EdSight

Jan D. Vermunt is a Dutch learning scientist and educational psychologist whose career has traced one of the most coherent and productive intellectual arcs in the modern study of learning: from a systematic analysis of how university students learn, to a theory of how teaching can productively challenge learning, to an investigation of how teachers themselves learn and develop across their professional careers. He completed his doctoral dissertation at Tilburg University in 1992 — cum laude — with a study of learning styles and learning regulation in higher education that introduced the Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS) and generated a research tradition adopted by scholars across four continents. The dissertation was conducted within the Department of Educational Psychology at Tilburg and drew on a combination of phenomenographic analysis, survey research, and qualitative interview study to produce a theoretically and empirically grounded account of how students differ in the ways they process information, regulate their learning, conceive of what learning is, and orient themselves toward their studies. From Tilburg he moved in 1995 to Leiden University's ICLON — Graduate School of Teaching — as Associate Professor, and subsequently held a Chair in Educational Development and Research at Maastricht University's Faculty of Health Sciences (1999–2002) before becoming Professor of Teaching and Teacher Education at Utrecht University (2004–2012). In 2012 he was elected to the Chair of Education at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, one of the most distinguished chairs in educational research in the English-speaking world, where he remained until 2018. On 1 December 2018 he took up his current position as Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Innovation at the Eindhoven University of Technology's Eindhoven School of Education (ESoE), where his research group addresses the interconnection of student learning, teaching practice, and teacher professional development. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Learning and Instruction — one of the leading international journals in educational research — from 2014 to 2018, and in 2016 the University of Antwerp awarded him an honorary doctorate in Educational Sciences in recognition of his entire scientific body of work. He continues to lead an active international research programme addressing learning patterns, teacher learning, and the design of educational environments that promote deep, self-regulated understanding.

The Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS), which Vermunt developed as the central empirical instrument of his 1992 doctoral dissertation at Tilburg University, is among the most theoretically grounded and internationally validated measures of student learning in higher education. Unlike earlier learning-style instruments — which typically measured a single cognitive dimension (such as deep versus surface processing, or field dependence versus independence) — the ILS was designed to capture the multi-component character of learning as Vermunt understood it, measuring four analytically distinct but empirically interrelated aspects of how students approach their studies. Processing strategies are the cognitive and metacognitive activities students use to work with study material — relating, structuring, and critically processing information on the one hand, or memorising and rehearsing it on the other. Regulation strategies are the metacognitive activities through which students plan, monitor, and control their own learning processes — self-regulating their study activities or relying on external direction from teachers and textbooks. Conceptions of learning (which Vermunt initially called “mental models of learning”) are the students' beliefs about what learning is and what it is for — whether it is the accumulation of knowledge transmitted by authorities, the construction of understanding through personal activity, or the development of capacities for practical use. Learning orientations are the personal intentions, motives, and goals that direct students' engagement with their studies — whether their orientation is toward vocational certification, personal development, deep interest in the subject, or simply compliance with institutional demands. These four components interact to constitute what Vermunt called a learning style, and they were measured by a 120-item questionnaire that has been translated and validated in Dutch, English, Finnish, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Chinese, and used by researchers across more than twenty countries.

From his analysis of the ILS data, Vermunt identified four empirically recurring learning patterns — coherent combinations of processing strategies, regulation strategies, conceptions of learning, and orientations that characteristically co-occur in groups of students. The meaning-directed learner employs deep processing strategies (relating, structuring, critical reflection), self-regulates her study activities, conceives of learning as the personal construction of understanding, and is oriented toward intrinsic interest in the subject matter. The reproduction-directed learner focuses on memorisation and rehearsal of the details that teachers and textbooks identify as important, relies on external cues to regulate her study, conceives of learning as the intake of knowledge offered by authorities, and is oriented primarily toward passing examinations. The application-directed learner combines deep processing with a practical orientation — constructing understanding in order to use it in professional contexts — and shows moderate self-regulation with a concrete, use-oriented conception of learning. The undirected learner shows low scores on both processing and self-regulation strategies, is uncertain or ambivalent in her learning orientations, and is typically in a state of affective and cognitive difficulty — unable to engage productively with study demands and lacking the metacognitive tools to address her own learning problems. This typology has been immensely generative for research and practice: it provides a vocabulary for describing student diversity that goes far beyond attainment levels or subject-matter knowledge, and it has informed diagnostic instruments, curriculum design, instructional strategy, and academic support services in higher education systems worldwide.

Vermunt's most theoretically original contribution to the study of teaching — elaborated in his influential 1999 paper co-authored with Nico Verloop in Learning and Instruction — is the conceptual framework of congruence, constructive friction, and destructive friction in the relationship between students' learning patterns and teachers' instructional strategies. Congruence exists when the regulation and processing demands made by a teacher's instruction match the student's existing learning pattern: the teacher who provides detailed structure and explicit direction to a reproduction-directed learner, for instance, is in congruence with that learner's orientation. Congruence produces comfort and smooth performance, but it does not challenge the student to develop more sophisticated or more adaptive learning strategies — it simply reinforces the pattern she already has. Constructive friction arises when instruction makes demands that the student's current learning pattern is not yet adequate to meet: the teacher who asks an undirected learner to relate concepts across chapters, or who challenges a reproduction-directed learner to formulate her own critical questions about the material, is creating a productive mismatch between the student's current capacities and the demands of the learning environment. This mismatch, if well-calibrated and scaffolded, generates the cognitive effort and metacognitive reflection through which learning patterns develop — through which students move from reproduction-directed to meaning-directed, from externally regulated to self-regulated learning. Destructive friction, by contrast, occurs when the mismatch between instructional demands and student capacities is so great as to produce confusion, anxiety, and disengagement rather than productive challenge. The framework gives teachers a conceptual tool for calibrating their instruction to a specific developmental purpose — promoting growth rather than merely confirming current capacity — and it connects Vermunt's learning-style research directly to the tradition of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and Jerome Bruner's scaffolding.

