93% of Teachers Believe a Myth
The idea that you're a 'visual learner' or 'auditory learner' is one of the most widely believed claims in education. Decades of research say it's wrong.
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 in Frontiers in Psychology, surveying educators about common beliefs about the brain. The 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. 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 style and matching instruction to it improves learning. Visual learners need diagrams. Auditory learners need lectures. Kinesthetic learners need hands-on.
It sounds reasonable. It feels true. It's been repeated so many times across so many countries that it's basically educational gospel.
Newton and Miah reviewed the global picture in 2017 in Frontiers in Psychology. Belief rates across countries ranged from 58% to 97%. Textbooks teach it. 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 established what a real test of learning styles would look like.
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. Measure outcomes. For learning styles to be real, you'd need a crossover interaction: visual learners doing better with visual instruction and auditory learners doing better with auditory instruction.
After reviewing the entire literature, they found essentially no studies meeting this standard with positive results. Not weak. Not mixed. No results.
But maybe the right experiment just hadn't been run.
Rogowsky, Calhoun, and Tallal ran it in 2015 in the Journal of Educational Psychology. 121 participants, identified by learning style preference, randomly assigned to written text or audiobooks. If learning styles were real, the match should matter.
It didn't. 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 in Anatomical Sciences Education. They tracked 426 anatomy students, identified each one's VARK preference, then watched how they actually studied. Most didn't even study in their supposed preferred style. The ones who did performed no better than anyone else.
The title of the paper literally calls it another nail in the coffin.
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.
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 writing code from memory works better. Every time. My preference points toward the easier path. The effective path feels worse.
That's the core of this entire series. The strategies that feel right are often wrong. The ones 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 what you're willing to try. If you've decided you're a "visual learner," 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 you a fixed identity. "I'm a visual learner" sounds a lot like "this is who I am." It turns a preference into a trait. Traits feel permanent.
Effective learning depends on specific strategies, not individual styles. Retrieval practice. Spaced repetition. Interleaving. These work for everyone. Not because everyone's the same, but because they target how memory actually forms in the human brain.
Ebbinghaus figured out the basics in 1885 in Über das Gedächtnis. You forget most of what you learn within hours unless you actively retrieve it at spaced intervals. Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, and Rohrer confirmed it in a 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covering 254 studies and over 14,000 observations. Spacing works. For everyone.
Roediger and Karpicke showed in 2006 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. Large effects. Robust. 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 preferences aren't a reliable guide to what actually helps you learn.
Learn how memory works instead. Retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, desirable difficulties. The rest of this series will cover them. They work for med students and middle schoolers and musicians and programmers.
The uncomfortable part is that they feel worse. Harder. Slower. More frustrating than what 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 long term. 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) (opens in new tab)
- Matching Learning Style to Instructional Method (Rogowsky, Calhoun & Tallal, 2015, Journal of Educational Psychology) (opens in new tab)
- Neuromyths in Education (Dekker, Lee, Howard-Jones & Jolles, 2012, Frontiers in Psychology) (opens in new tab)
- Evidence-Based Higher Education — Is the Learning Styles 'Myth' Important? (Newton & Miah, 2017, Frontiers in Psychology) (opens in new tab)
- Another Nail in the Coffin for Learning Styles? (Husmann & O'Hara, 2019, Anatomical Sciences Education) (opens in new tab)
- Über das Gedächtnis (Ebbinghaus, 1885) (opens in new tab)
- Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer, 2006, Psychological Bulletin) (opens in new tab)
- Test-Enhanced Learning (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006, Psychological Science) (opens in new tab)
- Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011, Science) (opens in new tab)
- Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way (Bjork & Bjork, 2011, Psychology and the Real World) (opens in new tab)
Part of the Practice Paradox series. Next: Your Brain Needs to Forget Before It Can Remember.
