Learning styles: a comfortable idea that measurement does not support

Few ideas in education have spread as widely or as easily as the notion that each student has a learning style — visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, or one of the dozens of other schemes in circulation — and that teaching matched to that style will produce better learning. It is intuitive, it is kind, and it has survived a great deal of evidence that does not support it.

What exactly is being claimed

It is worth separating two claims that are usually run together.

The first is that people differ in how they prefer to receive material. That is uncontroversial. Ask a room and they will tell you, and their answers will be stable.

The second is the one that carries all the practical weight: that matching instruction to the stated preference produces better learning than not matching it (Pashler et al., 2008). This is called the meshing hypothesis, and it is the claim that matters, because the whole practice of labelling students rests on it. It is also the claim that has repeatedly failed to hold when tested properly — where students are sorted by preference, taught in matched and mismatched conditions, and then assessed on what they actually learned.

Preferring to be taught a certain way and learning better that way are two different findings. The first is well established. The second is what the practice depends on, and it is not. (Pashler et al., 2008)

Why the idea persists

It persists because preference is real and felt. A student who prefers diagrams genuinely does feel more comfortable with diagrams, and comfort is easily mistaken for learning. It also persists because the alternative sounds harsh — that a student struggling with a subject may need more practice rather than a different modality.

And it persists because it offers an explanation for failure that blames nobody. If a student did poorly, the teaching did not match their style. This is a more comfortable account than the available alternatives, and comfort is a powerful preservative for a weak idea.

What does appear to matter

The material's own nature governs the modality far more than the student's preference does. Geometry is taught visually because it is spatial, not because some students are visual. A language's pronunciation is taught aurally because it is sound. Asking a student to learn map-reading through listening, on the grounds that they are an auditory learner, is not personalisation; it is removing the information.

What does differ between students, and does have measurable consequence, is prior knowledge, reading fluency, working memory load, and the amount of deliberate practice they have put in. These are less flattering to measure and considerably more useful.

What to do with a student who says they are a visual learner

Nothing dismissive. The preference is real information about what they find comfortable, and comfort has a genuine effect on whether a student engages at all. Use it where the material permits. But do not build a plan on it, do not label the student, and above all do not let the label become a reason they cannot do something. A student who has been told they are not a verbal learner has been handed an explanation for giving up on reading, and they will use it.