Catering to Learning Styles Isn't Just Ineffective: It Can Harm Learning

By Cindy Nebel

In a recent conversation on Twitter, an educator asked for an explanation for the learning styles myth. Lots of individuals spoke up to explain why it is considered a myth and why it can be problematic. We’ve discussed learning styles many times before (e.g. here, here, here, and here), but here’s a very short synopsis:

Learning Styles

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 Current Study

The study in question is Kraemer et al., 2017 (1). They were particularly interested in the way in which people navigate through environments, whether people with different learning styles do this in different ways, and if those differences matter. Here’s what they did:

Image from Pixabay

Participants watched as they traveled through a fake city. At each intersection, they were told to pick out one or two landmarks that they could use to remember where they were later on. They then went through the city again and this time were told at each intersection to try to remember which direction they were about to turn. After navigating the city twice, the participants were shown a series of landmarks and asked whether they had appeared in the city. This task was considered more verbal because most people describe these pictures in their heads (e.g. “a gray building that looks like a castle”) Next, participants were given a test where they were shown one intersection and then a second intersection and asked to “point” in the direction of the first intersection as if they were standing in the city (they actually did this on a keypad). This task was considered more visual because it’s difficult to verbalize these kinds of spatial directions). Participants then took a questionnaire to determine whether they were visual or verbal learners (or neutral, although these individuals weren’t of central interest to the study).

And surprisingly, it DID matter! Individuals who self-reported being more verbal performed better on the more verbal task (landmark recognition), whereas visual learners performed better on the more visual task (the direction task).

Image from cited source

But it’s important to note here that there was no instructor trying to match instruction to style. They were doing something the way they preferred to do it. In Experiment 2, the researchers tried to manipulate the way participants actually engaged with the task. During the first run through the city, participants were either told to describe out loud (verbally) the landmarks that they would use to remember the route or they were told to draw (visually) the landmarks. During the second run through the city, participants then either said out loud which way they would turn (verbal) or pointed to the direction they thought would turn (visual). Participants were again assessed on their verbal and visual memory of the scene as well as their learning style.

This is getting complicated, so let’s stop for a second and think about this. If learning style matters, then those participants who received the instruction that matched their style should perform much better than those who are forced to use a strategy that doesn’t match their style. Alternatively, if learning style doesn’t matter, then everyone who used a verbal strategy should do better on the verbal task and vice versa.

Image from Pixabay

And the latter is exactly what they found. When they looked at the results of Experiment 2, learning style no longer mattered. Strategy mattered. The way they students studied mattered. When their study strategy (verbalizing landmarks or visually drawing them) matched the way they were assessed (either on their verbal recognition of landmarks or their visual memory of spatial navigation), they performed best. This means that likely, in Experiment 1, verbal learners were using their preferred strategy and therefore performed better on the verbal test… not because they are verbal learners, but because they used a verbal strategy!

Implications

Let’s think of the implications of this for our own students. As an educator, this very clearly means that you should match instruction to material. What do you want your students to learn? Teach them that way. And ideally provide both modalities so that they can remember things in more than one way.

But this also has implications for what our learners are doing on their own. I recently heard an educator say that they advise their visual learners to study in a way that matchers their learning style in order to maximize engagement. That’s an intuitive and commendable goal, but this study shows that it may be misguided. If the material really is not appropriate for purely visual study, that student may be at a disadvantage because they have not maximized their learning by using the strategy that best matches the material.

Bottom Line

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.