Learning & Personality Styles

The four-stage cycle — Experience → Reflect → Conceptualise → Experiment — is a genuinely useful description of how professional learning unfolds. In GP training, the CbD (Case-based Discussion) is essentially Kolb's cycle made formal. The value is in ensuring trainees complete all four stages, not in labelling which stage they prefer. Many trainees skip straight from experience to action without reflection or conceptualisation. The cycle reminds us that this is incomplete learning.

As Peter Honey noted: "The whole idea was to get managers to see that consciously completing all the stages in the experiential Kolb's learning cycle was better than informal, tacit learning."

Knowing your tendencies — that you tend to jump to action without reflecting, or that you spend too long theorising and never try things out — is useful self-knowledge. The Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ), reframed as a preferences awareness tool rather than a fixed classification system, can be a useful starting point for a conversation about learning habits.

The key caveat: treat any questionnaire result as a starting point for reflection, not as a label to plan around. If you score high on "Activist," the takeaway is not "design all my learning as hands-on activities" — it is "I should probably spend more time on the Reflector and Theorist stages, since those are where I tend to cut corners."

One genuine positive of the learning styles era was that it encouraged teachers to vary their methods — to use diagrams, discussions, practical activities, and written tasks. This variety remains genuinely valuable, not because it "matches" different learner types, but because variety in presentation supports dual coding, maintains engagement, and accommodates the complexity of different topics. The reason to vary your teaching methods is not "because different students need different things" — it is "because different topics are best taught in different ways, and variety keeps everyone engaged."

What learning styles research never captured was the crucial role of the learning relationship itself. In GP training, the trainer–trainee relationship, psychological safety, a sense of curiosity and permission to fail — these profoundly affect learning. No questionnaire captures this, but any good trainer knows it. The most evidence-based lesson structure in the world will not work if the trainee is afraid to ask questions.

MBTI classifies people across four dimensions: Introversion/Extraversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving. It produces 16 personality "types." Widely used in leadership development, team building, and career guidance.

Where it has value: Generating conversations about personality differences, communication preferences, and team dynamics. Many people find it a useful lens for self-reflection and for understanding why a colleague does things differently.

Where it falls short: The categories are not stable — around 50% of people score differently on retesting within four weeks. Like learning styles, it over-simplifies human complexity into neat boxes. The psychological research community is largely critical of its scientific validity.

Verdict: Useful as a conversation-starter. Not a valid basis for major decisions.

Behavioural models like DISC (Dominant, Influential, Steady, Conscientious) describe observable behaviour patterns in professional settings. Unlike MBTI, these tools focus on behaviour rather than deep personality structure.

Where they add value: Understanding conflict styles, communication mismatches, and team dynamics. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, for example, maps five conflict strategies (competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating) and can be a genuinely useful reflective tool for trainees who find certain clinical relationships challenging.

The same caveat applies: These are starting points for reflection, not fixed categories.

Transactional Analysis (TA), developed by Eric Berne, describes three ego states (Parent, Adult, Child) and patterns of communication. In medical education, it has been used to examine doctor–patient dynamics, trainer–trainee relationships, and professional behaviour under stress.

TA is particularly useful in GP training for understanding consultation dynamics — why some interactions feel power-imbalanced, why some patients seem to trigger a "parental" response, why some trainees behave like a "child" in supervision. Its value lies not in fixed categorisation but in the insight it offers about relational patterns.

A consistent message from GP trainers and educational supervisors who have updated their practice is that ditching learning styles does not mean abandoning conversations about how trainees learn. The goal shifts from "what type are you?" to "how are you actually learning — and is it working?" That is a better conversation. It is more honest, more personalised, and more useful than any questionnaire score.

The RCGP itself encourages trainees to use their Personal Development Plan (PDP) to reflect on their learning needs and strategies — a process that is entirely consistent with evidence-based approaches. The PDP is not a learning styles assessment; it is an ongoing, reflective self-audit. That is exactly the right approach.

GP trainers who vary their teaching methods — using a diagram in one session, a case discussion in another, a written framework in another — are doing excellent teaching. But the reason to do this is not that different trainees need different modalities. It is that:

• Variety maintains engagement and prevents habituation
• Dual coding (words + visuals) improves retention for everyone
• Different formats expose different aspects of the same idea
• Some topics are genuinely better taught in some formats than others

The RCGP curriculum explicitly encourages a variety of learning opportunities — including clinical experience, tutorials, self-directed study, and technology-enhanced learning. That variety is evidence-based, but for reasons that have nothing to do with matching fixed learner types.

This is one of the most consistent messages in GP medical education: psychological safety — the feeling that you can make mistakes, ask questions, and share uncertainty without being judged — is one of the strongest predictors of how much a trainee actually learns. Learning style questionnaires never measured this. No questionnaire does. But experienced GP trainers know that a brilliant tutorial structure will fail if the trainee is afraid to say "I don't understand" or "I got that wrong."

