The concept of learning styles sort of just entered our academic lives one day and never truly left. Chances are you’ve probably taken a guess as to what your learning style is or have even gone out of your way to take some sort of quiz to help figure that out.
If you’ve managed to go this long without having heard of them, a “learning style” is a term “widely used to describe how learners gather, sift through, interpret, organize, come to conclusions about and “store” information for further use” as defined by Nancy Chick on the Vanderbilt University website.
There seems to be a new type of learning style every time one decides to go out of their way to look into them, but there are a select four that most people universally acknowledge; visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic (or “hands-on”).
Basically, the circumstances in which a person with the responsibility of learning something needs to be under for the optimal amount of understanding.
So, if you’re an auditory learner, you have an easier time understanding subjects with lots of details or instructions. If you’re a reading/writing learner, you thrive in situations where you have something to read or write about.
Pretty self explanatory.
While they may all be different (but not really though once you think about it more in depth), there is one thing they all have in common:
It’s all a myth.
Well, for the most part at least.
In actuality, there has been no research showing that the implementation of different learning styles has any correlation to student learning, according to a 2009 study, “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence” by Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, & Bjork.
“That’s a stupid question, yes,” said student Giselle Maree Saliot when asked if she thinks a classroom that integrates her learning style would produce a better outcome.
So, why are we so quick to believe in this?
Could it be because it provides a sense of comfort, putting ourselves in this box and having an easy excuse as to why we didn’t have the most seamless experience trying to understand a subject?
There’s no doubt we can enjoy one type of learning style more than the other, and while not absolutely hating the process of learning something is important, it turns out that it’s actually not important enough to the point that going as far to enjoy it equals more information actually being learned.
“It’s nice to believe that there’s a way to make things easier. It’s nice to think you can have something — like a category you can put yourself in to help you with your struggles more, ya know? It’s nice to have a cop out if you fail something,” Saliot said.
Implementing this idea of learning styles might actually do more harm than good.
By reiterating this idea, don’t we get students too used to this safe zone, where we teach that sticking to your learning style equals more learning, and in turn, stepping out of your comfort zone equals less?
Doing things that don’t come as naturally and easy to you, and putting in more effort can make for a memorable learning experience while also serving as experience for similar future instances where one has no choice but to take things as they are handed to them.
Your classes, your job, the world, will most likely not cater to your learning style.
They could probably care less about it, actually.
Is it nice when learning is fun? Yes. Does it need to be? No. Do most higher ups truly go out of their way to make sure their student or employee is having fun? You get the idea.
On top of that, aren’t all of these aspects crucial for truly understanding a subject?
How many times have we heard students complain about a professor that makes students buy a textbook and then call it a semester or spend their entire class time talking or have their whole curriculum be a collection of Google Slides on Canvas?
It’s easy to have a favorite, but the truth is all of us need a mix of auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and reading/writing learning to understand a subject to the best of our ability.
A lot of the time, the classes we consider our favorite or that we remember the most from, are classes where all of these learning styles were present.
We are more than our learning style, and that can be a difficult habit to break out of.
All it really takes is the curiosity to see just how well we can do under circumstances that we ideally would not have chosen for ourselves. It could take a little more work, but you’ll probably do better than this pseudoscience will have you expect.