The learning styles myth is not the observation that people have format preferences. They do, and they will tell you what theirs are. It is the next step: the claim that teaching someone in their preferred format makes them learn more. That claim is one of the most widely shared beliefs in education, held by thoughtful teachers and taught on training courses, and it is the part the research does not support.¹ A 2008 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest set out the one experiment that could test the claim, searched the literature for it, and found the field had almost never run it.²

What the learning styles myth actually claims

The learning styles myth is what researchers call the meshing hypothesis: the idea that instruction works best when its format matches the learner’s stated preference, so a visual learner gets pictures and an auditory learner gets speech. Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego, and three colleagues named it in a 2008 review of the evidence.

Two claims are stacked inside that idea, and only the first is safe. People have preferences, and Pashler’s team report ample evidence that children and adults, asked how they would rather receive information, answer readily. That acting on the preference improves what the learner ends up knowing does not follow, and that is the claim the evidence has to carry.²

Think of a colleague who would rather take a long report as audio than as a PDF. The preference is a fact about what they enjoy. Whether they can tell you what was in it on Friday is a separate fact.

There is also no single theory to check. A 2004 systematic review for the UK’s Learning and Skills Research Centre counted 71 published learning-styles models; VARK and Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory are only the best known.³

Myth

If you know your learning style, you can pick the study format that will teach you the most.

Fact

A preference tells you what feels comfortable. Across the studies designed to test it, matching the format to the preference has not reliably changed what people learned.

The practical lesson is a change of question. Instead of asking which format suits you, ask what you can still recall days later with the material closed. That is the test the habits with the strongest evidence, testing yourself and spacing your study sessions out, are built around, and they work whether you read, watch or listen.⁴

Why the idea feels right, and what is true underneath it

Three true things sit underneath the learning styles myth, which is why careful people believe it. Format preferences are real and reasonably consistent. Some material genuinely does have a best format. And what a learner already knows changes what teaching suits them. Pashler’s review grants all three, and none of them adds up to matching.²

Take the second. The review’s own example is that a writing course is mostly words while teaching geometry obviously needs visual and spatial materials. That is matching, but it matches the format to the subject, which is one decision for the whole room.

The third is about differences teachers really do see. One colleague understands the new expense system from the two-minute demo video; another only gets it from the one-page list of steps. Pashler’s team say outright that they do not dispute such differences. What they dispute is the jump to sorting people into types and teaching each type differently.²

Then there is the pull of the label. Most learning-styles schemes are type theories, descended from the same tradition as the Myers-Briggs test, and the review notes that finding out what type of person one is has a deep and lasting appeal. The label also consoles: if a student is not doing well, a mismatch is an easier thought.²

So keep the observation and drop the sorting. Noticing that a colleague needs a different explanation is good teaching. Writing “kinesthetic learner” next to their name is the point where the evidence stops following you.

The experiment that can settle it, and why so few researchers ran it

Settling the question takes one design, which Pashler’s review spells out: sort learners into style groups, randomly assign people from each group to each teaching format, and give everyone the same final test. Matching wins only if each group does best with a different format, the pattern researchers call a crossover interaction.²

That last condition is the whole test, and most learning-styles research skips it. A study showing that visual learners scored higher overall proves nothing about matching; they may simply be stronger readers. A study showing that pictures beat words for everybody proves nothing either, because then everybody should get pictures. The lines have to cross.

Two runners, two pairs of shoes. If shoe A is faster for both of them, knowing which runner is which buys you nothing. Only if shoe A suits one and shoe B the other does the sorting earn its keep.

1. What is plotted: test score up the side, the two style groups along the bottom, one line per teaching format
2. Lines cross: each group scores highest on a different format: the only pattern that supports matching
3. Lines stay parallel: one format is ahead for both groups, or neither is: what the well-designed studies report

Pashler’s group turned that standard into a filter and ran the literature through it.

The study

Moderate evidence

The 2008 Pashler review: looking for an experiment the field had not run

Four psychologists defined the experiment that would have to succeed before schools could justify teaching to learning styles, then searched the literature for it. They found one study that even arguably qualified, and several well-designed studies that ran the other way.

The one study that arguably qualified got a cautious reading: only about a third of its participants fell into the groups that produced the effect, and the pattern appeared only after outliers had been dropped for reasons the paper did not give. So the idea was not so much disproved as left untested, and the review says as much: many versions of learning styles have simply never been tested.²

Three studies that looked for the effect and did not find it

Since 2008, teams have built experiments around the crossover design. A 2015 experiment with 121 college-educated adults and a 2020 study with fifth graders did exactly that, and a 2019 survey followed 426 anatomy students through real courses instead. None of the three found a matching benefit.

