The Myth of Teaching to Learning Styles

This week’s article summary is 3 Reasons Most Teachers Still Believe the Learning Styles Myth, and it’s a follow-up to last week’s summary which focused more generally on the persistent popularity of many learning myths.

This week’s article deals specifically with the myth of learning styles.

The article’s author, Daniel Willingham, in his book Why Student Don't Like School, my favorite education book, explains why teaching to learning styles is a myth.

Yes, most of us have a preferred sense for receiving information—visual, auditory, kinesthetic. However, the ultimate key to learning is not how information is received but how it is stored (and then retrieved) from long-term memory.

And, as last week’s article outlined, there are research-supported techniques that help us store content in memory more successfully than others. As an example, frequently revisiting content over a long period time is a much more effective technique than highlighting in a textbook as it makes learning much more active and over time stimulates and myelinates brain synapses. (I can’t wait to brag to my parents that I used the word ‘myelinates’ in a sentence.)

Willingham’s article below surmises on the reasons why so many of us continue to believe in this myth.

Yes, good pedagogy ensures different senses are stimulated but also provides research-supported ways for students to store and remember content knowledge.

Joe

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I concluded that many teachers believe learning-styles theory is accurate in about 2003. It was perhaps the second or third time I had given a public talk to teachers. I mentioned it in passing as an example of a theory that sounds plausible but is wrong, and I felt an immediate change in the air. Several people said “Wait, what? Can you please back up a slide?”

Since then I’ve written a couple of articles about learning styles, created a video on the subject, and put an FAQ on my website. Recently I was on NPR’s Science Friday radio program to talk about learning styles and other neuromyths.

I put energy into dispelling the learning styles myth because I thought that audience of educators was representative—that is, that most teachers think the theory is right.

In recent surveys learning styles theory was endorsed by 93% of the public and 76% of educators.

Why is acceptance of the idea so high? No one really knows, but here’s my tripartite guess.

First, I think by this point it’s achieved the status of one of those ideas that “They” have figured out. People believe it for the same reason I believe atomic theory. I’ve never seen the scientific papers supporting it, but everyone believes the theory and my teachers taught it to me, so why would I doubt that it’s right?

Second, I think learning styles theory is widely accepted because the idea is so appealing. It would be so nice if it were true. It predicts that a struggling student would find much of school work easier if we made a relatively minor change to lesson plans—make sure the auditory learners are listening, the visual learners are watching, and so on.

Third, something quite close to the theory is not only right, it’s obvious. The style distinctions (visual versus auditory; verbal versus visual) often correspond to real differences in ability. Some people are better with words, some with space, and so on. The (incorrect) twist that learning styles theory adds is to suggest that everyone can reach the same cognitive goal via these different abilities; that if I’m good with space but bad with words (or better, if I prefer space to words), you can rearrange a verbal task so that it plays to my spatial strength.

That’s where the idea goes wrong. First, the reason we make the distinction between types of tasks is that they are separable in the brain and mind; we think verbal and visual are fundamentally different, not fungible. Second, while there are tasks that can be tackled in more than one way, these tasks are usually much easier when done in one way or another. For example, if I give you a list of concrete nouns, one at a time, and ask you to remember them, you could do this task verbally (by repeating the word to yourself, thinking of meaning, etc.) or visually (by creating a visual mental image). Even for people who are not very good at imagery, the latter method is a better method of doing the task. People’s alleged learning styles don’t count for anything in accounting for task performance, but the effect of a strategy on a task are huge.

A final note: I frequently hear from teachers that they learned about the theory in teacher education classes. I've looked at all of the well-known educational psychology textbooks, and none of them present the idea as correct. But neither do they debunk it. Debunking these ideas in ed psych textbooks ought to help.