The Potential Harm of Learning Styles
By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel
We have discussed the learning styles myth in different blog posts and you can find all of our posts in this topic here. Briefly, the idea of learning styles is that if you assess the learning styles in students and then match instruction accordingly to their self-reported learning style, their performance will be better than when they are instructed in a way that misaligns with their learning style. There is, however, no empirical evidence suggesting that tailoring to learning styles is effective for learning. A very recent series of experiments published this year (1) goes one step further and looks at how awareness of learning styles can affect the perception of student abilities in teachers, parents, and children. Put differently, being told that students are ‘visual’ versus ‘hands-on’ (kinesthetic) learners, changes our perception of the abilities and intelligence of these students. This is quite alarming and adds to the evidence that learning styles are not only ineffective for learning but potentially harmful. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s look at the evidence first.
Setup of the experiments
They conducted three experiments.
In Experiment 1, children (6-12 years old) and parents were given the description of two students with one being described as someone who “learns best by using their hands…when they can touch and feel things with their hands” (kinesthetic learner) and another being described as someone who “learns best by using their eyes…when they can look and see things with their eyes” (visual learner). Then, they were asked how smart they think each student is and how sporty each student is.
Experiment 2 was similar to the first experiment with two differences: First, instead of children, the researchers investigated parents and teachers. Second, this time the participants were asked which of the two students (visual learner versus hands-on learner) is smarter/sportier. So, they had to make a choice between the two learner types. In addition, they were prompted to list the school subjects the respective students would likely excel in.
In Experiment 3, teachers and parents were asked to guess the grades the two students would get on their report cards for different school subjects (e.g., arts, music, math, language).
Image from Pexels
What did they find?
6-12-year-old children rated the person described as a visual learner as smarter than the hands-on learner. There was no difference between the two learner types in their rating for sportiness.
Parents rated the visual learner as more intelligent than the hands-on learner. In addition, they rated the hands-on learner as sportier than the visual learner. The same results pattern was found for teachers.
Finally, parents and teachers guessed that visual learners would receive higher grades in subjects such as math, social studies, language, whereas hands-on learners were assigned higher predicted grades in arts, music, physical education. There was no difference in the science grades predictions between the two learner types.
Image from Pexels
Conclusions
The research highlights how preconceptions about learning styles can affect people’s perceptions of the abilities and intelligence of students. It is striking to see that even at a very young age, children will estimate visual learners to be smarter than kinesthetic learners. Parents and teachers make the same attributions, but also predict hands-on learners to be sportier than visual learners. Pigeonholing students in this way seems also to affect whether teachers and parents predict them to do well in specific subjects. This could potentially mean that students may miss out on being supported to excel in certain subjects or even fail to be considered for certain career options. More research is needed to investigate these findings further, but for now it adds to the evidence that the learning style myth should be dismissed in order to create learning environments that are not only effective, but also embraces the many potentials in our students.
(cover image by Startup Stock Photos on Pexels)
Reference
(1) Sun, X., Norton, O., & Nancekivell, S. E. (2023). Beware the myth: learning styles affect parents’, children’s, and teachers’ thinking about children’s academic potential. npj Science of Learning, 8(1), 46.