Across his career, Vermunt has consistently advocated for and theorised what he terms process-oriented teaching — an instructional approach in which the teacher's primary concern is not the efficient transmission of content knowledge but the deliberate development of students' capacity to regulate their own learning. The central argument is that the reproduction-directed and undirected learning patterns that his research has consistently found to be widespread in higher education are not fixed cognitive styles but educationally produced orientations — patterns that students have learned in response to educational environments that reward memorisation, penalise exploratory error, and provide external regulation so comprehensively that students never develop the internal regulatory capacities they need for lifelong, independent learning. Process-oriented teaching reverses these conditions: it reduces external regulation progressively, requires students to generate their own questions and structures, provides metacognitive prompts and models rather than answers, and uses assessment that demands performance of understanding rather than recall. Vermunt has developed practical frameworks for process-oriented teaching in higher education and has demonstrated through longitudinal research that sustained exposure to such environments produces measurable shifts in students' learning patterns — from reproduction-directed toward meaning-directed, from externally regulated toward self-regulated — shifts that persist beyond the immediate course context.

In the later phase of his career, Vermunt extended the learning-pattern framework from students in higher education to teachers in professional development, producing a body of research that treats teacher professional development as a form of intentional learning governed by the same multi-component structure — learning activities, regulation of learning, beliefs about professional learning, and motivations to learn — that he had originally described for student learning. His investigation of teacher learning patterns identified characteristic configurations of professional learning activity that parallel the student learning typologies: some teachers engage in deep, meaning-directed professional learning, constructing new conceptual frameworks from their experience of teaching; others focus on reproduction of established practices; others engage in application-directed professional learning, oriented toward immediate classroom utility. This framework has been applied to the study of teacher learning in different phases of the professional career — novice, experienced, and expert teachers showing characteristically different learning patterns — and has been extended to the study of teacher learning in specific professional development contexts, including Lesson Study. His 2023 paper (with Vrikki, Dudley, and Warwick) in Teaching and Teacher Education on the relationships between teacher learning patterns, contextual factors, and learning outcomes in Lesson Study exemplifies this programme's integration with contemporary teacher collaborative enquiry models, and represents one of the most empirically grounded contributions to the design of professional development for teachers available in the current literature.

Jan Vermunt's career represents one of the most sustained and successful efforts in contemporary educational research to build a genuinely cumulative empirical science of learning that is simultaneously practically useful for teachers and educational designers. Beginning with a theoretically coherent and empirically well-grounded typology of student learning, he extended the framework progressively — through the congruence/constructive-friction theory of teaching, through process-oriented instructional design, through the analysis of teacher learning patterns — into a comprehensive research programme that addresses learning at every level of the educational system: the student in the lecture hall, the graduate student in the seminar, the beginning teacher in the classroom, the experienced teacher in a Lesson Study group. His willingness to move his institutional home from Tilburg to Leiden to Maastricht to Utrecht to Cambridge to Eindhoven reflects a pattern of intellectual openness and ongoing engagement with new research contexts that is itself an embodiment of the self-directed, meaning-oriented learning he has spent his career studying and promoting. The honorary doctorate awarded by the University of Antwerp in 2016 recognised the cumulative significance of a body of work that — in its combination of theoretical rigour, empirical depth, international reach, and practical consequence — stands among the major contributions to the science of learning made in the last three decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first century.

• Vermunt, J. D. (1992). Leerstijlen en sturen van leerprocessen in het hoger onderwijs [Learning styles and guiding learning processes in higher education]. Swets & Zeitlinger.
• Vermunt, J. D. (1995). Process-oriented instruction in learning and thinking strategies. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 10(4), 325–349.
• Vermunt, J. D. (1996). Metacognitive, cognitive and affective aspects of learning styles and strategies: A phenomenographic analysis. Higher Education, 31(1), 25–50.
• Vermunt, J. D. (1998). The regulation of constructive learning processes. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 68(2), 149–171.
• Vermunt, J. D., & Verloop, N. (1999). Congruence and friction between learning and teaching. Learning and Instruction, 9(3), 257–280.
• Vermunt, J. D. (2005). Relations between student learning patterns and personal and contextual factors and academic performance. Higher Education, 49(3), 205–234.
• Vermunt, J. D., & Vermetten, Y. J. (2004). Patterns in student learning: Relationships between learning strategies, conceptions of learning, and learning orientations. Educational Psychology Review, 16(4), 359–384.
• Vermunt, J. D., & Endedijk, M. D. (2011). Patterns in teacher learning in different phases of the professional career. Learning and Individual Differences, 21(3), 294–302.
• Vermunt, J. D., Vrikki, M., Dudley, P., & Warwick, P. (2023). Relations between teacher learning patterns, personal and contextual factors, and learning outcomes in the context of Lesson Study. Teaching and Teacher Education, 121.