This is why the trainer–trainee relationship itself matters so much. A trainee who feels psychologically safe will engage with the uncomfortable learning — the retrieval practice, the honest reflection, the critical CbD discussion — that actually builds competence. A trainee who feels judged will produce polished log entries and avoid challenging cases. Guess which one learns more.

This applies to tutorials, log entries, revision, and reflective practice. The evidence for spaced practice is overwhelming — distributed effort outperforms massed effort for long-term learning in almost every study ever done. Yet GP training routinely creates conditions that encourage the opposite: trainees who do a long portfolio catch-up session before their ESR, who cram for the AKT in the final six weeks, who write three months of log entries in one evening.

The structural advice that GP trainers and experienced trainees give consistently: do something small every day or every week, and do it consistently. Two short log entries a week. Thirty minutes of AKT practice questions three times a week from ST2 onwards. A brief self-reflection after every clinic. The compounding effect of small, regular habits dramatically outperforms the sporadic burst — not just in theory, but in the actual ARCP outcomes trainers see year after year.

If you do use one, reframe it explicitly. Say something like: "This questionnaire won't tell you how you learn best — the research doesn't support that. What it might do is highlight which stages of the learning cycle you tend to skip, or give us a starting point to talk about your learning habits."

The Honey-Mumford LSQ used as a reflective conversation tool is very different from using it to design someone's entire learning programme around one style. If you use it, be honest about its limitations.

Use the evidence. Specifically:

• Build retrieval practice in. Start every tutorial with a brief recall challenge — "tell me what you remember from last time." Do not start by re-explaining. Make the trainee retrieve first.
• Space your topics. Return to the same theme multiple times across different weeks rather than doing one comprehensive session and moving on.
• Use Kolb's cycle to plan the session structure, not to label your trainee. A good tutorial moves through experience, reflection, conceptualisation, and application.
• Use concrete examples from the trainee's own surgery, not hypothetical cases. Specificity anchors learning.
• Mix your methods — not because of learning styles, but because variety supports engagement and dual coding.
• End with "what will you do differently next time?" This completes the cycle and triggers active experimentation.

Suggested tutorial structure:

1. Ask the trainee to complete a brief learning styles questionnaire before the session (e.g. the Honey-Mumford LSQ)
2. At the session, ask: "What did your results say? How did that make you feel?"
3. Introduce the research critique — "Actually, the evidence doesn't support what this questionnaire implies." Observe the reaction.
4. Discuss: "What is still useful from this? And what should we stop doing?"
5. Introduce the six evidence-based strategies. Ask which ones they already use and which are new.
6. Co-design one change to their PDP based on the evidence.

This session models good teaching: it uses Kolb's cycle (they do the questionnaire first = concrete experience), creates deliberate cognitive conflict, and ends with a real application. And it teaches critical appraisal of educational evidence — a skill that transfers to clinical practice.

• "But this is how I've always been taught." Acknowledge this. The learning styles model was genuinely dominant for 20–30 years. This is not about blame — it is about updating the map when better data arrives. That is itself a medical education lesson.
• "So how do I know how I learn best?" The honest answer is: try the six evidence-based strategies systematically and see what works in your context. Self-experimentation is more informative than a questionnaire.
• "My trainer tells me I'm a reflector." That may be a useful observation about a tendency — but it should not determine which learning strategies you use.
• IMGs in particular may have been taught styles-based frameworks extensively in their home countries, where these models remain embedded. Handle this with curiosity rather than dismissiveness — acknowledge that it was widely taught, and focus on "here is what the more recent research shows."

As a reflective exercise? Possibly. As a guide for designing your training? No. The questionnaire can prompt useful self-reflection about learning habits. But use the result as a conversation-starter, not a prescription. And be honest: the score describes your preferences, not your effectiveness.

You could share this page, or raise it gently in educational supervision. Most GP trainers genuinely want to base their practice on good evidence — they may simply not have come across the research yet. Frame it as something interesting you read, not as a criticism of them personally. Honest educational conversations are part of the training relationship.

Brain Gym — a series of physical exercises claimed to improve brain function and learning — is included in the downloads for completeness but should be treated with even more caution than learning styles. It sits squarely in the neuromyth category. There is no credible scientific evidence that the physical movements improve cognitive function or learning outcomes. It was popular in some educational settings in the 1990s and 2000s but has been widely rejected by neuroscientists and educational researchers. It is here so you know what it is — not because we recommend it.

Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic) is a different claim from VARK. Gardner argues that these represent distinct mental capacities — not preferred learning channels. He explicitly distanced his theory from learning styles. However, the evidence base for using MI as an instructional design tool is also weak. Its main value is in challenging the idea that "intelligence" is a single fixed thing — a useful philosophical point, but not a practical teaching prescription.

Not quite. What this probably shows is that drawing diagrams engages dual coding (combining visual and verbal/conceptual processing) and elaboration (making connections as you draw). Both of these are in the "six evidence-based strategies" list — and both work for everyone, not just "visual learners." The activity is effective because of what it does cognitively — not because of what "type" you are.