“There was not strong support for the hypothesis that verbal learners and visual learners should be given different kinds of multimedia instruction,” the authors concluded.īut perhaps this is just a few fringe studies? Perhaps there is still some debate on this within academia? Not so, says the American Psychological Association. “If classfication of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.”Ī 2006 study looking at multimedia instruction came to a similar conclusion. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” researchers wrote. Their conclusion is a hard pill to swallow. In a 2009 review paper entitled Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, researchers investigated the “meshing hypothesis,” which is the idea that students learn better when instruction is provided in a format that matches their learning style. If that sounds far-fetched, well, there’s plenty more where that came from. “Students may have preferences about how to learn, but no evidence suggests that catering to those preferences will lead to better learning.” “There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist,” write psychologists Cedar Riener and Daniel Willingham in a 2010 paper titled The Myth of Learning Styles. Indeed, many academics who study this for a living consider learning styles to be one of the biggest myths in education. No matter how hard scientists have looked, they haven’t been able to find any good evidence for the learning styles theory. But there’s a problem here, a big problem. ![]() Still others identify as kinesthetic learners, which means they learn best when they can physically engage with things, such as in a chemistry lab.įor most of us, the idea that different people have different learning styles is so obvious that it is simply common knowledge. ![]() Others identify as auditory learners, which means they learn best by hearing, or reading/writing learners, which means they learn best by reading books and taking notes. ![]() Some identify as visual learners, which means that, in theory, they learn best by seeing concepts in pictures and diagrams, perhaps on a blackboard or in a video. Are you a visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinesthetic learner? For millions of students, this question has become so familiar that they already have an answer ready to go.
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