A Simple Model of Learning Styles

Much of the economic literature on education treats the process of learning as a `black box'. While such models have many interesting uses, they are of little use when a college seeks advice about reallocating resources from one input to another (e.g. from lecture hours to seminars). Commenting on such questions requires us to `open up' the black box. This paper shows what one such model would look like by explicitly modelling how students vary in their `learning styles'. We apply this framework to investigate how reforms to higher education (e.g. MOOCs) would affect students with different learning styles.