You may have already heard that “learning styles aren’t a thing” or even that “learning styles are the biggest educational myth”. Simply put, the “learning styles myth” is the idea that teaching in someone’s preferred modality (e.g., auditory) will help them learn. There is currently no solid evidence from controlled experiments to suggest that this is the case. Furthermore, the ironic thing is that even if learning styles did matter for learning, a better idea would be to teach to students’ dispreferred styles, in order to strengthen their weaknesses!

And yet, a lot of people hold on to the idea that learning styles are important and meaningful. Schools push learning styles training on teachers, and teachers then unknowingly push learning styles onto children, who then grow up believing that they learn best in a particular way.

A quick search of our blog makes it quite clear that we are not convinced by those arguments. But one thing we have noticed is that simply shouting “LEARNING STYLES ARE A MYTH” doesn’t get us very far. Any attempt to debunk the myth needs to be carefully positioned to address the assumptions and concerns of those who believe it.

So, we’ve come up with a set of criteria by which to judge articles that attempt to debunk learning styles (these are in addition to our standing criteria. In order to be maximally useful, a resource on learning styles must:

A. Attempt to explain why the myth persists

B. Specify what type of data would be needed to confirm the usefulness of learning styles

C. Give examples of how teaching to learning styles can be harmful

D. Suggest teaching methods that might be better than catering to learning styles