Maybe they’re born with it, or maybe it’s experience: Toward a deeper understanding of the learning style myth.

Abstract

Decades of research suggest that learning styles, or the belief that people learn better when they receive instruction in their dominant way of learning, may be one of the most pervasive myths about cognition. Nonetheless, little is known about what it means to believe in learning styles. The present investigation uses one theoretical framework—psychological essentialism—to explore the content and consistency of people’s learning style beliefs. Psychological essentialism is a belief that certain categories (such as dogs, girls, or visual learners) have an underlying reality or true nature that is biologically based and highly predictive of many other features (Gelman, 2003). We tested the prevalence of erroneous essentialist beliefs regarding learning styles in both educators and noneducators, including that learning styles are innate, unchanging, discrete, and wired into the brain. In each of two experiments, we identified two groups of learning style believers, with one group holding an essentialist interpretation of learning styles, and the other group holding a nonessentialist interpretation of learning styles. No differences were found between educators’ and noneducators’ beliefs. In fact, only one factor was found to be a significant predictor of learning style beliefs for educators: the age of the population with whom they work. Specifically, those who worked with younger children were more likely to interpret learning styles in an essentialist way. Together the findings demonstrate that learning style beliefs are far more complex and variable than previously recognized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved