I Feel Your Pain

摘要

America is a nation of believers, ready to place their faith in God or baseball or the Psychic Friends Network. Corporate America, too, periodically gets religion—in the form of workplace feds that inspire revivalist fervor, then fade away. What these notions usually have in common, besides a snappy concept and a persuasive spokesperson, is a weak scientific foundation. That's true of the latest fed to catch fire: learning style. Learning-style theory proposes that each of us absorbs and processes information in one of several distinct ways: visual, auditory, tactile or kinesthetic, for example. An individual's learning style is usually determined by a pencil-and-paper test—of which there are now more than 50 available, with titles like the Cognitive Style Index and the Learning Style Questionnaire.