Cobra Effect · Learning and memory
The learning styles myth
Matching lessons to a preferred style does not improve learning.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:20, with a test and sources.
A teacher is told her class contains visual learners and auditory learners.
She is asked to plan every lesson three ways, so each child gets their own channel. It sounds humane. It sounds like paying attention to children. It has almost no evidence behind it.
The claim is not that people differ. Of course they do.
People have preferences, and they will tell you theirs happily. The claim is much stronger. It says teaching matched to a preference produces more learning. That part can be tested, and it is the part that has to be.
In 2008 four psychologists went looking for the evidence.
Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork reviewed the literature. The test they wanted is simple. Teach some people their way and some the other way, then give everyone the same exam. Matching should win for both groups. Almost no study had been built that way. The few that had found results pointing the other way.
It made no difference, and everybody carried on believing it.
In 2020 Philip Newton and Atharva Salvi gathered up the surveys of teachers and lecturers. Across them, about 9 in 10 educators said that matching teaching to a style helps. The idea is kind, it is flattering, and it explains a bad lesson without blaming anyone.
What does help is the material, not the pupil.
A map is better drawn than described. A melody is better heard than explained. A picture alongside an explanation helps nearly everybody, whatever they say they prefer. The right form is the one the subject demands.
So stop asking how someone learns. Ask what the thing is.
If a pupil says she is a visual learner, hear a preference, not a diagnosis. Then pick the form that fits the material, and check afterwards whether she can do it. A preference tells you what will feel good. Only a test tells you what got through.
Sources
- Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork, 2008. The review that asked what a proper test would look like and found that almost nobody had run one. Search the title for the paper. This page covers it and the reaction.
- Why Don’t Students Like School?, Daniel T. Willingham, 2009. A cognitive scientist on what classrooms get wrong, including why children are far more alike than different in how they learn. This is his page.
- The Learning Scientists, Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki. Short, practical posts on what the evidence actually supports, including a patient one on why the styles idea will not die.
Nearby ideas
- Dual coding. Words and pictures together stick better than either alone.
- The replication crisis. Why many famous findings vanished when others tried them again.
- The illusion of competence. Feeling familiar with material is not the same as knowing it.
- Sleep and consolidation. Sleep is when the day’s learning gets filed away.
- The spacing effect. Spread your study out over time and it lasts far longer.
- The testing effect. Pulling an answer from memory teaches more than reading it again.
- Desirable difficulties. The practice that feels hardest is often the practice that sticks.
- Interleaving. Mixing problem types feels worse and teaches better.