School Learning and Cognitive Style

Richard Riding

London: David Fulton Publishers (2002)

Reviewer: Belle Wallace, Director, TASC international

Successful classrooms radiate the warmth and energy that teachers develop and encourage in all learners. All teachers also realise that the most powerful combination of strategies that produce a dynamic classroom involve not only teaching strategies but the children’s learning strategies. This text aims to explore a wide range of teaching and learning strategies that have proved to be effective in classrooms. The writer focuses on how information is best learned; how the working memory is activated; how cognitive styles influence effective learning so that it is actively stored within the long-term memory.

In a very practical way, Richard Riding shows the powerful inter-relationship of these factors and how the teacher can create a classroom where learners understand how and why they are learning; to bring about greater on-task behaviour, and pupil enthusiasm and commitment. He incorporates recent psychological developments on individual learning differences and presents new approaches in three areas: processing capacity, cognitive style, and understanding of the structure of knowledge. All three components affect the perception of how pupils can be helped to learn; why some pupils find some aspects of their work difficult; and why some pupils display disaffected behaviour.

Riding suggests that all pupils need to develop an awareness of their individual style of learning - being also aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Recognising any mismatch between the task set and their learning style, frees learners from a sense of personal inadequacy and frequent failure. He suggests that pupils also need to be given freedom to select the method that best enables them to learn, together with learning a range of supportive strategies as their learning repertoire. 

With its rich source of insights and recommendations, the text is useful for teachers, counsellors, and educational psychologists. 

GEI Vol 23 No 3