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Impact of learning styles on group work
How a student prefers to learn can have a significant impact on their performance in group work. Some students see group work as the most important part of their learning experience while others complain that it was a waste of time. Why is this so?
Felder's Learning style model 
is one method of understanding why group work may not work sometimes.
Verbal or aural learners
Verbal or aural learners may find discussing information with their peers helpful and work well in study groups where discussion of the material reinforces class discussion and lectures. Visual learners may prefer to look at diagrams, models, and illustrations and find lengthy discussions unnecessary.
Kinaesthetic or sensory learners
Kinaesthetic or sensory learners may enjoy working in small groups or pairs for discussion, participating actively in an experiment or even 'acting out' a debate and moving around physically. Intuitive or reflective learners however may prefer a deductive approach where they take time to reflect on information by themselves without having to discuss it with anyone. They start with abstractions or principles and deduce the consequences.
Global and sequential learners
There may be a mismatch between global and sequential learners in the group. Global learners wanting to know the whole before they can start to understand where everything fits in may frustrate sequential learners. Sequential learners can take partial information and organise it into a logical order. So staff and students need to be aware of the different ways of processing information and use this information to work productively with each other.
At the same time, a 'holistic' student with learning disabilities and low academic self-esteem may find they can gain confidence from group work if it is in a supportive group. They can avoid scrutiny from the teacher and other students by trying out ideas with the small group first.
Structuring group work
Carefully structured group work can result in improved listening skills for the LD student when the focus is on completing the task co-operatively. It may be that students with LD are holistic learners because of their difficulty with retaining facts and so are inclined to focus more on the outline of any topic rather than the details. Pairing them with a sequential learner may help them to develop strategies to organise new information and construct schema so they can relate new information to previously learnt information.
Mortimore, T (2003) Dyslexia and Learning Style. Whurr Publishers England
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