Catering to learning styles isn't just ineffective: It can harm learning

https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2021/9/16-1

The learning styles meshing hypothesis explains that individuals have preferred learning styles (e.g. auditory, visual, etc.) and that instruction that matches that preference will improve learning. This theory has no empirical evidence to support it and it’s a bit dangerous. I once had a student inform me that they would be dropping my class because it was too auditory and they were a visual learner – it would be impossible for them to learn from me. They thought they were unable to learn in another way. Similarly, it’s a heavy burden on instructors to differentiate learning in this way, catering to individual styles.

But someone also commented that matching instruction to learning style might actually HURT learning and cited a paper I hadn’t read before, so today I’m summarizing that research for all of us to expand our understanding of whether and how the learning styles hypothesis might be more problematic than just ineffective.

The bottom line from this study is that we should match our learning and teaching strategies to the material that we are learning and the way in which we will need to use it later on. This *does* indicate that the way individuals are using the learning styles hypothesis could be worse than just “not effective” – it might actually be hurting students.

Reference: (1) Kraemer, D. J., 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, and Cognition, 43(4), 611.

My understanding of this paper is that study materials should dictate teaching strategy, unless students cannot access it due to deficit. For example, trying to teach hard-to-verbalize information (like faces or relative direction) using verbal instructions was shown to be less effective.

This paper also showed that individuals’ learning strategies, which may be associated with one’s verbal and visual cognitive styles, can be changed by teaching instructions, suggesting that optimizing teaching instructions is more efficient than preparing separate instructions for different learning styles.