The idea of learning styles has remarkable staying power. Ask a group of students how they learn best and it will not take long before somebody describes themselves as a “visual learner”, an “auditory learner” or perhaps someone who needs to learn by doing. Teachers encounter the same language in classrooms, professional development and conversations about individual learners.
There is something intuitively attractive about the idea. Students are different, so surely they must learn differently. From there, it seems only a small step to conclude that effective teaching should identify each student’s learning style and adapt instruction accordingly.
The difficulty is that the second claim does not necessarily follow from the first.
Tesia Marshik explores precisely this problem in her TEDx talk, Learning Styles & the Importance of Critical Self-Reflection. Her argument is uncomfortable because it challenges something that can feel less like a theory and more like educational common sense.
The problem with learning styles
The first distinction is important: saying that the evidence does not support the learning styles hypothesis is not the same as saying that all learners are identical.
They plainly are not.
Students differ in prior knowledge, motivation, confidence, interests, abilities and countless other respects. They may also have strong preferences about how they encounter information. One student may enjoy diagrams, another may prefer reading, while somebody else might favour discussion or practical activity.
Those preferences are real.
The questionable step occurs when preference becomes prescription: I prefer learning visually, therefore I am a visual learner, therefore I will learn more effectively when teaching is presented visually.
That is a much stronger claim.
A major review by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork examined the evidence behind precisely this proposition. The researchers found ample evidence that people express preferences about how information is presented. What they did not find was adequate evidence that matching teaching methods to supposed learning styles improves learning outcomes.
This distinction matters enormously. A preference is not necessarily an effective learning strategy.
Why the learning styles idea feels so convincing
If the evidence is so weak, why has the idea survived so successfully?
Part of the answer may be that learning styles appear to recognise individuality. The theory offers an appealingly humane message: learners are different, those differences matter and good teachers should respond to them.
I agree with the principle.
The problem lies in what follows from it.
Respecting individual differences does not require placing students into categories that lack adequate empirical support. In fact, labelling a student a particular “type” of learner may inadvertently narrow rather than expand the opportunities available to them.
Consider a student who believes, “I’m a visual learner.”
What happens when the most appropriate representation of a concept is verbal? What happens when the student encounters complex written material that requires sustained reading? Does the label encourage them to develop the necessary skill, or provide a ready explanation for why the task supposedly does not suit the way their brain works?
This is where an apparently supportive idea can become limiting.
The subject should influence the method
There is another difficulty with matching teaching to supposed learning styles: sometimes the material itself determines how it should be taught.
Geography is difficult to teach without maps. Pronunciation requires students to hear language. Music involves sound. Geometry often benefits from visual representation. Physical education requires movement.
These choices are not responses to a student’s supposed learning style. They arise from the nature of what is being learned.
Good teaching can also involve multiple representations of the same concept. A teacher might explain an idea verbally, illustrate it visually, model it through an example and then ask students to apply it independently.
That is not necessarily evidence of “catering for every learning style”. It may simply be good teaching.
The distinction matters because otherwise almost any varied lesson can be interpreted as confirmation of learning styles. Once a theory becomes capable of explaining everything we already do, it becomes surprisingly difficult to test whether the theory itself is actually correct.
Critical self-reflection begins with questioning what feels obvious
For me, this is where Marshik’s talk becomes more interesting than a simple exercise in myth-busting.
The real issue is critical self-reflection.
Education contains practices and beliefs that can become familiar enough to feel unquestionably true. Teachers inherit ideas from their own education, initial teacher training, colleagues, professional development, books and institutional cultures. Some become embedded so deeply in professional language that we stop asking where they originated.
Learning styles provide a particularly useful example because the idea sounds plausible.
That should make us more cautious, not less.
When something agrees with our experience, we naturally find it easier to accept. A student says that diagrams help them and we remember the occasion on which a diagram suddenly made something understandable to us. Another says they need to hear something explained and we recognise that experience too.
The observation may be perfectly valid. The conclusion drawn from it may not be.
Critical self-reflection therefore requires more than reflecting on whether a lesson “worked”. It also means examining the assumptions through which we interpret what happened. This connects closely with reflective practice, where professional experience becomes more valuable when assumptions and interpretations are examined critically.
Preference and learning are not the same thing
One of the most useful lessons here extends well beyond learning styles.
What feels effective while learning is not necessarily what produces the strongest learning.
An activity can feel comfortable because it is familiar. Material can seem easy because we have encountered it repeatedly. Reading the same notes several times may produce a reassuring sense of fluency. None of these subjective experiences automatically demonstrates durable learning.
Research into learning and metacognition has repeatedly demonstrated that our intuitions about how we learn can be unreliable. Conditions that feel easier are not necessarily those that produce better long-term retention or transfer.
This makes educational research particularly important.
Experience matters enormously in teaching, but experience still requires interpretation. If our underlying assumption is wrong, years of experience can reinforce the assumption rather than correct it.
That is an uncomfortable proposition for any profession.
It is also why reflective practice should involve evidence rather than introspection alone.
What abandoning learning styles does not mean
Rejecting unsupported applications of learning styles does not require teachers to abandon differentiation, variety or responsiveness.
It certainly does not mean teaching every student in precisely the same way.
Learners enter classrooms with different levels of prior knowledge. Some require more scaffolding than others. Students vary in confidence, motivation and educational experience. Disabilities and additional educational needs may require specific adjustments. Different subjects and learning objectives call for different instructional approaches.
None of this depends on categorising a student as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic.
The lack of convincing evidence for learning-style matching should therefore not be interpreted as evidence that identical instruction is optimal for every learner in every context. The conclusion is considerably more specific: there is insufficient evidence to justify assessing students’ supposed learning styles and then matching instruction to those classifications.
That nuance is important.
The alternative to learning styles is not standardisation. It is better-informed differentiation.
What this means for teachers
Perhaps the more useful question is not:
“What type of learner is this student?”
but instead:
“What does this student need to understand, what do they already know, and what approach will best help them learn it?”
That is a more demanding question.
It prevents us from reaching immediately for a convenient category. Instead, it directs attention towards prior knowledge, the nature of the material, misconceptions, cognitive demand, motivation and evidence of actual learning.
Teachers can still ask students about their preferences. Preferences matter for engagement and can tell us something valuable about how students experience learning. We simply need to avoid turning those preferences into fixed statements about what a student can or cannot learn from.
A student who enjoys visual material should not leave school believing that they cannot learn effectively from text.
Someone who prefers discussion still needs to develop the ability to learn independently.
A student who enjoys practical activity will nevertheless encounter ideas that require abstraction.
Education should expand learners’ repertoires rather than confirm the boundaries of categories assigned to them.
Why the learning styles myth matters
It would be easy to dismiss the learning styles debate as relatively harmless. If teachers vary their instruction anyway, what damage does the terminology really cause?
The answer depends on what we do with it.
If “learning styles” simply becomes an informal way of acknowledging that students enjoy different things, the consequences may be limited. But if schools spend time assessing learning styles, teachers plan separate activities around them, or students develop fixed beliefs about what kinds of learning supposedly suit them, the issue becomes more significant.
Time and attention in education are finite.
Every practice we adopt occupies space that could be given to something else.
This is why the evidence question matters. If an educational practice requires teachers’ time, influences lesson planning or shapes students’ beliefs about their own capabilities, it should have a defensible rationale.
That is not an argument against innovation.
It is an argument for intellectual discipline.
Critical self-reflection is the more important lesson
Tesia Marshik’s talk begins with learning styles, but its more enduring challenge concerns how we respond when evidence conflicts with something we already believe.
That question reaches far beyond this particular educational myth.
Teachers constantly make professional judgements. We select explanations, activities, technologies and interventions because we believe they will help students learn. Experience informs those choices, as it should. Professional expertise matters.
But expertise should not make beliefs immune from examination.
Quite the opposite.
The more established a practice becomes, the easier it is to stop seeing it as an assumption at all. Critical self-reflection means periodically returning to those comfortable certainties and asking awkward questions.
What evidence supports this?
What evidence would persuade me that I am wrong?
Am I observing learning, or merely engagement?
Does this approach work, or have I simply become accustomed to using it?
Those questions are harder than identifying a student as a particular type of learner.
They are also considerably more useful.
The debate around learning styles therefore offers a valuable lesson even beyond the myth itself. Good education does not require teachers to know everything with certainty. It requires us to remain sufficiently reflective to question what we think we know.
Sometimes the most important professional development begins when something that once seemed like common sense no longer does.
Web resource: TEDx
Further reading: Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence
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