Why Learning Styles Won’t Help You — and How You Should Study Instead

I remember many things about my first day of seventh grade. I remember being late, I remember finding my new counselor terrifying, I remember thinking I recognized the boy sitting on the other side of the room from somewhere. What I remember the most, though, is the test our new scary counselor had us take — something she called “The Learner Test”. It was a sheet full of A-B-C-D questions regarding various aspects of our personalities: what we notice first when meeting a new person, what note-taking style we like best, what activities we like to do in our free time. After a month it turned out I’d run late a lot, my counselor wasn’t so scary and the boy I recognized went to the same kindergarten as I did. Also, I was something called a “visual learner”, which apparently meant I should study for my tests by making a lot of mind maps.

Over four years later, I don’t remember the last time I made a mind map, yet my grades improved significantly since the rocky days of seventh grade.

Even though you might not share my exact experiences, there’s a chance you’ve been subjected to the idea of learning styles before. They’re praised by teachers and parenting blogs as something that will instantly boost students’ grades and make their studying process more enjoyable. It’s rooted in the idea that once a student knows what way of learning fits their personality best, studying will become a breeze for them because they can now focus on only the study methods that correspond with them. And while it’s a nice idea, it’s been debunked many times.

When we talk about learning styles, we usually distinguish four types of them: visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic (VARK for short). Their names correspond with the best study methods that fit each style: visual learners should study using diagrams, charts and maps, auditory learners should record their lectures and listen to them over and over again, reading/writing learners should, well, read and write the information they need to memorize, and kinesthetic learners should study through practice and recreation. It sounds lovely on the surface level: people like to categorize things into types, and those neat little boxes seem to be a great way to do just that.

While it’s true that everybody has different abilities and processes information in different ways, many studies since the 1970s have proven that there’s no evidence that learning styles are real and can help you with your learning process. In fact, they can be detrimental: believing that you are supposed to study in a certain way closes you off to many wonderful study techniques that could help you diversify your learning process. I’m the best example of this: for years I would refuse to study by practice, believing that charts and mind maps are my thing, when in reality, hands-on learning is beneficial for everyone, regardless of which box you’re put into by a VARK test.

Despite all the proof that learning styles don’t help people retain information better, I’m afraid that we won’t stop hearing about them anytime soon. According to a study conducted in 2017, 93% of the public and 76% of the teachers examined endorse the learning styles myth. The VARK test is taught to be an amazing method to help your students by universities and other teacher-training facilities. The love for learning styles is one of the many signs of how outdated the education field is, but while VARK is still around and well, we have to find ways to work around it.

So, what can you do instead?

The answer is simple: diversify! The learning styles put you into a box, so you should do the exact opposite — jump out of that box and explore the outside world. Mixing different study techniques to memorize the same information is a way to make sure you’re interacting with different parts of your brain and therefore learning more effectively. Read an article, listen to a lecture, take a practice test, draw a pretty chart! Explore different study techniques, find out what works for you, but don’t limit yourself to a V, A, R or K. Your brain has all the power to do all of that, and it’d probably love to do that. What are you waiting for, then?

Good luck with your studies!

SOURCES

• https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/07/20/oh-dear-even-people-with-neuroscience-training-believe-an-awful-lot-of-brain-myths/
• https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-state-teacher-license-prep-materials-debunked-theory/
• https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-styles-myth
• https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/learning-styles-are-more-myth-than-reality

Written by Magdalena Styś

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