Bad news: There's no such thing as learning styles.

It’s a tale (seemingly) as old as time: Jeff is really struggling to learn something, for example by reading a chapter about it, and then someone comes along and draws a picture of the idea and - Kaboom! Suddenly Jeff understands the concept and thus makes the very reasonable assumption that they are a “visual learner” who learns all things best when the material is formatted to match their “learning style” (ps. make note of that website and reconsider your thoughts about it after reading below). Such epiphanies are common, so much so that belief in learning styles is prominent in society (although, thankfully, perhaps somewhat malleable). Here’s the thing, though, there simply isn’t any compelling empirical evidence that teaching to or learning with one’s learning style is effective. Learning styles “aren’t a thing.” That can be a real shock to people, but there’s good news coming, I promise.

Why does it matter whether learning styles are a “thing” or not? Because teachers often spend TONS of time trying to differentiate their lessons to whatever types of learning styles they’ve been told exist (sometimes the “big three” of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic - and sometimes as many as 40 learning styles!). This effort to differentiate instruction to meet individual student needs is WONDERFUL. It’s just that differentiating to learning styles won’t have any effects. On the other hand, there are lots of other ways to productively differentiate, such as to students’ prior knowledge or experience, to their interests, etc. Teachers should be spending their time on those ways to differentiate, not on learning styles.

Now for the good news: all that work to differentiate to learning styles isn’t completely for naught. It turns out we all have ALL THE LEARNING STYLES! The more different ways we encounter information (e.g., visually, via a text, by working with it ourselves) the more likely it is we will understand that information and remember it later. So, it’s fine to create multiple representations of the same content, just make sure you show all of them to everybody. And when students say, “Sorry, I can’t learn when I attend class because I’m a kinesthetic learner - so I’m just going to sit in the back and chill” (which has happened to me), please dissuade them of this limiting belief about themselves.