Learning styles - why conscientious and explorative learning styles can predict academic success and failure

When learning style theory become popular among teachers I took an immediate liking to it because I have always known that I am NOT a visual person. I have always been fascinated by reports of autistic people seeing abstract concepts, like math, in pictures and colours. I don’t even see pictures when I read a story - all I can see is outlines.

However, even I as a not very visual person find visual information like charts and diagrams way more useful in understanding data than listening to an audio file with someone reciting the raw figures while riding my bike. I do love listening to audiobooks while cycling, but even I had to learn riding my bike in the only way possible - in a kinaesthetic way. So, no that whole learning style idea is not just flawed, it is plainly useless.

In my 20 years as a teacher I have noticed two different learning styles, though. There are students who focus really hard on their weaknesses and there are students who tend to give up on a subject when they start to fail them. Recently I have found out that these two types correspond roughly (though not exactly) to the two categories of Judgers (J) vs Perceivers (P) personality traits, introduced by Myers and Briggs in their famous personality test.

Here are some characteristics of each type:

https://personalitymax.com/personality-types/preferences/judging-perceiving/

Only by looking at these personality traits it is easy to predict which type is more successful in school, conscientious (J) learners or explorative learners (P).  

My J learners tend to

• Hand in everything on time
• Do well on tests
• Soldier on when the goings get tough
• be organized (including beautiful handwriting
• Do their work first and then relax
• Work to an extreme when under stress
• Be good at most subjects
• Excel at almost all subjects when gifted

My P learners tend to

• forget to hand in homework on time (or don’t care)
• do worse at tests
• give up more easily when things get hard
• be disorganized in general (including bad handwriting)
• relax first and then do the homework
• procrastinate to an extreme when under stress
• to be unilaterally gifted
• be twice exceptional when gifted

For teachers, who for obvious reasons most frequently belong to the J-type, P learners easily might seem a bit stupid, disorganized and lazy. However, there is a pattern here and if you look closely the truth is, they are a bit cleverer (teachers don’t know that) than the J kids, still disorganized (that is what the teachers get right) and work hard at something they are good at, be it gardening, sports, coding or robotics (that is what teachers typically can’t see).

I can base my claim that P types more intelligent than J types both on statistics as well as my personal experience.  As you can see from this table (study about gifted people) that P types consistently rank higher (with the exception of ISTJ types) than their corresponding J types.

Let me explain. I am P type (yeah, that’s really rare for a teacher, as you can imagine! ;)  and at university I taught myself Romanian and a J friend of myself Hungarian (both of us being passionate autodidacts).  My J friend did every unit very conscientiously and he did not move on to the next unit until he had learned absolutely everything from the unit. As a P learner I find this way of learning horribly boring. Being and explorative learning I moved on quickly from unit to unit until I got to unit 8 or so and could not understand much anymore. Instead of going back to previous units I would rather buy myself a new textbook then get bored with the old stuff.

Naturally, I progressed much more quickly than my J friend. However, now image we both had started our languages at school and been tested after unit 1, unit 2, etc. How would have performed better? Obvious my J friend for many units! It would have taken me much more time to finally outperform him. Eventually I would have outperformed him. Or would I? No I wouldn’t have. Remember, P types focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. After each unit I would have got the signal than I am worse at language learning than my friend and I would have become disinterested in the subject and focused on one of my strengths instead.

From these two tables, you can see how P and J do when they cannot prepare for a test and when they have the chance to work for their grades.

I have a gifted son, who was a super learner before he started school at the age of five. He learned to read at the age of two, multiply at the age of three and knew about 200 dinosaurs including their habitats and periods at the age of five.

When he started school me and my wife expected his teacher to be raging with joy about him, instead she went raging with anger. She told us that our son was stupid, lazy, and crying all the time. How, come? She showed us a drawing he had to color in and told us that he couldn't do it and he shouldn’t have started school a year early. It looked like this:

It was true, he couldn’t color in a circle properly because his fine motor skills always lagged behind his cognitive skills. When I pointed this out the teacher only replied that “I overestimated my son”. All she saw was a lazy and horrible kid who would start to cry when he had to color in a picture.

Now, image a gifted kid who has no support from their parents. You can easily see him or her ending up in special education, can’t you?

Being a P-person I have understood that the opera is not my cup of tea - I am wild, and I hate tuxedos and ties and all that other J stuff about operas (even the music). I’d rather go for a walk in the rain than spend a night at the opera. This corresponds way more to my idea of a fun time.

Being a P-person, my son quickly understood that school was not his cup of tea. Being perfectionist as most gifted kids are and feeling he was not good enough was plainly painful to him. Being a P-person he prioritized relaxing to working and would rather cry for an hour than do his homework. When he understood that he was not only misunderstood in school, but also by his parents who made him feel bad about not doing his homework he started to withdraw and not learn anything anymore at all. He refused to do anything that remotely resembled school. What he did enjoy though was open work. At least he could finish that easily in school and not have any homework.

Now, think of all P kids (not only gifted ones) who understood early on that school was not their cup of tea. Sometimes this happened sometimes right from the start. or with a change of teacher, All that talent that got lost, due to a stifling J school system. Often the problem isn't the teacher, but our modern times. P kids need more time to compesate for their weaknesses, but they aren't given this time anymore. All the groups have to be homgeonous, and if they aren't the kids get "fixed" with additional classes, such as logotherpy or fine motor therapy. When I wet to school, kids had more time to devlop than today. All these devolopments only lead to kid shutting down earlier and earlier in our school system resulting in kids only learning for grades and not the subjects. This trend is extremely counterproductive, as most kids don't want to go on with any field resembling the subject after school.

Is there any way to solve this problem? Yes, there have been myriads of proposals: Montessori, project-based learning, e-learning, and many more. These solutions aren’t just employed often enough at schools to make all P kids stay at school and not drop out.

P learners like me tend to excel at university level. There I had the freedom to pursue my own interests and I often finished with straight As while my weaknesses at school were math and science (I am extremely in love with the latter now, and I wish I had better skills in the former)

All this doesn’t mean that J students are always happy or favoured by our school system. Even though they usually try to catch up with their weaknesses, they often hurt themselves with their perfectionism. They often sacrifice free time and friends and don’t have a life anymore. I had a J student who, even though she had already decided not to go on to university and look for a job instead after high school, spent so much time studying for her final exams that she put on some 20 pounds to finish them with straight As.

Sometimes the J students even start to suffer from psychological conditions such as social phobia and fear of failure (they feel they are not good enough people if they get Bs instead of straight As) and might start to stay away from school because of that. And sometimes they don’t know what to do with their lives after school, because they have never had a hobby or learned to learn anything new by themselves.

Dedicated to my P-son Andrej and all my P students who are frustrated with the current school system.

Dedicated also to Roger Schank, the most inspirational educational psychologist I have ever read.

Dedicated also to George Lucas, one of my favourite P people in the world, who didn’t enjoy school a lot and excelled only at university level. He is the founder of Edutopia, an NGO which tries to make our education system a good one for all students.