What’s your style? : The Myth of Learning Styles

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Would you consider yourself a visual learner or an auditory one? What if I told you that these “learning styles” are a myth and don’t have much significance in a student’s academic performance? In this post, I will delve into how there are fallacies in the theory which keep getting debunked on whether some people learn better visually or aurally. Additionally, anecdotal remarks will be used to clarify the topic. So, to start off my commentary I’ll begin by explaining the VARK questionnaire and this will unfold the rest of the episode. 

The VARK Questionnaire 

The VARK questionnaire which stands for Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic is an experimental model created in the 1990s by a New Zealand teacher named Neil Fleming. He was determined to find a better understanding of a concept that confused him throughout his tenure monitoring classrooms as a school inspector. To be specific, he discovered that only some teachers were able to reach every one of their students. You might ask, how can that be? What were they doing differently? Well, Fleming narrowed his focus on how it is that people like to be presented with information and he developed a 16 questionnaire that would assess students’ “learning styles”. Considering this, once implemented it shed some light on the concept and the logistics of the method, but what it didn’t account for was how the students reacted to it. In addition, during the dubbed “self-esteem movement” of the late 1980s and 90s everyone was seen as special, and therefore everyone was believed to have a special learning style. This was emphasized to students in grade school. In other words, teachers believe that they can reach every student, even struggling students, just by tailoring their learning experience so it can match the learning format. They may believe their efforts will yield an auspicious outcome but meanwhile, students who begin to experience scholastic failures will start to blame those failures on their teacher because the teaching style didn’t align with their learning style.

Furthermore, when students get to college, it’s been reiterated to them throughout grade school that “you’re a visual learner”, an auditory one or what have you, but unless the students have been thoroughly tested, professors are making assumptions that students can use as a self-proclamation and excuse whenever they fall short on their studies. With that in mind, students can’t be one or the other (visual or auditory) because one cannot be affected in one way and not the other. In regard to this, Indiana University professor Polly Husmann and her colleagues gathered hundreds of students to take the VARK questionnaire to determine what kind of learners they supposedly were. During the study, students were given some study strategies that presumably would correlate with that learning style. Husmann found that the study habits students had did not reflect their learning style and to take it a step further those who did tailor their studying to suit their learning style didn’t do any better on exams. Husmann was critical of VARK and the assessment because of its frivolous nature in terms of learning styles. She would go and say, “I think as a purely reflective exercise, just to get you thinking about your study habits, (VARK) might have a benefit”. “But the way we’ve been categorizing these learning styles doesn’t seem to hold up”. From my perspective, her argument has validity in the sense that “learning styles” is a nebulous concept unless expounded on because you’ll need to be specific and know how certain “learning styles” can work in conjunction and complement the study habits students have and are familiar with, such as to name a few, lesson outlines, Powerpoints, pictures aids in textbooks (i.e.graphs, charts) on the visual side and discussions (seminars), verbal instructions on tape and so forth on the auditory side.

Abilities over Styles

Now, what if I told you, your preferences for something aren’t always going to give the ideal outcomes you desire? Case in point, a study published in 2017 in the British Journal of Psychology found that students who preferred learning visually thought they would be able to remember pictures better. On the other hand, those who preferred to learn verbally thought they would remember words better. This concluded in a failure on how their preferences had no correlation to what they remembered once tested, words or pictures. Ultimately, all the “learning styles” meant in this case was that the subjects liked words or pictures better, not that either one worked for them to remember and comprehend what was given to them. In other words, Daniel Willingham a psychologist at the University of Virginia stated that “ there’s evidence that people try to treat tasks in accordance with what they believe to be their learning style, but it doesn’t help them”. Considering this, that same year, a Journal of Education Psychology paper failed to find any relationship between the study subjects’ learning-style preference (visual or auditory) and their reading or listening comprehension performance. Here we have two sets of similar results that state that it doesn’t matter whether a student prefers to learn visually, auditory, or by kinesthetics, what needs to be focused on is their abilities or lack thereof in certain aspects of learning. Quite frankly, people have a tendency to have a confirmation bias with their learning style because it’s one they feel confident doing and one they’ve relied on throughout their life. However, with the studies that have been conducted on “learning styles”, the value it has on recall and comprehension is minimal in the long run. Moreover, all of these “learning styles” ultimately will need to result in the student being able to retain course material. Retaining information means nothing if you can’t properly apply it. 

A study published in 2009 explained how self-proclaimed visualizers and self-proclaimed verbalizers were tested. The visualizers did their best to try to create an image and the verbalizers tried to form words. However, there was a problem, visual learners didn’t remember pictures any better than the verbalizer, and the verbalizers couldn’t remember and form words any better than the visualizers. In other words, it doesn’t mean everyone is equally good at every skill but what this all culminates to is that people have different abilities, not styles. Some people are better readers than others while others have a disability like dyslexia which hinders that ability; some people are better at math and others struggle when it becomes more complex. The emphasis needs to be placed on abilities because individuals have their strengths and weaknesses. This is whether a person has a learning disability or a physical one. The challenges are always there but it’s how you respond to them that will determine if you’ll overcome them. Having the ability to forge a mental toughness will cause you to be resilient through adversities so success can be achieved. In my case, throughout my school years (grade school to college) I’ve always had trouble grasping math concepts initially but with time, a change in strategy, and practice I found the ability to find what worked for me so I could understand the subject in order to excel. I believe everyone can succeed in whatever they’re learning and that’s even for people who have disabilities. You can find stories of individuals who have disabilities, physical and mental ones and they don’t allow that to deter them from reaching what they aspire to become. Furthermore, it’s that relentless mentality that causes them to see what they’re doing can be never enough because they’ve been told constantly they would never be able to accomplish what a person not in their condition could do. 

Move past it

All in all, there can be an argument about whether being a “Visual, or Auditory learner” is a meaningless label or if it has any significant value. It’s your prerogative if you’d like to identify yourself as a visual learner, auditory, or whatever the case may be but what I believe needs to be understood and prioritized by educators is that abilities not styles are what needs to be emphasized and that’s what truly matters, because “learning styles” compliment the abilities an individual already possesses and it’s those abilities that will influence how a student will perform when under pressure from an exam. Lastly, even if a group of students were to share “learning styles”, the way they perceive the coursework will be different and it’s that uniqueness I believe that makes those abilities more important than learning styles. 

Works Cited 

Khazan, O. (2018, April 11). The myth of “learning styles.” Pocket. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-myth-of-learning-styles?utm_source=pocket-newtab