Are Learning Styles a Myth? What the Evidence Says

Are you a visual learner? An auditory one? Perhaps a kinaesthetic learner, someone who learns by doing? Many people can answer at once, because many of us were told at school which one we were. The idea feels obviously right: people differ, so surely they should be taught differently.

It is one of the most widespread beliefs about education. And the evidence for it, in the form most people know, is close to nonexistent.

That is a strong claim, so it is worth seeing exactly how researchers reached it.

What the theory actually claims

The label 'learning styles' covers dozens of different models, but the version most people have met rests on what researchers call the meshing hypothesis: the idea that teaching works best when it matches a learner's preferred mode. A 'visual learner' should get diagrams, an 'auditory learner' should get talk and discussion, and so on.

Notice what this claim is not. It is not that people have preferences - they obviously do. It is not that people differ in their abilities - they obviously do too. It is the much more specific claim that matching the teaching to a person's style makes them learn more.

The test almost nobody ran

In 2008 four cognitive psychologists, Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork, published a review in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Their task was to decide whether learning-styles practices in schools were supported by scientific evidence.

They began by describing what a convincing study would have to look like. First, classify learners by style. Then randomly assign learners of each style to different teaching methods. Then give everyone the same final test. The theory predicts a crossover: visual learners should do best with visual teaching, while verbal learners should do best with verbal teaching. If one method simply works better for everybody, that tells you about the method, not about styles.

The literature on learning styles is enormous. Yet the reviewers found that very few studies had used a design capable of testing the idea at all, and several of those that had found results that flatly contradicted it. Their conclusion was that there was no adequate evidence base for building learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.

They were careful to add a caveat that is easy to skip over: many possible versions of learning styles have simply never been tested properly, so the question is not closed forever. But the burden of proof has not been met, and schools had adopted the idea long before anyone checked.

Why smart people still believe it

In 2012, Sanne Dekker, Nikki Lee, Paul Howard-Jones and Jelle Jolles surveyed 242 primary and secondary school teachers in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, all of them interested in the neuroscience of learning. The teachers rated 32 statements about the brain, 15 of which were well-known myths.

On average, the teachers believed 49% of the myths. The learning-styles statement was among the most believed of all: 93% of the British teachers and 96% of the Dutch teachers judged it correct. Another favourite was the idea that differences between 'left-brain' and 'right-brain' dominance explain differences between learners.

The most uncomfortable finding was this: teachers who knew more about the brain in general were more likely to believe the myths, not less. Enthusiasm plus some knowledge seems to make a plausible-sounding idea easier to swallow. It is fair to add that this was a self-selected group of interested teachers in two countries, so the exact percentages will not hold everywhere. They do show how far the idea had travelled.

The myth survives for understandable reasons. Preferences are real and easy to notice in yourself. The idea is flattering and sounds respectful of individual differences. And, as Dekker's team pointed out, it grows from a real fact bent out of shape: different kinds of sensory information are processed in different parts of the brain, but those parts are heavily interconnected. Knowledge is not filed away in a visual or auditory format that you can only reach through one door.

What actually works

If learning styles are the wrong lever, what are the right ones? In 2013, John Dunlosky and four colleagues rated ten popular study techniques against the research. Two received a high utility rating because they helped learners of different ages and abilities across many kinds of tests:

• Practice testing: pulling information out of memory, for example with flashcards or by answering questions without looking at your notes.
• Distributed practice: spreading study sessions out over time instead of cramming them together.

Highlighting and rereading, which most students say they rely on, were rated low utility because they do not consistently improve performance.

The testing effect has an elegant demonstration. In 2006, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students either restudy a prose passage or take recall tests on it. When the final test came five minutes later, restudying won. When it came two days or a week later, the students who had tested themselves remembered substantially more - even though the restudiers felt more confident about how much they would remember.

For spacing, a 2006 review by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues pooled 839 comparisons from 317 experiments on verbal memory. One of its clearest lessons was that the best gap between study sessions depends on how long you need to remember: the further away the test, the longer the ideal gap.

Notice what these techniques have in common: they help nearly everyone. The best way to present material depends much more on the material than on the learner. Geometry needs diagrams, a poem needs words, and a new language needs to be heard.

What this means for you

• Keep your preferences, drop the label. It is fine to enjoy diagrams or prefer listening. Just do not let 'I'm not a visual person' stop you from using the format the subject needs.
• Swap some rereading for self-testing. Close the book, write down what you remember, then check what you missed.
• Space it out. Several shorter sessions spread over a week tend to beat one long session the night before.
• Expect good studying to feel harder. In the Roediger and Karpicke study, the students who felt more confident were the ones who remembered less a week later.

The learning style test, the test on whether you think in pictures, diagrams or words, and the deep or surface study approach test on this site can describe your preferences and habits, which is genuinely useful self-knowledge. What they cannot do - and what no questionnaire can do - is prove that you must be taught in one particular way. Treat the result as a description of how you like to work, not a rule about how you are able to learn.