity to sounds, rhythms, tones,
and music;
Interpersonal intelligence: ability to “read” other people and
work with them effectively;
Intrapersonal intelligence: ability to understand one’s self
and make accurate judgments of one’s knowledge, abilities, and
effectiveness;
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Naturalistic intelligence: the ability to discriminate and relate to one’s natural surroundings (for example, the kinds of
intelligence invoked by a gardener, hunter, or chef).
Gardner’s ideas are attractive for many reasons, not the
least because they attempt to explain human differences that
we can observe but cannot account for with modern, Western
defi nitions of intelligence with their focus on language and
logic abilities. As with learning styles theory, the multiple intelligences model has helped educators to diversify the kinds
of learning experiences they offer. Unlike learning styles, which
can have the perverse effect of causing individuals to perceive
their learning abilities as limited, multiple intelligences theory
elevates the sheer variety of tools in our native toolkit. What
both theories lack is an underpinning of empirical validation,
a problem Gardner himself recognizes, acknowledging that
determining one’s par tic u lar mix of intelligences is more an
art than a science.8
While Gardner helpfully expands our notion of intelligence,
the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg helpfully distills it again.
Rather than eight intelligences, Sternberg’s model proposes
three: analytical, creative, and practical. Further, unlike Gardner’s theory, Sternberg’s is supported by empirical research.9
One of Sternberg’s studies of par tic u lar interest to the question of how we mea sure intelligence was carried out in rural
Kenya, where he and his associates looked at children’s informal knowledge of herbal medicines. Regular use of these
medicines is an important part of Kenyans’ daily lives. This
knowledge is not taught in schools or assessed by tests, but
children who can identify the herbs and who know their appropriate uses and dosages are better adapted to succeed in
their environment than children without that knowledge. The
children who performed best on tests of this indigenous informal knowledge did worst relative to their peers on tests of the
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 149
formal academic subjects taught in school and, in Sternberg’s
words, appeared to be “stupid” by the metric of the formal
tests. How to reconcile the discrepancy? Sternberg suggests
that the children who excelled at indigenous knowledge came
from families who valued such practical knowledge more
highly than the families of the children who excelled at the
academics taught in school. Children whose environments
prized one kind of learning over another (practical over academic, in the case of the families who taught their children
about herbs) were at a lower level of knowledge in the academic areas not emphasized by their environment. Other families placed more value on the analytic (school- based) information and less on the practical herbal knowledge.
There are two important ideas here. First, traditional measures of intelligence failed to account for environmental differences; there is no reason to suspect that kids who excelled
at informal, indigenous knowledge can’t catch up to or even
surpass their peers in academic learning when given the appropriate opportunities. Second, for the kids whose environments emphasized indigenous knowledge, the mastery of academics is still developing. In Sternberg’s view, we’re all in a
state of developing expertise, and any test that mea sures
only what we know at any given moment is a static mea sure
that tells us nothing about our potential in the realm the test
mea sures.
Two other quick stories Sternberg cites are useful here.
One is a series of studies of orphaned children in Brazil who
must learn to start and run street businesses if they are to survive. Motivation is high; if they turn to theft as a means to
sustain themselves, they risk running afoul of the death squads.
These children, who are doing the math required in order to
run successful businesses, cannot do the same math when
the problems are presented in an abstract, paper- and- pencil
Make It Stick ê 150
format. Sternberg argues that this result makes sense when
viewed from the standpoint of developing expertise: the children live in an environment that emphasizes practical skills,
not academic, and it’s the practical exigencies that determine
the substance and form of the learning.10
The other story is about seasoned, expert handicappers at
horse tracks who devise highly complex mental models for
betting on horses but who mea sure only average on standard
IQ tests. Their handicapping models were tested against those
devised by less expert handicappers with equivalent IQs.
