Learning styles and the evidence on teaching
Learning styles promise to match teaching to a person's preferred sensory format so learning will improve. The familiar categories are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, often abbreviated as VAK. Visual teaching might use pictures or diagrams, auditory teaching sounds or speech, and kinesthetic teaching the manipulation of objects. Numerous scientific studies have tested whether matching information to a preferred or dominant style improves learning. None had established that benefit. The scientific community has consequently warned educators that teaching practices built around these categories lack evidence for their effectiveness.
The reach of these categories is substantial. Surveys conducted in 14 countries, including Canada, found that 90 percent of teachers strongly believed their students belonged to visual, auditory, or kinesthetic groups. Teachers adapted instruction in an effort to meet the needs they associated with those groups. At Laurentian University's Cognitive Health Research Laboratory, researchers have focused particularly on this VAK framework. Its underlying premise connects individual brain development to different ways of learning. The brain begins with 100 billion neurons, and a unique network of synaptic connections develops. That individuality does not make a preferred sensory channel the best route for processing information.
The sensory regions of the brain work together. Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic areas are highly interconnected, and hearing a noise activates more than the auditory area alone. Visual and kinesthetic areas also become active. This automatic transfer between sensory modalities helps information processing. An illustration involving mosquitoes makes the connection tangible: viewing a picture of someone covered with mosquitoes can prompt an unconscious scratching response. The stimulus arrives through sight, while the response involves bodily sensation and movement. Human brains share far more common features than differences, so separate sensory labels miss this interconnected functioning when they are used to prescribe teaching.
Labels can also narrow a student's sense of possibility. A student who excels in music and is labeled auditory may feel limited to learning through her ears. That limitation could reduce her motivation for subjects such as geography or chemistry. Teachers' effort has a cost as well: time and energy spent on practices without an evidential basis may delay the adoption of practices supported by research. A $5,000 reward has been offered to a research team able to establish the effectiveness of learning styles.
Changing teacher preparation presents another set of questions. A university neuroscience course could improve future teachers' knowledge of the brain, yet that improvement would likely leave false educational beliefs in place. Scientific rebuttal texts paired with personal reflection have shown promise in reducing those beliefs among apprentice teachers. Whether that change reaches their future classroom practice remains uncertain. Presenting scientific evidence alone does not necessarily loosen deeply held convictions. A direct challenge can even intensify a belief through a backfire effect.
The gap becomes visible in teachers' responses to rebuttal texts. After encountering them, 90 percent said they rejected the pedagogical usefulness of learning styles, yet one-third still intended to adapt teaching to students' styles. Among those intending to continue, 89 percent appealed to personal experience. A teacher might observe a student learning with a diagram and interpret the improvement as confirmation of a visual category. Confirmation bias makes that anecdote persuasive despite the experimental findings. The classroom observation and the scientific test are being weighed differently: the familiar personal experience retains influence over plans for instruction even after teachers reject the framework's educational usefulness.
Researchers at Laurentian University designed an activity to give teachers a personal experience of the proposed match. Words to be memorized were accompanied by images or sounds. If the categories had pedagogical validity, visual participants would retain more words paired with images, while auditory participants would retain more words paired with sounds. The activity followed scientific experiments conducted around the world, which had all failed to establish the benefit of matching images or sounds to the corresponding style. Results from an initial trial with apprentice teachers appeared in Neuroeducation. Participants discovered that their memory performance did not depend on their preferred VAK category.
Even that experience left resistance to changing practice. After the Sounds and Images activity, 60 percent of trainee teachers still planned to adapt instruction to their students' learning styles. The researchers began exploring whether conducting the activity with students, while teachers watched, might give teachers a more persuasive personal experience. A different teaching practice already has research support: presenting learning materials in varied formats. Human brains respond well to information arriving through more than one sensory modality, and that variety strengthens synaptic connections between sensory areas.