We don't test Option 3 - Learning in a way that matches your personal learning style

At the beginning of the workshop, I ask students to vote on which option they think is the real answer and this is consistently one of the top two selected by the students. It's also one of the most pervasive pieces of bad science floating around educational theory.

First, a little background. (Based on Hattie & Yates, 2014)

There are over 20 different models of learning styles but most are based around the VAK model which looks at the ways we prefer to take in information. 

• Visual learners do best with diagrams, pictures or spatial relations

• Auditory learners do best with hearing information

• Kinaesthetic learners do best by movement, action and doing things with their hands.

It's easy to find a questionnaire online that will allow you to assess someone's learning style and there is also a significant industry based around providing these tests to companies and educational institutions. The idea is that for optimal learning, the teacher needs to match the teaching style with the preferred learning styles of their students. This is also an area that has been heavily researched in recent decades, so what does the research say?

​Academic research can often be a little dry, forcing you to read between the lines. Not so much in this area, here are a selection of comments by key researchers:

The reason researchers roll their eyes at learning styles is the utter failure to find that assessing children's learning styles and matching them to instructional methods has any effect on their learning. (Stahl, 1999)

 the research evidence has been clear, consistent and convincing: learning styles are invalid, unreliable and have a negligible impact on practice. (Coffield, 2013)

there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice... limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base

(from a major study commissioned by the American Association for Psychological Science, Pashler et at, 2008)

This was the only piece of the psychology of human learning that I encountered during my teacher training and it is very pervasive. Like any bit of bad science, it is based around some truths. There are different ways to take in information. When learning about how to shade a drawing, we can tell students how to do it, we can demonstrate or show visual examples and we can get them to try it. People often exhibit preferences for certain ways to take in information - I love a good diagram and my wife can attest to the fact that I have limited patience in listening to people. Everyone will have their preferences, however the problems arises when we make the assumption that we learn better through those modes. That simply isn't supported by the evidence. Everyone will learn shading better with a combination of the explanation, example and practice. People will learn more about shading by watching a demonstration than listening someone talk about it. Basically, while people are different, they are much more alike than they are different. A lesson or study routine that works really well for one person will, at the very least, work quite well for everyone else.

Hattie & Yates summarise the topic well in Visible Learning (2014):

The notion that one style of instruction [or study method] can advantage one type of student, but disadvantage another type of student, remains unsupported by any known evidence and is simply wrong.

Further reading