“You must be mythtaken”: Learning styles is the neuromyth that refuses to go away

When you watched Line of Duty did you learn what was happening by looking or seeing? Did you sit still throughout, or were you on the edge of your seat in some places? What did you learn while watching it? Could you write a summary of it and analyse the plot in the context of knowing who H was? That’s all learning. You saw, you heard, you probably didn’t sit still. Seeing, hearing, doing.

Have you ever tried out any moves you’ve seen superheroes on screen do? At one point my daughter decided she was training to be a ninja after to watching the Power Rangers, it involved lots of climbing over things and hiding behind the sofa. Again, seeing, hearing and doing.

Much like the Mozart Effect, the VAK Learning Styles idea is pervasive neuromyth that will not go away. It’s been repeatedly discredited; the ideas have no basis in scientific validity and there is a mountain (and I do mean mountain) of evidence that learning styles don’t exist. But the idea is still thriving (Newton, 2015). For anyone who knows anything about learning this is more than a little frustrating.

[black background with white outline chalk arrows pointing in opposite directions saying ‘myths’ and ‘facts’, with a hand drawing them. Source: https://www.td.org/insights/eradicating-the-learning-styles-myth]

Many of you will have heard of learning styles, this idea that you learn in a particular way, or at least prefer learning in a particular way. There are many learning styles theories and ideas out there, none of which have any real basis in evidence (Willingham et al, 2015), but this blog is about VAK learning styles, developed way back in 1979 by Barbe et al. Flemming (1995) subsequently tried to expand on this with his VARK theory that has links with NLP, neurolinguistic processing and the right-brain, left-brain ideas. (Why talk about just one neuromyth when you can cover three at the same time!)

The VAK/VARK learning styles idea states that we learn based on our senses: some people learn best by reading (visually), some by listening (aurally) and some by doing (kinaesthetically/physically). This idea also states that the learning styles are present at birth and can’t be changed, so if you have a learning preference for one sense, that won’t change. All of this is wrong, because that’s just not how the brain works, and it completely ignores the individual differences and life experiences that impact learning (and that includes differences in sensory and perceptual abilities).

Let’s consider learning kinaesthetically for a moment, while you’re reading a blog on a computer/smartphone screen. We know that reading a physical book is a partly kinaesthetic experience: holding it, turning pages, knowing where you are relative to the start and end, that’s all kinaesthetic. But what is kinaesthetic about reading on a screen? Did you lick the screen? Oh wait, no, sorry that’s taste. Don’t do that either though, bit weird.

Why just the 3 senses? It’s a bit restrictive if you think about it, we have lots more (between 5 and 18 depending on the source you look at) and we use all of them to engage with the environment. Let’s start with smell. This article from The Onion in 2000 about ‘nasal learners’ is one of my favourite examples to support why learning styles are a truly mad neuromyth. We definitely learn things by smell, but do we go around sniffing things? Well, you can certainly tell the difference between melted chocolate and bananas pretty easily if you’re blindfolded. What about taste? Can you identify orange smarties just based on taste? Yes, actually you can, they’re made of orange chocolate rather than regular milk chocolate, I used to use them in a class experiment with my undergrads back when I taught stats elsewhere. Learning while eating chocolate, you can’t go wrong with that approach.

Most of the studies that purport to support learning styles have poor (or non-existent) methodology and don’t meet the criteria for scientific validity, meaning the perpetuation of learning styles is “disturbing” (Pashler et al, 2008, p15) if you think about it. So why isn’t this idea being ignored? Much like the Mozart Effect (again, it’s still not real), the concept of learning styles is easy to understand, it fits with our love of categorising and simplifying things. Theories of personality aren’t immune from this over-simplification either, the Myers-Briggs personality test is wildly popular, forming the basis of most random quizzes you see on social media, but has no scientific validity or reliability, was not constructed by psychologists, and is about as accurate as a fortune cookie (Robert, 2015).

