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89.1% of educators believe in learning styles: design for the content

Clients ask me to adapt a session to the visual learners in the room. I have trained 300+ people across 6 countries, and the request lands in most scoping calls. The claim behind it carries a clean experimental test, and the trials that run that test keep coming back empty. Endorsement holds anyway: across 37 samples of educators, a weighted 89.1% back the idea of matching instruction to a learner's style 1.

The test the claim has to pass.

Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork wrote the specification in 2008 2. Matching predicts a crossover interaction. Measure each learner's preference, assign the format at random, teach the same content, and the visual learners should come out ahead after the visual lesson while the auditory learners come out ahead after the auditory one. Skip the crossover and the numbers say nothing: teach a whole class visually, find the self-declared visual learners on top, and you have measured which group was stronger to begin with.

Pashler's team read a literature they called enormous and found that most of it never ran that design. Among the studies that did, the results went against the meshing hypothesis 2.

Four studies that ran the crossover design.

Laura Massa and Richard Mayer ran three experiments with college students and non-college adults 3. Participants took 14 measures of the verbalizer-visualizer dimension, spanning cognitive style, learning preference and spatial ability, then worked through a 31-frame electronics lesson whose help screens carried either text or illustrations. Verbalizers and visualizers scored the same on the learning test. Almost none of the 14 measures produced an attribute-by-treatment interaction.

Beth Rogowsky, Barbara Calhoun and Paula Tallal built the first trial to follow Pashler's prescription to the letter 4. 121 college-educated adults between 25 and 40 took a standardized inventory of auditory and visual-word preference, then received the same nonfiction book content at random, as an audiobook or as e-text. Preference and format produced no reliable interaction on the immediate comprehension test, and none on the delayed one. The same team repeated the design with 118 fifth graders and reported the same null 5.

Polly Husmann and Valerie Dean O'Loughlin took the question into a live course 6. 426 undergraduate anatomy students completed the VARK questionnaire plus a survey of how they studied. Most of them studied in ways their VARK profile did not prescribe. The ones who followed their profile earned no advantage in class performance.

The survey sells a feeling of learning.

Abby Knoll and three colleagues had participants study word pairs and picture pairs, rating after each item how well they had learned it 7. Verbal preference raised those ratings on the words, visual preference raised them on the pictures, and cued recall moved with neither. The preference shapes what learning feels like and leaves the memory alone, the same split I described in why smooth training teaches nothing.

That dissociation explains the durability of the belief better than any study does. A participant handed material in their declared channel reports a better session, and the delayed test shows no trace of the advantage 4.

The label carries a cost.

Shaylene Nancekivell, Priti Shah and Susan Gelman surveyed 668 people across two experiments 8. More than 90% endorsed teaching to a predominant style. Believers split into two camps, and one of them treats styles as innate, unchanging, discrete and wired into the brain. A teenager who accepts they are a kinesthetic learner now holds a standing reason to skip the reading.

The protocol.

  1. Delete the style question from your intake form. Ask two questions in its place: what the participant already knows about the subject, and the task they have to perform the week after the session.
  2. Match the guidance to prior knowledge. A meta-analysis of 60 experiments and 5,924 participants found that heavy instructional support lifts novices and costs the experienced 9. Novices get the worked example, experienced people get the problem.
  3. Pick the format from the material. Spatial structure gets a diagram, a procedure gets a live demo, and the narration for an animation belongs in the audio rather than printed on the slide. An overview of 29 reviews, 1,189 studies and 78,177 participants ranks the design principles that pay 10.
  4. Send words and pictures to the whole room. No sorting into channels, no parallel tracks to maintain.
  5. Spend the hour you saved on retrieval and spacing. Out of 10 study techniques reviewed by John Dunlosky's team, those two earned the only high-utility ratings 11.
  6. Answer a styles request with a measurement. When a client asks for a styles-adapted session, propose one 10-question scenario quiz for everyone 30 days out, and commit to sharing the score distribution with the room.

Sources.

  1. Newton, P. M., & Salvi, A. (2020). How common is belief in the learning styles neuromyth, and does it matter? A pragmatic systematic review. Frontiers in Education, 5, 602451. doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.602451
  2. Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119. doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x
  3. Massa, L. J., & Mayer, R. E. (2006). Testing the ATI hypothesis: should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style? Learning and Individual Differences, 16(4), 321-335. sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1041608006000331
  4. Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: effects on comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(1). doi.org/10.1037/a0037478
  5. Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2020). Providing instruction based on students' learning style preferences does not improve learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 164. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00164
  6. Husmann, P. R., & O'Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students' study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles. Anatomical Sciences Education, 12(1), 6-19. doi.org/10.1002/ase.1777
  7. Knoll, A. R., Otani, H., Skeel, R. L., & Van Horn, K. R. (2017). Learning style, judgements of learning, and learning of verbal and visual information. British Journal of Psychology, 108(3). doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12214
  8. Nancekivell, S. E., Shah, P., & Gelman, S. A. (2020). Maybe they're born with it, or maybe it's experience: toward a deeper understanding of the learning style myth. Journal of Educational Psychology, 112(2), 221-235. doi.org/10.1037/edu0000366
  9. Tetzlaff, L., Simonsmeier, B. A., Peters, T., & Brod, G. (2025). A cornerstone of adaptivity: a meta-analysis of the expertise reversal effect. Learning and Instruction, 98, 102142. doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2025.102142
  10. Noetel, M., Griffith, S., Delaney, O., Harris, N. R., Sanders, T., Parker, P., del Pozo Cruz, B., & Lonsdale, C. (2022). Multimedia design for learning: an overview of reviews with meta-meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 92(3), 413-454. doi.org/10.3102/00346543211052329
  11. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

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