Learning style is a student's way of responding to, and using, stimuli in the context of learning. It refers to a person's characteristic style of acquiring and using information in learning and solving problems. Using the layers of an onion as a metaphor for the different levels of a person's learning style, the core of a learning style is a person's basic characteristics of personality.
Personality models of learning styles deal with the basic characteristics that a person brings to the learning situation. Personality characteristics are the most stable and the least subject to change in response to intervention by a researcher or instructor. Personality models include: (1) field dependence and independence; (2) Myers-Briggs Type Indicator; (3) reflectivity versus impulsivity models; (4) Omnibus Personality Inventory; and (5) The Holland Typology of Personality.
The second layer of the learning style onion is the person's information processing style. Information processing models of learning styles deal with how people take in and process information. Information processing models include: (1) comprehensive learners versus operation learners; (2) conceptual versus factual learner (sequencing of information) models; (3) deep-elaborative versus shallow-reiterative models; (4) Kolb's Model of Experiential Learning; and the (5) Gregorc model.
The third layer of the learning style onion is the person's social interaction styles. Students learn better in settings that meet their social-emotional needs and in social situations that are attuned to their predominant pattern of behavior. Social-interaction models of learning styles include: (1) Mann's Research based on personality clusters; (2) Grasha-Reichman Student Learning Style Scales; (3) Furmann-Jacobs model; and (4) Eison's Learning and Grade orientation.
The final layer of the learning style onion is the person's instructional preference and learning environment. Instructional style models are concerned with students preferences for particular teaching methods. Instructional style models of learning style include: (1) cognitive mapping; and (2) Canfield Learning Style Inventory.
The traits identified by the different learning style measures are not discrete and each level influences the other.
William James followed in the pragmatist tradition inaugurated by Charles Sanders Peirce. Pragmatists held that all beliefs must be tested, and those that failed to garner sufficient practical value ought to be discarded.
In his Will to Believe, James was a strong critic of W.K. Clifford's uncompromising empiricism. Clifford, like Hume, had argued that acting on beliefs or convictions alone, unsupported by evidence, was pure folly. He likened such acting to that of an irresponsible shipowner who allows an untrustworthy ship to be ready to set sail, merely thinking it safe, and then gives "benevolent wishes" for those who would set sail in it. Clifford concluded that we have a duty to act only on well founded beliefs. If we have no grounds for belief, we must suspend judgment. This provided the basis for an ethics of belief quite different than Newman's. Clifford's evidentialism inspired subsequent philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Scriven.
James argued, pace Clifford, that life would be severely impoverished if we acted only on completely well founded beliefs. Like Newman, James held that belief admits of a wide spectrum of commitment: from tentative to firm. The feelings that attach to a belief are significant. He defended the need we have, at times, to allow our "passional tendencies" to influence our judgments. Thus, like Pascal, he took up a voluntarist argument for religious belief, though one not dependent solely upon a wager. There are times, admittedly few, when we must act on our beliefs passionately held but without sufficient supporting evidence. These rare situations must be both momentous, once in a lifetime opportunities, and forced, such that the situation offers the agent only two options: to act or not to act on the belief. Religious beliefs often take on both of these characteristics. Pascal had realized the forced aspect of Christian belief, regarding salvation: God would not save the disbeliever. As a result, religion James claimed that a religious belief could be a genuine hypothesis for a person to adopt.
James does, however, also give some evidential support for this choice to believe. We have faith in many things in life -- in molecules, conversation of energy, democracy, and so forth -- that are based on evidence of their usefulness for us. But even in these cases "Our faith is faith in some one else's faith." Our mental life effectively comprises a constant interplay between volitions and beliefs. Nonetheless, James believed that while philosophers like Descartes and Clifford, not wanting to ever be dupes, focused primarily on the need to avoid error, even to the point of letting truth take its chance, he as an empiricist must hold that the pursuit of truth is paramount and the avoidance of error is secondary. His position entailed that that dupery in the face of hope is better than dupery in the face of fear.
In "The Sentiment of Rationality" James concludes that faith is "belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance." So, faith is not only compatible with doubt, but it requires its possibility. Faith is oriented towards action: it is a kind of "working hypothesis" needed for practical life.
