Abstract
The existence of ‘Learning Styles’ is a common ‘neuromyth’, and their use in all forms of education has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited in the research literature. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that their use remains widespread. This perspective article is an attempt to understand if and why the myth of Learning Styles persists. I have done this by analyzing the current research literature to capture the picture that an educator would encounter were they to search for “Learning Styles” with the intent of determining whether the research evidence supported their use. The overwhelming majority (89%) of recent research papers, listed in the ERIC and PubMed research databases, implicitly or directly endorse the use of Learning Styles in Higher Education. These papers are dominated by the VAK and Kolb Learning Styles inventories. These presence of these papers in the pedagogical literature demonstrates that an educator, attempting to take an evidence-based approach to education, would be presented with a strong yet misleading message that the use of Learning Styles is endorsed by the current research literature. This has potentially negative consequences for students and for the field of education research.
Highlights
Davies (1999) called for an ‘evidence-based’ approach to education, arguing that the design of new interventions in education was not sufficiently informed by rigorous evidence and that new interventions are poorly evaluated
The ERIC research database returned more results than PubMed, but both demonstrate that an educator conducting a simple search for “learning styles” would be presented with abundant, modern, results, there is a suggestion that the numbers of studies may be declining in the ERIC database
The present study demonstrates that this view would be overwhelmingly confirmed, encouraging and perpetuating the use of Learning Styles
Summary
Davies (1999) called for an ‘evidence-based’ approach to education, arguing that the design of new interventions in education was not sufficiently informed by rigorous evidence and that new interventions are poorly evaluated. This was one in a series of such calls, the very idea of evidence-based education continues to be criticized (e.g., see Biesta, 2010), often on the basis that education is complex (allegedly more so than medicine, to which it is often compared). There are some concepts in education for which there is abundant clear evidence to show that they are not effective One of these is Learning Styles, such as the ‘VAK’ classification, which classifies individuals as one or more of ‘Visual, Auditory, or Kinesthetic’ learners (Geake, 2008). The concept of ‘Learning Styles’ as an educational tool is fairly straightforward, and follows three steps: (1) individuals will express a preference regarding their ‘style’ of learning, (2) individuals show differences in their ability to learn about certain types of information (e.g., some may be better at learning to discriminate between sounds while others may be better at discriminating between pictures), and (3) the ‘matching’ of instructional design to an individual’s Learning Style, as designated by one of the aforementioned classifications, will result in better educational outcomes
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