Once you start disentangling the concept of learning styles, and applying a basic knowledge of the brain to the theory, it’s pretty obvious why it’s a neuromyth. We all learn by using all our senses, learning isn’t defined by sensory experience, it’s defined by other things such as life experience, social observation and interaction, engagement and motivation. Your brain responds to stimuli in the environment (all stimuli) and then creates new connections in response to our interactions with those stimuli. Attention is a big part of this, because if you ignore something completely, there is no input and there is no connection made so there is zero learning, much like when students play on their phones during class.

Attention is goal-driven allocation of neural resources in order to achieve things (such as reading, watching Line of Duty, walking, or simply reaching for another piece of cake). Our attentional processing system doesn’t care which sense the information comes from, it’s connected to all of them, and the resources are allocated where it makes sense for the particular behavioural goal. If we want to watch Line of Duty, the priority senses are vision and audition, if we want cake then the priority senses are proprioception and taste. It’s all about the goal, sensory ‘preference’ has nothing to do with it, and forcing a preference onto learners can be actively damaging their learning journey because it can prevent them from developing skills that will actually support them in learning and reduce their motivation to try other ways of learning when they’re stuck.

The Harry Potter series is perennially popular because it is engaging; children (and adults) are motivated to read it because it’s fun. Look up the word lengths, the books got longer and longer through the series. An average young adult book is around 50k words, and an average adult novel is around 90k words. Book 5 in the Harry Potter series is a whopping 257,045k (Dexter, n.d.), that’s a serious reading commitment, even for an adult. Children (and adults) don’t read this series in their millions because it’s long or because they’re all ‘visual’ learners, they read it because it’s engaging, and they are motivated to read it.

Read this: “It’s leviOsa, not levioSA”. Along with the visual clues in the words, many of you will also have heard Emma Watson say it, the actress who played Hermione in Harry Potter. If I write “Swish and flick”, I bet some of you could do the swish and flick demonstrated in the film as well… Seeing, hearing, doing.

You can’t split the senses so directly; it doesn’t make neurological (or logical) sense, life isn’t a series of sensory experiences, it’s a whole sensory bath of experience guided by desires, goals and motivations. Whichever senses you have are combined in the joint effort of engaging and understanding the world around us. It’s a collaboration, not a competition. We have a highly interconnected brain, and we are fully engaged in our surroundings. If you take away sensory stimulation, your brain will actively make hypotheses up about what it thinks it should hear and see (look up Ganzfield experiments if you’re interested in this), the subsequent hallucinations are a full-on sensory experience in the absence of actual sensory input. The McGurk effect shows us how connected sight and sound are in particular; we need both to form an accurate hypothesis of what is happening in our environment through our senses, and a mismatch in the information can lead to the perception that something entirely different is happening.

[square split diagonally into pink and green with ‘learning styles vs learning strategies’ on. Source: http://psychlearningcurve.org/learning-myths-vs-learning-facts/]

We learn by engaging with material, by doing something with it, and by remembering it and recalling it at multiple time points. That might be thinking about it, explaining it to someone, or by applying it to a problem or situation. We learn by association (classical conditioning), reinforcement (operant conditioning), observation (vicarious or social learning). All of these involve information being attended to, stored in memory, recalled and used to inform the situation and behavioural goals. Pick up any general Psychology textbook and you will likely find a whole chapter (or more) on how we learn. It’s a cognitive process that relies on interaction with the world and remembering those interactions.

Learning isn’t confined to a classroom, it is not confined to a sensory situation, it is a life-long and continual experience. There is simply more structure in the classroom, more direction to learn particular things. Do we need to present material in particular ways? To a point, yes. We need to make sure that all students have appropriate instructions in various formats, to account for variations in reading/writing speed and the amount they can hold in working memory. We need to ensure that the tasks they’re being asked to do have some relevance and are engaging enough so that they understand the point and are motivated to learn. We need to provide enough resources so that students don’t get bored, we also need to ensure there is enough variety of resources, so students won’t get fed up doing the same thing and disengage; continual repetition of the same things leads to boredom, disengagement, a lack of motivation and a reduction in learning (Pawlak et al, 2020).