Handicapping requires comparing horses against a long list of
variables for each horse, such as its lifetime earnings, its lifetime speed, the races where it came in the money, the ability
of its jockey in the current race, and a dozen characteristics of
each of its prior races. Just to predict the speed with which a
horse would run the fi nal quarter mile, the experts relied on
a complex mental model involving as many as seven variables. The study found that IQ is unrelated to handicapping
ability, and “what ever it is that an IQ test mea sures, it is not
the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning.”11
Into this void Robert Sternberg has introduced his threepart theory of successful intelligence. Analytical intelligence is
our ability to complete problem- solving tasks such as those
typically contained in tests; creative intelligence is our ability to
synthesize and apply existing knowledge and skills to deal with
new and unusual situations; practical intelligence is our ability
to adapt to everyday life— to understand what needs to be done
in a specifi c setting and then do it; what we call street smarts.
Different cultures and learning situations draw on these intelligences differently, and much of what’s required to succeed in
a par tic u lar situation is not mea sured by standard IQ or aptitude tests, which can miss critical competencies.
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 151
Dynamic Testing
Robert Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko have proposed the
idea of using testing to assess ability in a dynamic manner.
Sternberg’s concept of developing expertise holds that with
continued experience in a fi eld we are always moving from a
lower state of competence to a higher one. His concept also
holds that standardized tests can’t accurately rate our potential because what they reveal is limited to a static report of
where we are on the learning continuum at the time the test is
given. In tandem with Sternberg’s three- part model of intelligence, he and Grigorenko have proposed a shift away from
static tests and replacing them with what they call dynamic
testing: determining the state of one’s expertise; refocusing
learning on areas of low per for mance; follow- up testing to
mea sure the improvement and to refocus learning so as to
keep raising expertise. Thus, a test may assess a weakness, but
rather than assuming that the weakness indicates a fi xed inability, you interpret it as a lack of skill or knowledge that can
be remedied. Dynamic testing has two advantages over standard testing. It focuses the learner and teacher on areas that
need to be brought up rather than on areas of accomplishment, and the ability to mea sure a learner’s progress from one
test to the next provides a truer gauge of his or her learning
potential.
Dynamic testing does not assume one must adapt to some
kind of fi xed learning limitation but offers an assessment of
where one’s knowledge or per for mance stands on some dimension and how one needs to move forward to succeed: what do
I need to learn in order to improve? That is, where aptitude
tests and much of learning styles theory tend to emphasize
our strengths and encourage us to focus on them, dynamic
testing helps us to discover our weaknesses and correct them.
Make It Stick ê 152
In the school of life experience, setbacks show us where we
need to do better. We can steer clear of similar challenges in
the future, or we can redouble our efforts to master them,
broadening our capacities and expertise. Bruce Hendry’s experiences investing in rental property and in the stock market
dealt him setbacks, and the lessons he took away were essential elements of his education: to be skeptical when somebody’s
trying to sell him something, to fi gure out the right questions,
and to learn how to go dig out the answers. That’s developing
expertise.
Dynamic testing has three steps.
Step 1: a test of some kind— perhaps an experience or a
paper exam— shows me where I come up short in knowledge or a skill.
Step 2: I dedicate myself to becoming more competent, using refl ection, practice, spacing, and the other techniques
of effective learning.
Step 3: I test myself again, paying attention to what works
better now but also, and especially, to where I still need
more work.
When we take our fi rst steps as toddlers, we are engaging
in dynamic testing. When you write your fi rst short story, put
it in front of your writers’ group for feedback, and then revise
and bring it back, you’re engaging in dynamic testing, learning the writer’s craft and getting a sense of your potential. The
upper limits of your per for mance in any cognitive or manual
skill may be set by factors beyond your control, such as your
intelligence and the natural limits of your ability, but most of
us can learn to perform nearer to our full potential in most
areas by discovering our weaknesses and working to bring
them up.12
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 153
Structure Building
There do appear to be cognitive differences in how we learn,
though not the ones recommended by advocates of learning
styles. One of these differences is the idea mentioned earlier
that psychologists call structure building: the act, as we encounter new material, of extracting the salient ideas and constructing a coherent mental framework out of them. These
frameworks are sometimes called mental models or mental
maps. High structure- builders learn new material better than
low structure- builders. The latter have diffi culty setting aside
irrelevant or competing information, and as a result they tend
to hang on to too many concepts to be condensed into a workable model (or overall structure) that can serve as a foundation for further learning.
