Learning Styles: The Learning Myth That Will Never Die
The King of Learning Myths
There are certain ideas about learning that just seem to refuse to die. You’ve probably heard that some people are visual learners while others are auditory or kinesthetic learners. You may have been told that creative people are more “right-brained,” while analytical people are more “left-brained.” Maybe you’ve heard someone say that younger generations are naturally better at multitasking because they grew up surrounded by technology. Depending on when you went to school, you might have even taken a quiz designed to tell you what kind of learner you were.
What fascinates me about these ideas isn’t simply that many of them are unsupported, overstated, or misunderstood. But what I wanted to know is how did we get here in the first place? Most learning myths didn’t begin as complete nonsense. Usually, somewhere underneath the myth is a legitimate scientific finding, an observation that seems reasonable, or a theory that was much more nuanced than the version that eventually made its way into classrooms and professional development.
Learning is complicated. Educators and administrators are constantly looking for ways to understand why one learner succeeds while another struggles. If someone offers you a framework that appears to explain individual differences and promises a clear way to personalize instruction, it makes sense that people would be interested in it.
But as you know, there is no silver bullet. There is no magical fix that will change all of education for the better. A limited scientific finding becomes a broad claim about how people learn. A theory gets reduced to a graphic or a three-category model. An interesting observation becomes a prescription for teaching. By the time the idea becomes common knowledge, it may look very different from what the original research actually said.
So, in the next few episodes, I want to explore where some of our most persistent learning myths came from, why they became so popular, and what the evidence actually tells us today. We’ll look at learning styles, left-brain versus right-brain thinking, multitasking, digital natives, and the broader idea of neuromyths. So, let’s start with the best one: learning styles.
How Did We Get Here?
If you’ve spent any amount of time in education, there is a very good chance that you have encountered learning styles. The most familiar version says that some people are visual learners, some are auditory learners, and others are kinesthetic learners. You may have heard these categories described as VARK, which adds reading and writing as a separate preference.
One of the most influential figures in popularizing this particular version was New Zealand educator Neil Fleming. Fleming developed what became the VARK questionnaire beginning in 1987, and he and Colleen Mills formally introduced the model in a 1992 article titled “Not Another Inventory, Rather a Catalyst for Reflection.” VARK organized learning preferences into four modalities: visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic. The questionnaire became extraordinarily recognizable in education and helped give teachers and students a simple vocabulary for talking about how they preferred to encounter information.
There is an interesting wrinkle in Fleming’s story, though. VARK was originally described as a catalyst for reflection, not as a diagnostic test that permanently labels someone as one kind of learner. Fleming himself later cautioned that students and teachers could place more faith in VARK than it warranted and distinguished preferences from abilities. That distinction matters because the popular version of learning styles eventually became much stronger than simply saying that people have preferences. It became the claim that identifying a learner’s style tells us how that person should be taught.
At first glance, the idea makes intuitive sense because people really do have preferences. Maybe you would rather watch someone demonstrate a new process than read a ten-page manual. Maybe you love podcasts and can listen to an explanation for an hour but find dense reading exhausting. Maybe you prefer to work through something with your hands before you feel like you truly understand it. None of those preferences are imaginary, and rejecting the learning-styles hypothesis does not mean pretending that all learners are identical. And even if we take the words directly from Fleming and Mills, this doesn’t seem to come from a place of negligence or carelessness, “We believe in assisting students to know themselves and programs. Rather, we believe in assisting students to know themselves and to operate in a metacognitive fashion to make adjustments in their learning to operate in a metacognitive fashion to make adjustments in their learning behaviors” (1992, p. 138).
The questionable leap happens when a preference becomes a prescription for instruction. The traditional learning-styles hypothesis says that if we can identify a learner’s preferred style and then match our teaching to that style, learning should improve. If you are a visual learner, visual instruction should work better for you. If you are an auditory learner, you should learn better when information is presented through sound. If you are kinesthetic, hands-on instruction should be especially effective for you.
And The Research Says…
Researchers sometimes refer to this as the meshing hypothesis. The learner supposedly has a stable style, the instruction has a particular mode, and the best learning happens when those two things match. The problem is that this is a much more specific claim than simply saying that learners have preferences. Once you make that claim, you need evidence showing that matching instruction to a diagnosed style actually produces better learning.
That is where the research becomes much less convincing. In 2008, Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork published one of the most influential reviews of the learning-styles literature. They explained what evidence we would actually need in order to show that matching works.
Imagine that we identify one group as visual learners and another group as auditory learners. We then randomly assign learners from both groups to either visual instruction or auditory instruction. Afterward, everyone takes the same assessment. If the learning-styles hypothesis is correct, visual learners should perform better with visual instruction while auditory learners should perform better with auditory instruction.
That particular interaction is crucial. It is not enough to show that students enjoy receiving instruction in their preferred format. It is not enough to show that people describe themselves as visual or auditory. It is not enough to find that one instructional format produced better learning overall. To support the matching hypothesis, the best instructional method would need to change depending on the learner’s supposed style.
