The Myth of Learning Styles

Have you ever been taught something that seemed to make so much sense, and you accepted it as the “truth” only to later find out that it was false? I recently had that realization with Learning styles. When I was in grad school in 2008, learning styles were taught as the gospel truth. They are now so widely accepted that we don’t stop to question them when they are referenced.

Did you know there is no credible evidence that learning styles exist?!

In their article, The Myth of Learning Styles in Change The Magazine of Higher Learning (Riener, Willingham August 2010), Cedar Riener, assistant professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College, and Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, break down this deeply held educational myth. It has me questioning everything! 

Not only is there no actual research supporting learning styles, but they also support racist, classist, and ableist views of learners. So why have they persisted for so long? Partially, it is because they are built on a solid claim that learners are different and that we need to meet them where they are to help them learn and grow. Reiner and Willingham state that “in claiming that learning styles do not exist, we are not saying that all learners are the same. Rather, we assert that a certain number of dimensions (ability, background knowledge, interest) vary from person to person and are known to affect learning. The emphasis on learning styles, we think, often comes at the cost of attention to these other important dimensions.”

Another reason they persist is that students are predisposed to specific ways that information is presented. For example, a favorite mode of presentation (e.g., visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) often indicates a preference for tasks for which one has high ability and at which a learner feels successful. When put to the test, under controlled conditions, the research does not support this and instead has found they make no difference—learning is the same whether students learn in the preferred mode or not.

I love the example that they present in the article: 

As we begin to explore this myth, we inevitably look at the learning opportunities lost by holding onto an outdated belief. Research on memory and the brain has grown in the last thirty years since this myth began to gain traction, and holding onto it doesn’t allow us to fully engage with these new ideas. Then we must also ask, who is left out when we hold onto this myth? Students who have had the privilege to practice accessing various presentation styles are more likely to be classified as naturally smart or good learners. These ideas feed into a fixed model of intelligence, which is problematic. Finally, instructional choices, like showing a video in class, may be designed to benefit specific types of “learners” instead of considering important aspects like learners’ background/prior knowledge.      

What can we learn from breaking down this myth beyond the fact that we should stop referencing this outdated learner classification? As teachers, facilitators, and designers, we need to work with learning researchers and strive to understand their emerging findings. The field of instruction and learning should not be a fixed set of absolute truths; instead, we should think of it as an ever-evolving and deepening understanding of how people interact with new information.