This is an excerpt from my recent book. You can find it under the “Get Gary’s Books” menu above. The title is Efficacious Educational Technology. This section is from the chapter on theories and educational technololgy.
When a theory is parsimonious it is the least complex it can be. An example of increasing parsimony in educational research comes from the myth of learning styles (Pashler et al., 2008). According to this theory, individual students learn best when the materials is presented in their preferred style. For example, “visual learners” were supposed to learn best when materials were presented in graphs or images. As work to establish this theory continued, it was discovered that learning styles do not exist. There are some materials that we all learn better when presented visually, and we learn better when we interact with material in different modes.
It turns out we can explain how different media affects learning if we ignore learning styles. By removing learning styles from learning theory, we made it more parsimonious. It turns out we should make material available in many formats (something you support as a school IT professional), but we do not need to justify it by “learning styles.”
Reference
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x