Gosh, you’ve heard so much about learning styles—some people learn best by reading, others by listening, some by doing, yet others by watching, and so on … or so the story goes. For some of us the following is tough to stomach: when researchers have looked behind the curtain of learning styles, instead of the magic of the Great and Powerful Oz they’ve pretty much found a short traveling snake oil salesman from Kansas pulling levers and making grand pronouncements. Sure, people know which learning styles they prefer. But there’s no evidence that actually matching the style of instruction to a person’s preferred learning style makes him or her learn any better. For example, a 2012 report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education observes, “In short, there exist a smattering of positive findings with unknown effect sizes that are eclipsed by a much greater number of published failures to find evidence, and we suspect that additional null findings sit in researchers’ file drawers.”
What this means is that when you take a single subject, say math, and teach it in a visual way to visual students, an auditory way to auditory students, and a kinesthetic way to kinesthetic students, it hasn’t been shown to create better results than using one method of instruction for all students. In fact, when you try to teach math through kinesthetics or art by talking about it so that instruction can match students’ preferences, learning suffers. That’s because, as much as some parents may wish otherwise, movement is not the best way to teach math, and art is a visual exercise, not an auditory one.
Instead of working to match instruction to students’ learning styles, the Department of Education report suggests that “educators should focus on developing the most effective and coherent ways to present particular bodies of content, which often involve combining different forms of instruction, such as diagrams and words, in mutually reinforcing ways.”
The same is true for you at work. What matters most is not necessarily how you like to learn new skills and information, but how the particular skills and information are best presented. As much as you fear Excel, Photoshop, or the interpersonal mechanics of learning a new skill directly from someone who already knows it, if it’s the best way to get the information, it’s the best way to get the information, regardless of how you think about your learning style.
The Research Cost of Learning Styles
Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and leading debunker of the learning styles myth, points out that not only might belief in learning styles doom a “kinesthetic learner” to inefficiently trying to learn math by skipping rope, but the research invested in learning styles takes away from other, more important, and more promising things that people could be studying. Couldn’t all those education researchers’ crackling neurons be put to better use solving actual problems in learning and school systems? Your assignment today is to stop believing in learning styles. Just stop.