The theory of structure building bears some resemblance to
a village built of Lego blocks. Suppose you’re taking a survey
course in a new subject. You start with a textbook full of ideas,
and you set out to build a coherent mental model of the knowledge they contain. In our Lego analogy, you start with a box
full of Lego pieces, and you set out to build the town that’s
pictured on the box cover. You dump out the pieces and sort
them into a handful of piles. First you lay out the streets and
sidewalks that defi ne the perimeter of the city and the distinct
places within it. Then you sort the remaining pieces according
to the elements they compose: apartment complex, school, hospital, stadium, mall, fi re station. Each of these elements is like a
central idea in the textbook, and each takes more shape and
nuance as added pieces snap into place. Together, these central
ideas form the larger structure of the village.
Now suppose that your brother has used this Lego set before and dumped some pieces into the box from another set.
Make It Stick ê 154
As you fi nd pieces, some might not fi t with your building
blocks, and you can put them aside as extraneous. Or you
may discover that some of the new pieces can be used to form
a substructure of an existing building block, giving it more
depth and defi nition (porches, patios, and back decks as substructures of apartments; streetlights, hydrants, and boulevard trees as substructures of streets). You happily add these
pieces to your village, even though the original designers of
the set had not planned on this sort of thing. High structurebuilders develop the skill to identify foundational concepts
and their key building blocks and to sort new information
based on whether it adds to the larger structure and one’s
knowledge or is extraneous and can be put aside. By contrast,
low structure- builders struggle in fi guring out and sticking
with an overarching structure and knowing what information
needs to fi t into it and what ought to be discarded. Structure
building is a form of conscious and subconscious discipline:
stuff fi ts or it doesn’t; it adds nuance, capacity and meaning,
or it obscures and overfreights.
A simpler analogy might be a friend who wants to tell you
a rare story about this four- year- old boy she knows: she mentions who the mother is, how they became friends in their
book club, fi nally mentioning that the mother, by coincidence,
had a large load of manure delivered for her garden on the
morning of the boy’s birthday— the mother’s an incredible
gardener, her eggplants took a ribbon at the county fair and
got her an interview on morning radio, and she gets her manure from that widowed guy in your church who raises the
Clydesdale horses and whose son is married to— and so on
and so on. Your friend cannot winnow the main ideas from
the blizzard of irrelevant associations, and the story is lost on
the listener. Story, too, is structure.
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 155
Our understanding of structure building as a cognitive difference in learning is still in the early stages: is low structurebuilding the result of a faulty cognitive mechanism, or is
structure- building a skill that some pick up naturally and
others must be taught? We know that when questions are
embedded in texts to help focus readers on the main ideas, the
learning per for mance of low structure- builders improves to a
level commensurate with high structure- builders. The embedded questions promote a more coherent repre sen ta tion of the
text than low- structure readers can build on their own, thus
bringing them up toward the level achieved by the high
structure- builders.
What’s happening in this situation remains an open question for now, but the implication for learners seems to reinforce a notion offered earlier by the neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold and the pediatric neurologist Doug Larsen: that cultivating
the habit of refl ecting on one’s experiences, of making them
into a story, strengthens learning. The theory of structure
building may provide a clue as to why: that refl ecting on what
went right, what went wrong, and how might I do it differently next time helps me isolate key ideas, or ga nize them into
mental models, and apply them again in the future with an
eye to improving and building on what I’ve learned.13
Rule versus Example Learning
Another cognitive difference that appears to matter is whether
you are a “rule learner” or “example learner,” and the distinction is somewhat akin to the one we just discussed. When
studying different kinds of problems in a chemistry class, or
specimens in a course on birds and how to identify them, rule
learners tend to abstract the underlying principles or “rules”
Make It Stick ê 156
that differentiate the examples being studied. Later, when they
encounter a new chemistry problem or bird specimen, they
apply the rules as a means to classify it and select the appropriate solution or specimen box. Example learners tend to
memorize the examples rather than the underlying principles.