In the 2015 study, Beth Rogowsky of Bloomsburg University and two colleagues sorted adults into auditory and visual-word learners, then randomly assigned them to hear a book chapter as an audiobook or read it as e-text. Style and format showed no statistically significant relationship on the written comprehension test, taken immediately and again two weeks later, though only half the participants entered that comparison, so the authors warn the comparison may have been underpowered.⁵ The same team repeated the design in 2020 with fifth graders in one rural Pennsylvania school, comparing listening with reading; only 34 children had a clear enough preference to enter the key comparison, and the authors concluded that matching instruction to a student’s learning style had no effect on achievement.⁶

The 2019 study looked at real courses instead of a lab: Polly Husmann and Valerie Dean O’Loughlin of Indiana University gave 426 undergraduate anatomy students the VARK questionnaire and a survey of how they studied. Most were not using the strategies VARK recommended for them, their VARK scores did not track how they did in the course, and where habits and type did line up the alignment showed no link to grades. Particular strategies, such as using the virtual microscope, did track grades, for everyone.⁷

Each has limits, and two of the three are small. Together they say something plain: when researchers go looking for the matching effect, in the lab or in a real course, it has not turned up. If you were told to study in your style and it never seemed to help, that is what this research would predict.

Further reading

• 

  Why Don't Students Like School?

  by Daniel T. Willingham

  A co-author of the 2013 study-techniques review explains why people learn more alike than different, learning styles included.

As an Amazon Associate WiserHours earns from qualifying purchases.

Where the evidence is genuinely unsettled

Two honest caveats belong here. A recent meta-analysis did find a small average benefit from matching, and a separate research tradition finds that instruction sometimes should differ between learners, though not by their preferred format.

Virginia Clinton-Lisell and Christine Litzinger of the University of North Dakota pooled 21 studies of matching and found a small average benefit (g = 0.31), a difference you would struggle to notice in one classroom. Only about a quarter of the outcomes showed the crossover pattern the theory predicts, and most of the studies that did show it fell short of quality standards. Their own verdict is that the benefits are too small and too infrequent to justify widespread adoption.⁸

The older tradition asks whether learners of different ability need different teaching, and Pashler’s review surveys it. Some studies found that learners with lower measured ability did better with highly structured instruction while stronger learners did better with less structure; others found no such interaction.² That question is live, but it is about prior knowledge and skill, which can be measured against outcomes, rather than about a preferred channel.

So treat “what suits this learner” as a question about what they already know and what the task demands, and check the answer against results rather than against a questionnaire.

Why the belief lasts, and what it costs

Belief has not faded with the evidence. A 2020 systematic review by Philip Newton and Atharva Salvi of Swansea University pooled 37 studies covering 15,405 educators in 18 countries and found 89 percent agreed that matching instruction to learning styles is effective, with no sign of decline over the decade it covered. Agreement among trainee teachers was higher still, and about 80 percent said they used matching or meant to.¹

More training goes with less of the belief, but not with none of it. In a 2017 online survey run through a brain-testing website, educators and people with high exposure to neuroscience endorsed the learning-styles statement less often than US adults with some college education, but more than three in four of them still did.⁹ Everyone in that study volunteered, so none of the groups represents a population in particular.

What believers take themselves to be believing matters too. Shaylene Nancekivell and two colleagues at the University of Michigan surveyed 331 US adults who all said they believed in learning styles, and most of them agreed that a style sits in the brain, that people are born predisposed to one, and that it predicts their career.¹⁰ That is a preference label carrying the weight of a diagnosis.

Two costs follow. The first is effort: an educator acting on the answers would have to build and keep up four or more versions of the same lesson, for no apparent benefit. The second is the label, and Newton and Salvi’s own example is a student told they are an auditory learner who concludes there is no point taking up a visual subject such as art.¹

What to do instead of sorting learners into types

Spend the effort on the choices that help everyone in the room. Pick the format the material needs rather than the format the learner prefers. Give everybody the pictures, instead of saving them for the people who call themselves visual. And judge a session by what people can still recall days later, not by how comfortable it felt: testing yourself and spacing sessions out both work that way, and neither cares which format you like.

That middle point is worth separating from the myth, because the two sound alike. In the laboratory task Pashler’s review singles out, words shown as line drawings of the objects were recalled better than the same words spoken aloud, and visualizer-verbalizer scores bore no clear relation to who gained.² The picture helped everyone in that task, which is not the same as some people needing a visual channel.

WiserHours

Swap the style question for these

• Ask what the material needs: a diagram, a demonstration or plain prose
• Give the diagrams to everyone, not only to the self-described visual learners
• Shut the material and write down what you remember
• Leave days, not minutes, before the next pass over it
• Check yourself cold a week later, and believe that score over how it felt

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/learning/learning-styles-myth/#checklist-learning-styles-myth-swap

The bottom line

Preferences are real. The teaching practice built on them is not. The experiments capable of testing whether matching teaching to a learning style helps are rare, and they have not produced a benefit that holds up.² Belief among educators, meanwhile, has not moved.¹ If you take one thing from the research, take the swap: stop asking which format suits you and start asking what you can recall days later with the page closed.