By Kate Cammack, CfT Co-Director
TLDR: Students often explain themselves through learning styles – “I’m an auditory processor,” “I’m a visual learner,” “I don’t really learn by reading.” Here’s what 15+ years of studies in psychology and education actually found about “learning styles”, and how to help students see a more nuanced relationship between their learning, their preferences, and even their identity.
“I’m a visual learner”
As a neuroscientist, I draw a lot of diagrams in my classes. They get ugly and messy, and if I post one here it’ll make your eyes bleed. Despite this, every semester, at least one of my students tells me something along the lines of, “I really like the diagrams, because I’m such a visual learner.”
In my own learning experience, I found that drawing diagrams helps solidify core concepts and visualize dynamic processes and interactions in ways that reading the material did not. In my teaching, asking students to generate drawings helps them to remain actively engaged in their learning. I’ve even built assessments where students can choose to explain concepts via diagrams on video – here’s a screenshot of one of my NEUR101 students’ TikTok explanations:
I might posit that visual-based approaches to learning can be particularly helpful for explaining certain concepts. But I balk at “visual learner,” and so does the data.
A story that we tell ourselves
I imagine that most of us have heard students reference their “learning style” at some point. and it got me thinking about the origins of this myth, and why it’s so persistent.
The word “myth” comes from the Greek mythos, meaning “story” – not necessarily a false one, just a shared narrative that explains something about ourselves to ourselves.
The “learning styles theory” states that our learning styles are innate, unchanging, and wired into our brains – they are a part of who we are, as individuals. VARK is one model, but there are over 70 frameworks out there (an early indicator that the construct might be suspect). It is a myth that is widely told and deeply embedded in educator training and development.
Everyone loves a good story – they can be memorable, easy, and simplify things. But telling ourselves stories that aren’t accurate, particularly about our capacity to learn, can pose problems.
We do have learning preferences
What is true: our students differ, and their preferences for how information is presented are real.
It is valuable to use different approaches to teaching and assessment, in order to engage different students’ preferences and strengths – indeed, this is a central premise of UDL.
It is also true that we might not know whether something “works” well for our learning until we engage with it in multiple ways and in different settings. I have preferences for how I work with material, and much of that was forged through trial/error and skill-building, and engagement.
Some of these things might be “learning preferences” but others might not; as one author quipped, “is it really a learning style to like to work in pairs, in the afternoon, when it is warm, and while snacking?”
Learning doesn’t improve when instruction is matched to learners’ preferences
Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer & Bjork (2008) ran a definitive review, where they set a genuinely fair bar for what would count as compelling evidence: a crossover interaction, where they would sort learners by style, randomly assign them to different instructional conditions, and see whether Style-A learners do better under the Style-A method while Style-B learners do better under the Style-B method. Figure 1 diagrams “acceptable” vs “unacceptable” evidence, in true psychologist-nerd fashion.
They found that (a) very few studies met that bar and (b) the few studies that did found scant compelling evidence that learning style impacts academic performance.
As one example, Husmann & O’Loughlin (2019) found that anatomy students’ self-reported learning style did not predict the study strategies that they students used or how well they performed on assessments.
This TED Talk provides a nice overview of some of these data.
What might actually be going on
First, students aren’t always the best judge of their learning. In one study, students reported that they thought that they learned less in active- vs passive-learning STEM classrooms, but their quiz scores were actually higher in the active-learning classrooms (see below). Preference can easily get mistaken for ability.
Second, we tend to pay more attention to information that matches what we already believe. A student who “gets it” from my diagrams now has “proof” that they are a visual learner (even though we didn’t test whether other ways of understanding might have worked just as well). This is called confirmation bias, and we all have it.
Third, it can be a deferral of responsibility. Maybe they didn’t set aside enough time to study, or weren’t using study techniques that led to deeper understanding.
What’s at stake
There are deeper costs. When students pigeonhole themselves as a certain type of learner, they’re not just misdiagnosing how they learn, they are absorbing a fixed mindset about learning itself. A “learner identity” can turn a temporary preference into a fixed label, which runs counter to a growth mindset.
If a student walks away believing they can’t learn well from a certain format because it doesn’t match their style, that’s not a neutral misunderstanding — it’s an excuse to stop trying. In other words, when the learning style myth is reinforced, it suggests that struggles are signs of a mismatch that is outside their control, not a normal and expected part of learning.
In these ways, fixed academic identities (e.g., “bad test-taker”) can have far-reaching implications for students’ persistence, self-efficacy, and even belonging.
Three things that we can do
We can help students think about their learning. Students don’t often know how to make sense of their learning experiences. Consider talking explicitly with them about what makes courses hard (or easy) or how to make sense of the feedback that you give them – it will be time well spent.
We can also build metacognitive practices into our classes. It can be valuable to provide students dedicated time to articulate aspects of their learning, from exams to groupwork.
Finally, when we hear students cite their “learning style,” we can gently reframe their thinking to allow more nuance and welcome space to their academic journey.
Your “enjoys-a-visual-but-can-learn-other-ways-too” colleague,
Kate
