The Myth of Learning Styles

When I was in college (in the nineteen hundreds), one of my education classes explored Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I was enamored with the idea. As a doe-eyed college senior, I was destined to enter the classroom and teach to all seven multiple intelligences – musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, intrapersonal, and visual-spatial (and later, the elusive eighth one, naturalistic). The classroom was my oyster. I was ready to take on every student, one learning style at a time.

And for a few decades the prevailing wisdom was to identify learning styles through a student inventory and then craft learning experiences targeting specific learning styles. But in 2008, four researchers (Hal Pashler, Doug Rohrer, Mark McDaniel – of Make it Stick fame, and Robert Bjork – of basically-every-study-ever-in-teaching-and-learning) investigated this in their study Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. And the results were quite damning:

The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing. If classification of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated (p.117).

They found that few studies into learning styles used the appropriate methodology, and those that did were not able to show that teaching to a particular learning style enhanced learning. This is a big deal. It needs more attention. There are at least two earth-shattering consequences of these findings. If educators are dedicating bandwidth towards specific learning styles, that is a Sisphyean task that consumes valuable time that should be allocated to other areas of teaching. More pernicious, though, is the consequence for the student; if students believe they can only learn one way and their teachers do not teach to that style then learning failures are externalized and the student may have difficulty succeeding.

But it wasn’t just those four that came to this conclusion. In 2010, Catherine Scott concluded in her study The Enduring Appeal of ‘Learning Styles’ that:

Learning styles as an idea chimes well with the individualist value system of our culture and fits its dominant, entity, model of human attributes but there is no credible evidence that it is a valid basis for pedagogical decision-making… It has no place in education theory and practice that claim to be scientifically based (p.14).

If you need more convincing, in 2018 Adam Brown and Althea Need Kaminske (in our backyard at St. Bonaventure) pointed out in Five Teaching and Learning Myths Debunked:

As of 2017, “there has not been a single published study that shows evidence that tailor-made learning styles lesson plans improve a student’s achievement. Not only is there no evidence that catering to learning styles helps students, there is good reason to think that it may be holding them back. By tailoring lesson plans to learning styles, presenting material only in students’ preferred mode, we are ignoring weaknesses that can be strengthened (p.56).

The authors also conclude with another damning statement, “Learning styles may be the biggest hoax played on teachers and educators in the past 50 years” (p.56).

Yet the myth persists. Why?

One explanation is that we want to believe this myth. It makes so much sense. Math is hard! I love learning in nature! I can’t learn unless I’m pacing around the room! It’s also easier for students to blame their challenges on the teacher – “my teacher doesn’t teach the way I learn”. Or it might have something to do with the fact that in 2012 there were more than 2,600 textbooks that promoted learning styles (Hughes, 2012). It is a cottage industry. Heck, even Howard Gardner – the father of Multiple Intelligences – admitted it was more of a psychological theory:

Gardner himself acknowledges that his is a psychological theory applied to education and did not originate in neuroscience, nor is the evidence to support his theory found in neuroscience (Tokuhama-Espinosa, Kindle Location 1645).

In 2014, Kristina Dandy and Karen Bedersky published a study that revealed alarming data – 64% of faculty surveyed believed that “teaching to a student’s learning style enhances learning” (the number is higher in K12 educators). Even more alarming was that 88% of students believed that, too.

Despite there being no evidence to support learning styles, it is appropriate to talk with students about learning preferences. That is, how do students perceive that they learn best. This is a nice metacognitive exercise and level-sets your teaching. This is also a great opportunity to talk about the mountain of research disputing learning styles. As an aside, though I do have this conversation in class, it is also worth noting that humans are notoriously wrong when self-identifying learning strategies (see the lecture/active learning study, perceptions of multitasking, efficacy of interleaving, and even affinity for re-reading the textbook as a studying mechanism when we know it is, pound-for-pound, one of the worst ways to study). Which is also a good conversation to have with your students.

You may be asking yourself, “Self, what am I supposed to do with this?”. The answer is fairly simple. Do it all. By that I mean teach using multiple “learning styles”. Demonstrably, this is the best way to reach learners. Switch it up. Be aware of different preferences. In What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain reminds us:

“The great contribution of the learning-styles stuff,” one teacher told us, “is that it called attention to the need to diversify. I don’t think there’s much evidence that most people have exclusive learning styles and can’t learn in any way but one, but I do think that we all benefit from variety” (p.116).