Pashler and his colleagues found very little evidence demonstrating that pattern. Pashler and colleagues stated that, ‘Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles” (2008).
Their conclusion was not that individual differences are meaningless or that every person should receive identical instruction. Their conclusion was that there was not an adequate evidence base for using learning-style assessments to determine how instruction should be delivered.
A few years earlier, Frank Coffield and his colleagues had already documented another major problem with learning styles. In a large review published in 2004, they examined numerous learning-style models and found an enormous and confusing collection of competing frameworks. Different systems categorized learners in different ways, used different questionnaires, measured different characteristics, and often disagreed about what a “learning style” actually was. Coffield revisited these again in 2013 and still found the same issues.
Confusion Amongst Learning Style Enthusiasts
When someone says, “We should teach to learning styles,” which learning styles are they talking about? Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic? Kolb’s experiential learning styles? Honey and Mumford? Felder-Silverman? Dunn and Dunn? There have been dozens of frameworks, and they do not all define learning styles in the same way.
Yet the visual-auditory-kinesthetic version became incredibly popular, and I think part of the reason is that it feels very learner-centered. It feels like this should be a logical and common-sense approach. Telling someone, “You learn differently, and I want to teach in a way that works for you,” sounds thoughtful and supportive. It’s easy to then identify by this style and feel like you have more control in how you learn. By contrast, saying that there is little evidence for learning styles and that they’re fake can sound as though you are arguing that individual differences do not matter.
And while I could just end this section with these words, I’ll try to spin a more positive direction. We should match instructional methods to what learners are trying to learn rather than to a label assigned to the learner. For instance, if I’m teaching pronunciation in a new language, learners need opportunities to hear the language. If I’m teaching geography, maps and visual representations may be especially valuable. If I’m teaching guitar, learners eventually need physical practice because the learning goal itself involves performing a physical skill.
In other words, modality can absolutely matter. The key question is whether the modality is appropriate for the content and the learning goal, not whether a questionnaire has labeled someone a visual learner. We can also use multiple forms of representation. Images, narration, demonstrations, examples, written explanations, practice, and discussion can all contribute to a well-designed learning experience.
Pain
But it is crazy how this myth is still here. It’s 2026. There is an enormous amount of research on why learning styles aren’t a thing, yet my neurologist recently asked me about my learning style. I looked at her like she had three heads while she pointed to the hospital’s questionnaire form and sure enough, there was our old pal VARK. I said that I’m a food-based learner and I learn best while eating. Then it was her turn to stare at me like I had three heads and I had to explain about what I do for a living and how their forms need to be updated.
Yes, the myth persists. In 2020, Newton, Salvi, Najabat-Lattif, and Santiago published a systematic review looking at belief in learning styles among educators across multiple countries. They found that belief in matching instruction to learning styles remained remarkably common, despite decades of criticism in the research literature. Many educators also didn’t stumble across learning styles on a random website. They were taught them. Learning styles became embedded in teacher education programs, professional development workshops, instructional books, and other formal training materials. This has been especially painful for me as an instructional design instructor who will love a textbook and then have to tell students to ignore the learning styles section. So, when we ask why this idea became so persistent, part of the answer is institutional.
For some educators, learning styles weren’t presented as a controversial theory. They were presented as part of learning how to teach and how to go above and beyond to serve students. Once an idea becomes embedded in teacher preparation, professional development, websites, consulting services, textbooks, and popular culture, it can become very difficult to dislodge. At that point, the myth may have an infrastructure supporting it that is much larger than the research base that originally inspired it.
Even with my own platforms and trying to debunk this information, easily, my most disliked video was on how learning styles aren’t real. One comment in particular has stuck with me from a person who said that his ADHD counselor taught him about learning styles so therefore, they have to be real. The medical field seems to really have a problem with learning styles huh?
It does give me hope though that content creators have been making more around this learning myth. Veritasium with 21 million subscribers made a viral video gaining 15 million views called, “The Biggest Myth in Education.”
How Are Learning Styles Harmful?
But where’s the harm in all of this? If I want to still believe in my visual identity, does it matter? Well, potentially. Sun, Norton, and Nancekivell ran three experiments where they examined what happens when children are labeled as either “visual learners” or “hands on learners.” Parents, teachers, and children tended to view the supposed visual learners as more intelligent and expected them to earn higher grades in core subjects.
More recently, Hattie and O’Leary (2025) argue that treating learning styles as stable categories can distract educators from something much more useful: helping students develop flexible learning strategies appropriate to the task and learning goal. Their review distinguishes learning strategies from supposed fixed learning styles and concludes that there is no support for the claim that different types of learners require teaching matched to their style.
So, limiting your own beliefs is one, and two, the perceptions of those around you can change.
When I think about learning styles today, I think the lesson is not simply “learning styles are fake.” The more useful lesson is that preferences are real, individual differences are real, and instructional methods matter, but the evidence does not support the popular idea that learners should be classified into fixed sensory types and then taught according to those labels. There are good intentions here, but they can backfire. As educators, we should be striving for better ways to improve our learning experiences, but we should also be skeptical.