When they encounter an unfamiliar case, they lack a grasp of
the rules needed to classify or solve it, so they generalize from
the nearest example they can remember, even if it is not particularly relevant to the new case. However, example learners
may improve at extracting underlying rules when they are
asked to compare two different examples rather than focus
on studying one example at a time. Likewise, they are more
likely to discover the common solution to disparate problems
if they fi rst have to compare the problems and try to fi gure
out the underlying similarities.
By way of an illustration, consider two different hypothetical problems faced by a learner. These are taken from
research into rule learning. In one problem, a general’s forces
are set to attack a castle that is protected by a moat. Spies
have learned that the bridges over the moat have been mined
by the castle’s commander. The mines are set to allow small
groups to cross the bridges, so that the occupants of the castle can retrieve food and fuel. How can the general get a large
force over the bridges to attack the castle without tripping
the mines?
The other problem involves an inoperable tumor, which
can be destroyed by focused radiation. However, the radiation
must also pass through healthy tissue. A beam of suffi cient
intensity to destroy the tumor will damage the healthy tissue
through which it passes. How can the tumor be destroyed
without damaging healthy tissue?
In the studies, students have diffi culty fi nding the solution
to either of these problems unless they are instructed to look
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 157
for similarities between them. When seeking similarities, many
students notice that (1) both problems require a large force to
be directed at a target, (2) the full force cannot be massed and
delivered through a single route without an adverse outcome,
and (3) smaller forces can be delivered to the target, but a
small force is insuffi cient to solve the problem. By identifying
these similarities, students often arrive at a strategy of dividing the larger force into smaller forces and sending these in
through different routes to converge on the target and destroy
it without setting off mines or damaging healthy tissue. Here’s
the payoff: after fi guring out this common, underlying solution,
students are then able to go on to solve a variety of different
convergence problems.14
As with high and low structure-builders, our understanding of rule versus example learners is very preliminary. However, we know that high structure-builders and rule learners
are more successful in transferring their learning to unfamiliar
situations than are low structure-builders and example learners. You might wonder if the tendency to be a high structurebuilder is correlated with the tendency to be a rule learner.
Unfortunately, research is not yet available to answer this
question.
You can see the development of structure- building and
rule- learning skills in a child’s ability to tell a joke. A threeyear- old probably cannot deliver a knock- knock joke, because
he lacks an understanding of structure. You reply “Who’s
there?” and he jumps to the punch line: “Door is locked, I can’t
get in!” He doesn’t understand the importance, after “Who’s
there?”, of replying “Doris” to set up the joke. But by the
time he’s fi ve, he has become a knock- knock virtuoso: he has
memorized the structure. Nonetheless, at fi ve he’s not yet
adept at other kinds of jokes because he hasn’t yet learned
the essential element that makes jokes work, which, of course,
Make It Stick ê 158
is the “rule” that a punch line of any kind needs a setup,
explicit or implied.15
If you consider Bruce Hendry’s early lesson in the high value
of a suitcase full of scarce fi reworks, you can see how, when
he looks at boxcars many years later, he’s working with the
same supply- and- demand building block, but within a much
more complex model that employs other blocks of knowledge
that he has constructed over the years to address concepts of
credit risk, business cycles, and the pro cesses of bankruptcy.
Why are boxcars in surplus? Because tax incentives to investors had encouraged too much money to fl ow into their production. What’s a boxcar worth? They cost $42,000 each to
build and were in like- new condition, as they had been some
of the last ones built. He researched the lifespan of a boxcar
and its scrap value and looked at the lease contracts. Even if
all his cars stood idle, the lease payments would pay a pretty
yield on his investment while the glut worked through the
system and the market turned around.
Had we been there, we would have bought boxcars, too.
