People learn best when taught in their preferred learning style

What we know

The learning styles theory, most commonly presented as the VAK or VARK model dividing learners into categories such as visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and sometimes reading/writing learners, holds that people learn most effectively when instructional material is presented in a format matching their preferred style, and that mismatched instruction, such as teaching a self-identified visual learner primarily through lecture, produces meaningfully worse learning outcomes. This idea has been extremely influential in education and corporate training for decades, with surveys of teachers in multiple countries finding most believe and apply the theory.

The specific, testable claim embedded in learning styles theory is not simply that people have preferences, which is generally true and uncontroversial, but that matching instruction to a stated preference produces better learning, a claim that requires what researchers call a 'meshing hypothesis' study design, comparing students taught in their preferred style against students taught in a non-preferred style, to properly test. A comprehensive and highly influential review commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science and published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2008, led by psychologist Harold Pashler, searched the existing research literature specifically for studies using this proper meshing design and found that the overwhelming majority of published research on learning styles had not used an experimental design capable of actually testing the hypothesis, and that among the small number of studies that had used an adequate design, results consistently failed to find the predicted benefit of matching instruction to a learner's stated style preference, leading the authors to conclude there was no adequate evidence base to justify tailoring teaching to individual learning styles.

Subsequent research has generally reinforced this conclusion rather than overturning it, including additional controlled studies specifically testing whether matching instructional format, visual versus verbal presentation, for example, to a student's self-reported preferred style produced better test performance than mismatched instruction, consistently finding no meaningful advantage for matched instruction, a pattern summarized in later reviews of educational neuromyths, including analyses conducted by cognitive scientists and organizations including the OECD, which lists learning styles matching among the most persistent and evidence-resistant myths in education internationally.

What the research does support is a different and more limited point: certain content is more effectively taught through a format suited to the content itself rather than to the individual learner, for instance, geometric or spatial concepts are often genuinely easier to learn through visual diagrams for essentially all learners regardless of stated preference, a principle sometimes confused with individual learning style matching but reflecting a difference in optimal format for particular content types rather than for particular types of people. Cognitive scientists studying effective learning strategies instead point to techniques with strong, well-replicated evidence for improving learning across virtually all learners, including spaced repetition, retrieval practice or self-testing, and interleaving different types of practice problems, none of which depend on identifying or matching a person's supposed individual learning style category.

Education researchers studying why learning styles theory persists despite this consistent negative evidence point to its intuitive appeal, since most people do have genuine subjective preferences about how they like to receive information, an accurate personal observation that gets mistakenly extended into the different and unsupported claim that these preferences predict which teaching method will actually produce the best learning outcomes for that person.

Common claims

• Matching teaching methods to a student's preferred learning style improves learning outcomes.False, a major 2008 review found no adequate evidence supporting this specific claim.
• People have subjective preferences for how they like to receive information.True, but a preference is different from evidence that matching improves actual learning.
• Some content is easier to learn in a particular format for nearly all learners.True, this reflects optimal format for content type, not individual learning style matching.
• Techniques like spaced repetition and self-testing improve learning across virtually all students.True, these strategies have strong, well-replicated supporting evidence.

Evidence hierarchy

All sources

• Learning Styles, Concepts and EvidencePsychological Science in the Public Interest · 2008
• Neuromyths in educationOECD · 2007
• Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning TechniquesPsychological Science in the Public Interest · 2013
• The learning styles myth is thriving in higher educationFrontiers in Psychology · 2017

Related terms