We know that discussion of ideas leads to better understanding than does just listening (Goldberg et al, 2006), it’s why there isn’t a single method of teaching throughout the whole of education, and the interactive elements always take priority. We know that giving students more control over their learning can even lead to an increase in performance (Goldberg & McKhann, 2000), which is why we expect some independent learning (or homework) and why asynchronous learning can work really well when it compliments synchronous (Parson et al, 2009). These things work when you engage students and motivate them to learn. Motivation is key to enhancing the quality of learning (Pajares & Johnson, 1994), and increased motivation leads to increased engagement, which increases learning (Junco, 2010). Indeed, lack of motivation and increased procrastination is directly associated with lower performance levels (Cormack et al, 2020).

According to the VAK/VARK learning styles myth my lectures are primarily auditory, because I’m talking. But anyone who’s been taught by me knows that’s simply not the case, because that would involve me just reading out slides (how dull!), which is one thing I’m really bad at, I’m terrible for going off on tangents with extra information and random facts. I have slides (usually with pictures and not just words), sound effects, videos and I frequently get my students to do all manner of activities and mad things (even via asynchronous video this last year); I’ve also been known to pop balloons to make a point. My friend taught DNA and the menstrual cycle by getting her students to make colour-coded beaded bracelets this week. Engaging, motivating, interesting.

[image of people’s legs standing in front of the word ‘motivation’ on the floor with pictures of a chemistry vial, a graduate hat, a lightbulb, a book, a brain, an apple, a degree scroll, and a planet around the word. Source: Ecosia Images: http://www.closemarketing.es]

ALL educators instinctively want to make their classes engaging, and we use ALL the tools at our disposal to do this. The literature might be full of material about learning styles, but they don’t work. Using learning styles to direct teaching formats undermines the learning process and can actually have a negative impact on our students (Newton, 2015) they can distract from what does work: interacting with the information and applying it in a multitude of ways. Using the same tools in every situation is dull, and if we want to learn, we need to be motivated and engaged.

Teaching is a surround-sound immersive experience that engages students and motivates them to learn. We learn because we want to, because we are motivated to, because we are interested. Instead of worrying about sensory experience (which differs between people anyway), why don’t we focus on making teaching engaging and motivating students to learn, because that method has a lot of evidence to say it works. Time for the VAK/VARK learning styles neuromyth to go, because if you still think it’s real, you are very much mythtaken.

References

• Barbe, W.B., Swassing, R.H., Milone, M.N. (1979). Teaching through modality strengths: concepts practices. Zaner-Bloser. 
• Cormack, S. H., Eagle, L. A., & Davies, M. S. (2020). A large-scale test of the relationship between procrastination and performance using learning analytics. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(7), 1046-1059.
• Dexter, A. (n.d.). How many words are in Harry Potter, Wordcounter: https://wordcounter.io/blog/how-many-words-are-in-harry-potter/
• Fleming, N. D. (1995, July). I’m different; not dumb. Modes of presentation (VARK) in the tertiary classroom. In Research and development in higher education, Proceedings of the 1995 Annual Conference of the Higher Education and Research Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA), HERDSA (Vol. 18, pp. 308-313).
• Goldberg, H. R., Haase, E., Shoukas, A., & Schramm, L. (2006). Redefining classroom instruction. Advances in Physiology Education, 30(3), 124-127.
• Goldberg, H. R., & McKhann, G. M. (2000). Student test scores are improved in a virtual learning environment. Advances in physiology education, 23(1), S59-66.
• Junco, R., Heiberger, G., & Loken, E. (2011). The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. Journal of computer assisted learning, 27(2), 119-132.
• Newton, P. M. (2015). The learning styles myth is thriving in higher education. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1908.
• Pajares, F., & Johnson, M. J. (1994). Confidence and competence in writing: The role of self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, and apprehension. Research in the Teaching of English, 313-331.
• Parson, V. J., Reddy, P.A., Wood, J., & Senior, C. (2009). Educating an IPod generation: Undergraduate attitudes, experiences and understanding of vodcast and podcast use, Learning, Media and Technology, 34(3), 215-228
• Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119.
• Pawlak, M., Kruk, M., Zawodniak, J., & Pasikowski, S. (2020). Investigating factors responsible for boredom in English classes: The case of advanced learners. System, 91, 102259.
• Robert, H. (2015). Personality and the Fate of Organizations. Psychology Press.
• Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271.