Thing #1: Learning preferences vs. Learning styles hypothesis
It is true that we do have study preferences. When given a choice, most of us will prefer receiving instruction in certain ways (e.g. I’ll always prefer reading something to listening to a lecture of the same material). And research does bears this out.
However, the learning styles hypothesis doesn’t just say that we have preferences for how we receive information. It goes a step further and predicts that our learning will be enhanced if instruction is tailored to our preferred style (or compromised, if we don’t receive instruction in our preferred style). Which takes us to the second thing.
Thing #2: What learning is and isn’t
It’s important to note that there is a fundamental difference between how quickly we pick up things (performance), and how much of those gains actually stick and can be retrieved a day or week later (learning). The learning-performance distinction as it is sometimes called.
What does the research actually show?
The researchers did an exhaustive search, but found surprisingly few studies which were set up this way. And the few that were…well, let’s take a look.
A 2006 study compared the performance of verbal and visual learners who were taught a lesson in either a visual-based or verbal-based style. It was a sophisticated, well-designed study, and they undertook a pretty exhaustive statistical analysis in search of some effect, but couldn’t find any difference between the performance of those whose training was matched to their preferred style, and those who were mismatched.
And then there’s a 2009 study of medical residents, where researchers thought that those with a “sensing” learning style might learn more effectively if presented with the problem to be solvedbefore receiving the information or instruction they would need to solve it. Conversely, they hypothesized that those with an “intuitive” style would do better if they received the lesson first, before being presented with the problem. But here too, there was no difference in performance.
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