Learning-styles lingo—along with directives that make learning-styles-accommodation mandatory—has been around since at least the 1980s, plaguing algebra teachers wondering how to present the quadratic formula in a way that appeals to that kid whose preferred learning style is “kinesthetic.”
But according to some 30 neuroscientists connected to top U.S., British, and Continental universities, the learning-styles approach is bunk. The neuroscientists, who teach and research at such distinguished venues as Oxford, Harvard, the University of London, and the Max-Planck-Institute in Frankfurt, signed off on an open letter to the Guardian by Bruce Hood, chair of the University of Bristol’s developmental psychology in society department, urging schools and teachers to stop wasting their time and money on this long-running pedagogical fad. Hood’s letter read:
There are…a number of problems with the learning styles approach. First, there is no coherent framework of preferred learning styles. Usually, individuals are categorised into one of three preferred styles of auditory, visual or kinesthetic learners based on self-reports. One study found that there were more than 70 different models of learning styles including among others, “left v right brain,” “holistic v serialists,” “verbalisers v visualisers” and so on. The second problem is that categorising individuals can lead to the assumption of fixed or rigid learning style, which can impair motivation to apply oneself or adapt. Finally, and most damning, is that there have been systematic studies of the effectiveness of learning styles that have consistently found either no evidence or very weak evidence to support the hypothesis that matching or “meshing” material in the appropriate format to an individual’s learning style is selectively more effective for educational attainment. Students will improve if they think about how they learn but not because material is matched to their supposed learning style. The Educational Endowment Foundation in the UK has concluded that learning styles is “Low impact for very low cost, based on limited evidence”
Hood called the learning-styles approach a “neuromyth” that isn’t “evidence-based.” “Neuromyth” it may be, but learning-style lore (mostly gleaned from education theorist David Kolb’s 1984 book, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development) is deeply embedded in current pedagogy, even among smart people whom you’d think would know better. A 2012 directive from the Santa Clara County School District, which includes half of the billionaire-studded Silicon Valley, blames the poor performance of many minority students partly on “[t]eachers unprepared to address the different learning styles that children from varied backgrounds bring to the classroom.” In adjacent San Mateo County, which includes the other half of the Silicon Valley, teachers were recently offered a learning-styles training workshop to equip them with “hands on methods to engage children with various learning differences.” It’s going to take a lot more than a neuroscientists’ letter to get rid of that sort of entrenched educational infrastructure. Interestingly, one of the signers of Hood’s letter was the Harvard psychology professor and public intellectual Steven Pinker. In his 2014 book, The Blank Slate, Pinker might have been referring to the learning-styles industry when he wrote: “Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest.”
