The Myths of Learning Styles

This week’s article summary is The Myth of Learning Styles.

When I was a kid the type of classroom I liked had textbooks, reading assignments, and handouts. I liked classroom discussions (especially as I got older) but really didn’t get much out of  group projects.

As you’ll see from the article below, while the idea of learning styles remains popular in schools, the reality is that knowing what you prefer doesn’t correlate with how you actually learn. I may prefer steak to hamburger, yet either one fills my stomach when I’m hungry.

The article includes a popular learning style inventory called VARK, a set of 16 questions that helps identify whether you prefer learning experience that are aural, visual, kinesthetic, or reading/writing.

Based on what I wrote in the first sentence about the type of classroom I preferred, my VARK results of Read/Write (11), Aural (4), Visual (1), Kinesthetic (0) seem pretty accurate.

Yet knowing how you like to absorb material is much different from how you actually place it in your long-term memory. As a student, I may have like to read textbooks but to learn the material I needed to employ many different strategies to remember, let alone be able to apply, it.

So, the take away from the article is it’s not bad for teachers to talk to students about how they like information presented to them, yet regardless of how we like to receive information there are certain techniques that are much more effective  to learn/memorize/remember content.

Joe

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In the early ‘90s, a New Zealand man named Neil Fleming decided to sort through something that had puzzled him during his time monitoring classrooms as a school inspector. In the course of watching 9,000 different classes, he noticed that only some teachers were able to reach each and every one of their students. What were they doing differently? Fleming zeroed in on how it is that people like to be presented information. For example, when asking for directions, do you prefer to be told where to go or to have a map sketched for you?

Today, 16 questions like this comprise the vark questionnaire that Fleming developed to determine someone’s “learning style.” Vark, which stands for “Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic," sorts students into those who learn best visually, through aural or heard information, through reading, or through “kinesthetic” experiences.

Experts aren’t sure how the concept spread, but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Everyone was special—so everyone must have a special learning style, too.

The thing is we don’t. Or at least, a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. In a recent study, thousands of college students took the vark questionnaire to determine what kind of learner they supposedly were. The survey then gave them some study strategies that seem like they would correlate with that learning style. Not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests.

The study’s conclusion is that students typically develop certain study habits, which, once formed, are hard to break. While the students in the study seemed interested in their learning styles, they did not adjust their established study strategies based on them. And even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered.

Another recent study found that students who preferred learning visually thought they would remember pictures better, and those who preferred learning verbally thought they’d remember words better. But those preferences had no correlation to which they actually remembered better later on—words or pictures. Essentially, all the “learning style” meant, in this case, was that the subjects liked words or pictures better, not that words or pictures worked better for their memories.

‘There’s evidence that people do try to treat tasks in accordance with what they believe to be their learning style, but it doesn’t help them,” says Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. In 2015, he reviewed the literature on learning styles and concluded that “learning styles theories have not panned out.”

That same year, a Journal of Educational Psychology paper found no relationship between the study subjects’ learning-style preference (visual or auditory) and their performance on reading- or listening-comprehension tests. Instead, the visual learners performed best on all kinds of tests. Therefore, the authors concluded, teachers should stop trying to gear some lessons toward “auditory learners.” “Educators may actually be doing a disservice to auditory learners by continually accommodating their auditory learning style,” they wrote, “rather than focusing on strengthening their visual word skills.”

The reality is people have different abilities, not styles. Some people read better than others; some people hear worse than others. But most of the tasks we encounter are only really suited to one type of learning. You can’t visualize a perfect French accent, for example.

Yet the "learning styles" idea has snowballed—with more than 90% of teachers believing it. The concept is intuitively appealing, promising to reveal secret brain processes with just a few questions.

Willingham and others recommends that people should stop thinking of themselves as visual, verbal, or some other kind of learner.  Everyone is able to think in words, everyone is able to think in mental images. It’s much better to think of everyone having a toolbox of ways to think, and think to yourself, which tool is best?

The most important thing, for anyone looking to learn something new, is just to really focus on the material.

So, in other words, learning styles inventories might help you learn about yourself, but they will not help you learn material.