Or so we’d like to think. But it’s not like fi lling a satchel with
fi reworks, even if the underlying principle of supply and demand is the same. You had to buy the boxcars right, and understand the way to go about it. What in lay terms we call knowhow. Knowledge is not knowhow until you understand the
underlying principles at work and can fi t them together into a
structure larger than the sum of its parts. Knowhow is learning that enables you to go do.
The Takeaway
Given what we know about learning differences, what’s the
takeaway?
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 159
Be the one in charge. There’s an old truism from sales school
that says you can’t shoot a deer from the lodge. The same
goes for learning: you have to suit up, get out the door, and
fi nd what you’re after. Mastery, especially of complex ideas,
skills, and pro cesses, is a quest. It is not a grade on a test,
something bestowed by a coach, or a quality that simply seeps
into your being with old age and gray hair.
Embrace the notion of successful intelligence. Go wide: don’t
roost in a pigeonhole of your preferred learning style but take
command of your resources and tap all of your “intelligences”
to master the knowledge or skill you want to possess. Describe what you want to know, do, or accomplish. Then list
the competencies required, what you need to learn, and where
you can fi nd the knowledge or skill. Then go get it.
Consider your expertise to be in a state of continuing development, practice dynamic testing as a learning strategy to
discover your weaknesses, and focus on improving yourself
in those areas. It’s smart to build on your strengths, but you
will become ever more competent and versatile if you also use
testing and trial and error to continue to improve in the areas
where your knowledge or per for mance are not pulling their
weight.
Adopt active learning strategies like retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. Be aggressive. Like those with dyslexia
who have become high achievers, develop workarounds
or compensating skills for impediments or holes in your
aptitudes.
Don’t rely on what feels best: like a good pi lot checking his
instruments, use quizzing, peer review, and the other tools
described in Chapter 5 to make sure your judgment of what
you know and can do is accurate, and that your strategies are
moving you toward your goals.
Make It Stick ê 160
Don’t assume that you’re doing something wrong if the
learning feels hard. Remember that diffi culties you can overcome with greater cognitive effort will more than repay you
in the depth and durability of your learning.
Distill the underlying principles; build the structure. If you’re
an example learner, study examples two at a time or more,
rather than one by one, asking yourself in what ways they
are alike and different. Are the differences such that they require different solutions, or are the similarities such that they
respond to a common solution?
Break your idea or desired competency down into its component parts. If you think you are a low structure-builder or
an example learner trying to learn new material, pause periodically and ask what the central ideas are, what the rules are.
Describe each idea and recall the related points. Which are
the big ideas, and which are supporting concepts or nuances?
If you were to test yourself on the main ideas, how would you
describe them?
What kind of scaffold or framework can you imagine that
holds these central ideas together? If we borrowed the winding stair meta phor as a structure for Bruce Hendry’s investment model, it might work something like this. Spiral stairs
have three parts: a center post, treads, and risers. Let’s say the
center post is the thing that connects us from where we are
(down here) to where we want to be (up there): it’s the investment opportunity. Each tread is an element of the deal that
protects us from losing money and dropping back, and each
riser is an element that lifts us up a notch. Treads and risers
must both be present for the stairs to function and for a deal
to be attractive. Knowing the scrap value of boxcars is a
tread— Bruce knows he won’t get less than that for his investment. Another tread is the guaranteed lease income while his
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 161
capital is tied up. What are some risers? Impending scarcity,
which will raise values. The like- new condition of the cars, which
is latent value. A deal that doesn’t have treads and risers will
not protect the downside or reliably deliver the upside.
Structure is all around us and available to us through the
poet’s medium of meta phor. A tree, with its roots, trunk, and
branches. A river. A village, encompassing streets and blocks,
houses and stores and offi ces. The structure of the village explains how these elements are interconnected so that the village
has a life and a signifi cance that would not exist if these elements were scattered randomly across an empty landscape.
By abstracting the underlying rules and piecing them into a
structure, you go for more than knowledge. You go for knowhow. And that kind of mastery will put you ahead.
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