Are learning styles just a myth?

The biggest myth is the field of Learning & Development it that it is beneficial to teach to people’s preferred learning styles. For years, people believed that they have a preferred learning style- either visual, auditory or kinesthetic despite having no educational, psychological or neuroscientific basis. The concept seems to remain popular, in part, because learning by our preferred style leads us to feel like we have learned, even though we haven’t!
Why is it popular?
In a fascinating study, Abby Knoll, a doctoral student at Central Michigan University, gave students a learning styles questionnaire to assess their preference for either words (auditory) or pictures (visual) and tested their ability to learn, using a memory exercise. Crucially, he also asked participants how well they believe they had performed on either word or picture tasks. They found a strong relationship between participants learning styles and their judgements of learning (e.g.. word exercise with auditory learning preference) However, learning styles were found to be unrelated to the actual recall of words. Thus while participants felt more confident when they had learnt their ‘preferred way’ it didn’t make any difference to their performance.
So what?
It is harmful to employees and students who are taught and encourage to learn based on their preferred learning styles. The waste of resources encouraging L&D professionals to learn and utilize an approach that isn’t valid could also be avoided. Because we are all visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners, L&D functions and teachers should use all these categories and avoid categorizing, in turn avoiding self-imposed barriers to learning (if not taught to your preferred style!)
How can we make our learning more effective and efficient?
Williams College psychologist Nate Kornell suggests three evidence ways to study and learn more effectively:
- Spacing effect: Read of the material and then allow yourself to forget. Avoid mass study where you study something, and then restudy immediately. At work, this could mean attending a workshop and then attending to it again after 3-months, this would help consolidate learning and shift behaviour.
- Retrieval practice: Avoid passive reading or activity, and instead test yourself. A lot of people re-read their notes or prefer to listen in the classroom, however, it is a less effective learning technique. The process of testing yourself helps internalize key concepts and reveals how much you know about the topic. By encourage workshop participants to teach their team afterwards will also help them with retrieval practice (as a good teacher you have to you have to recall the critical information, organize your thoughts and deliver the key concepts)
- Look out for overconfidence: When something is easy, you are not learning. If it feels difficult, you are increasing your knowledge and challenging what you already know. Identify the crutch that is making something easy for you (e.g. taking the same test) and learn to live with the discomfort of learning. Teaching the content to someone else stops you from becoming overconfident and avoid the ‘illusion of explanatory depth’ (where you think you can explain something but you can’t!)
So if you’re using learning styles to inform your training or classroom pedagogy, it’s time to stop and instead draw on decades of research that demonstrates that spacing, retrieval and avoiding overconfidence helps people to learn more effectively.
