The Mythology of Learning Styles
A few years ago, I decided to swap out the hard drive in my laptop for a solid-state drive. I know my way around a user interface, but I’m not really an IT person, and hardware generally isn’t my strong suit. On the other hand, my Google-fu is pretty strong, and I was sure that I could find a good walk-through.
Before I go any further, I have a confession to make: I love words. And not words as stand-ins for other things, but words, in and of themselves. Maybe you’re one of those people who see pictures in your head while reading a novel? Lots of my bibliophile friends are like this. I’m not. I feel the words in my mouth. I hear them in my ears. I have no idea what a character looks like, but I know what they would say.
Since I like words so much, it will likely come as no surprise that I frequently prefer to learn by reading. And so, you might think that I would look for written instructions when trying to perform a task that I’d never done before, like changing out a hard drive.
But I didn’t. I went straight to YouTube.
The idea of inadvertently lobotomizing my newish laptop had me a little anxious. And while I checked out the help documentation from the manufacturer, I also wanted to watch someone doing the work in real time. Words were helpful, but I felt safer with the video.
But what if I had been convinced that I was a person who needed to read to learn? That I needed the written word to be able to comprehend a new task — to the point that I wouldn’t seek out information in any other medium? I would have spent a lot more time figuring out the process, and might well have bricked my computer, anyway.
Think how hard it would be for me to assemble IKEA furniture if I were exclusively limited to learning through reading.
When people believe that a learning style or preference is essential to their cognition, they may wall themselves off from the types of materials that are best suited to teaching a particular skill or concept.
Imagine trying to learn how to sculpt from a textbook, or how to calculate a first derivative from an interpretive dance. But a dance major who struggles to learn calculus from a textbook alone might only need a video explanation or a live person to supplement the text, rather than a visit from Martha Graham.
And while anecdotes and personal preferences are not science, the science in support of learning styles is shaky, at best.
In a recent column for American Educator, Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, summarized the history of learning styles this way:
There are scores of learning-styles theories, some going back to the 1940s. Enough research had been conducted by the late 1970s that researchers began to write review articles summing up the field, and they concluded that little evidence supported these theories.
A 2009 literature review conducted by Harold Pashler, et al., supports this, and concluded that “at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.”
In a recent study of verbal and visual processing led by David J.M. Kramer, participants were identified as verbalizers or visualizers through the administration of a questionnaire. They were then presented with navigational tasks after watching videos of virtual cities. Verbalizers were better at recognizing landmarks, while visualizers were better at judging relative directions. When the researchers ran the experiment a second time, they instructed groups of participants to behave like verbalizers or visualizers. What they discovered was that, regardless of the participant’s questionnaire-based identification, simply instructing them to approach the task in a particular way overrode their natural inclinations and eliminated any significant difference that one might expect to find if the preferred style had a limiting effect on the types of cognition the participants were capable of.
But even in the face of current cognitive research that clearly demonstrates that learning styles don’t have scientific validity, learning styles continue to thrive as a concept in contemporary education, most likely because they feel like they make sense — they’re part of the common wisdom, a thing that everybody knows. In 2017, a study conducted by a team led by Kelly McDonald — a psychologist at the University of Houston — tried to better understand some common “neuromyths” held by the general population, as contrasted with a sample of educators at levels ranging from primary education through higher ed. They found that 93% of the general public agreed with the statement that “Individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style,” while only 76% of educators agreed. But even 78% of respondents with high exposure to neuroscience research agreed with the statement. Similarly, “Children have learning styles that are dominated by particular senses” was endorsed by 88% of the general public, 71% of educators, and 68% of respondents with high neuroscience exposure. Even people with high exposure to research that questions the validity of learning styles still continue to believe that learning styles have a basis in fact.
The difficulty here is that presenting information in different formats — which is frequently how instructors approach the incorporation of learning styles into their teaching practices — creates an opportunity for repetition of content in multiple modes, which does improve learning outcomes. So it may look like incorporating learning styles improves outcomes, when improved outcomes are more likely a byproduct of multi-modal instructional content.
All of which is to say, while the idea of an essential learning style doesn’t seem to be supported by science, there is good reason to encourage the use of resources that fit the task at hand, regardless of what students may believe their learning styles to be. Additionally, it seems that a significant part of our task as teachers is to identify the materials that best serve what we are trying to teach. It’s also worthwhile to provide more than one type of resource, in case our own assessment of what type of resource is most useful for a particular task turns out to be wrong, as well as to provide an opportunity for repetition and reinforcement in multiple modes. And finally, in the spirit of continuous improvement, we need to survey and query those resources to determine if they really are meeting the needs of the task and the students.
- Kraemer, D. J. M., Schinazi, V. R., Cawkwell, P. B., Tekriwal, A., Epstein, R. A., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2017). Verbalizing, visualizing, and navigating: The effect of strategies on encoding a large-scale virtual environment. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory & Cognition, 43(4), 611–621. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000314
- Macdonald, K., Germine, L., Anderson, A., Christodoulou, J., & McGrath, L.M. (2017). Dispelling the myth: Training in education or neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths. Frontiers in Psychology (8)1314. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01314
- Pashler, Harold, McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 103–119. doi: 10.1111/j.1539–6053.2009.01038.x
- Willingham, D. (2018, Summer). Does tailoring instruction to “learning styles” help students learn? American Educator, 42(2), 28–32, 41. Retrieved from https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2018/willingham
