93% of Teachers Believe a Myth

Ninety-three percent of teachers in the UK and Netherlands believe students learn better when taught in their preferred learning style. That number comes from a 2012 study by Dekker and colleagues published in Frontiers in Psychology, where they surveyed educators about common beliefs regarding the brain. The learning styles idea wasn't just popular. It was nearly unanimous.

The problem is that it's wrong.

Not controversial. Not debated. Not "more research needed." Wrong. The kind of wrong where researchers have spent decades looking for supporting evidence and keep coming up empty.

The Myth

You've heard the framework. Maybe you've taken the quiz. VARK: Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, Kinesthetic. The idea is that each person has a dominant learning style, and if you match instruction to that style, learning improves. Visual learners need diagrams. Auditory learners need lectures. Kinesthetic learners need hands-on activities.

It sounds reasonable. It feels true. And it has been repeated so many times, across so many countries, that it's essentially become educational gospel.

Newton and Miah surveyed educators across 37 countries in a 2020 study published in Frontiers in Education. Belief rates ranged from 58% to 97%. In some countries, nearly every single teacher believed it. Textbooks teach it. Professional development workshops build curricula around it. Parents use it to advocate for their kids.

And the evidence says none of it works.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

In 2008, Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork published a review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest that should have ended the debate. They didn't just survey opinions. They established what a real test of learning styles would look like.

The test is straightforward. Take students who identify as different types of learners. Randomly assign some to instruction that matches their style and some to instruction that doesn't. Then measure learning outcomes. For learning styles to be real, you'd need a crossover interaction. Visual learners performing better with visual instruction AND auditory learners performing better with auditory instruction.

After reviewing the entire literature, they found essentially no studies that met this standard with positive results. Not weak results. Not mixed results. No results.

But maybe the right experiment just hadn't been run yet.

Rogowsky, Calhoun, and Tallal ran it in 2015, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology. They took 121 participants, identified their learning style preferences, then randomly assigned them to either visual instruction (written text) or auditory instruction (audiobooks). If learning styles were real, the match should matter.

It didn't. Learning style preference predicted nothing about actual performance. Visual learners did not learn better from text. Auditory learners did not learn better from audiobooks. The preference was real. The performance advantage was not.

Husmann and O'Hara at Indiana University School of Medicine pushed it further in 2019. They tracked 426 anatomy students, published in Anatomical Sciences Education. They identified each student's VARK preference, then tracked how they actually studied and how they performed. Two findings stood out. First, most students didn't even study in their supposed preferred style. Second, the minority who did? They performed no better than anyone else.

Another nail in the coffin. The title of the paper literally says that.

Why It Won't Die

The myth persists because it satisfies something deep. People like categories. People like explanations for why learning sometimes feels hard. "I struggled with that lecture because I'm a visual learner" is a comfortable story. It externalizes the difficulty.

And here's the thing. People do have preferences. That part is real. You might genuinely prefer watching videos over reading textbooks. You might enjoy hands-on projects more than listening to someone talk. Preferences exist.

But preference and effectiveness are different things.

I prefer learning from videos. I'll choose a YouTube tutorial over documentation almost every time. But when I actually need to retain something for a coding project, reading the docs and then writing code from memory works better. Every time. My preference points me toward the easier path. The effective path feels worse.

This is actually the core of the entire Practice Paradox series. The strategies that feel right are often wrong. The strategies that work often feel terrible. Learning styles is just the first example.

The Real Damage

The myth isn't harmless. It does two things that actively hurt learners.

First, it narrows the strategies people are willing to try. If you've decided you're a "visual learner," you might avoid strategies that don't involve visuals. You might skip retrieval practice because it doesn't feel like your style. You might avoid explaining concepts out loud because "that's for auditory learners." You've given yourself permission to ignore the tools that actually work.

Second, it gives people a fixed identity. "I'm a visual learner" sounds a lot like "this is who I am." It turns a preference into a trait. And traits feel permanent.

The research on what actually works, which the rest of this series will cover, shows that effective learning depends on specific strategies, not individual styles. Retrieval practice. Spaced repetition. Interleaving. These work for everyone. Not because everyone is the same, but because they target how memory actually forms in the human brain.

Ebbinghaus figured out the basics in 1885, published in Über das Gedächtnis. You forget most of what you learn within hours unless you actively retrieve it at spaced intervals. That finding has been replicated so many times it's not even interesting anymore. Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, and Rohrer confirmed it in a 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, covering 254 studies with over 14,000 observations. Spacing works. For everyone. Regardless of your supposed learning style.

Roediger and Karpicke showed in 2006 in Psychological Science that testing yourself produces more learning than rereading. Karpicke and Blunt showed in 2011 in Science that retrieval practice beats even elaborative studying with concept maps. These aren't small effects. They're large, robust, and universal.

No crossover interaction. No "but it depends on your style." Just strategies that work for human brains because of how human brains work.

What to Do Instead

Drop the label. You're not a visual learner or an auditory learner or a kinesthetic learner. You're a person with preferences, and those preferences are not a reliable guide to what actually helps you learn.

Instead, learn how memory works. Learn about retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and desirable difficulties. These are the topics this series will cover. They're backed by decades of replicated research. They work for med students and middle schoolers and musicians and programmers.

The uncomfortable part is that they feel worse. They feel harder and slower and more frustrating than the strategies you're used to. Rereading your notes feels productive. Testing yourself on material you half-remember feels like failure.

That feeling is the paradox. And it's where the real learning happens.

Bjork and Bjork named this in 2011: "desirable difficulties." Conditions that make learning harder in the moment but stronger in the long run. The brain doesn't strengthen connections by reviewing what it already knows. It strengthens them by struggling to retrieve what it's starting to forget.

Your learning style isn't the variable that matters. Your learning strategy is. And the best strategies feel like they're not working.

That's what this series is about.

Sources

• Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence (Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer & Bjork, 2008, Psychological Science in the Public Interest)
• Matching Learning Style to Instructional Method (Rogowsky, Calhoun & Tallal, 2015, Journal of Educational Psychology)
• Neuromyths in Education (Dekker, Lee, Howard-Jones & Jolles, 2012, Frontiers in Psychology)
• Evidence-Based Higher Education — Is the Learning Styles 'Myth' Important? (Newton & Miah, 2017, Frontiers in Psychology)
• Another Nail in the Coffin for Learning Styles? (Husmann & O'Hara, 2019, Anatomical Sciences Education)
• Über das Gedächtnis (Ebbinghaus, 1885)
• Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer, 2006, Psychological Bulletin)
• Test-Enhanced Learning (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006, Psychological Science)
• Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011, Science)
• Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way (Bjork & Bjork, 2011, Psychology and the Real World)

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Part of the Practice Paradox series. Next: Your Brain Needs to Forget Before It Can Remember.