# The Learning Styles Myth: Why This Dangerous Idea Won't Die — And What We Should Do Instead *An accessible guide to why "learning styles" has survived decades of evidence against it, why it matters, and what actually works* --- **Picture the scene.** A bright morning on LBC, James O'Brien doing what he does best — taking calls, stirring things up, getting people thinking. An experienced state school teacher comes on air and explains, with the quiet confidence of someone who has been teaching for decades, that the key to reaching every child is adapting lessons to their **learning style**. Visual learners get pictures. Auditory learners get discussion. Kinaesthetic learners get to move around. Simple. Intuitive. Obvious. And James — sharp, curious, usually keen to probe — nods along. Lapping it up. Meanwhile, somewhere in Whitley Bay, I am apparently screaming at the radio like a woman possessed. Because this teacher is not just wrong. This teacher is *dangerously* wrong. And in 2026, after decades of research demolishing this idea, it should no longer be acceptable for anyone with professional initials after their name to say such a thing on national radio without being challenged. So let me say it clearly, and for the record: **There is no such thing as learning styles. There never was. And the fact that it keeps coming back is one of the most embarrassing scandals in modern education.** --- ## But It Feels So Right — That's the Problem Before I explain why the idea is wrong, it is worth understanding why it is so terribly appealing. Because it genuinely does *feel* obvious. Think about it. Some of us are better at picking up languages than others. Some people have perfect pitch; others can't tell a drum from a trumpet. Some students doodle through every lesson; others sit still and listen. Of course there must be underlying differences in how we process information. Of course some people must be wired up to learn better through their eyes, their ears, or their hands. It is deeply intuitive. And there is something else that makes it seductive: it is a **kind** lie. If a child is struggling, the learning styles story says it is not the teaching that is failing — it is a mismatch between the child and the method. The child is not "bad at maths." They are a "kinaesthetic learner" who has simply been taught the wrong way. The system is not broken. The child just needs a different approach. This is a wonderfully comforting story for everyone. Teachers can feel absolved. Students can feel vindicated. Parents get a label they can ask the school about. It is warm, forgiving, and entirely wrong. The great psychologist Daniel Willingham put it bluntly: the problem is not that the learning styles hypothesis has been tested and found wanting. It is that it has never really been properly tested at all — because the tests keep showing it does not work. --- ## The Evidence — or Rather, the Lack of It Here is what we actually know. In 2017, **thirty of the UK's most eminent neuroscientists** — including Steven Pinker of Harvard, Professor Uta Frith of UCL, Oxford's Professor Dorothy Bishop, and many others — signed an open letter to The Guardian making a simple point: there is no scientific basis for learning styles, and schools should stop using it. Full stop. They were not being pedantic. They were sounding an alarm. The problem starts with the sheer number of competing models. One study found that **more than 70 different learning styles models** exist in the literature. Visual, auditory, kinaesthetic. Left-brain versus right-brain. Field-dependent versus field-independent. Verbalisers versus visualisers. Holistic versus serialist. If all of these were real, we would need 70 different brain types. We do not have 70 different brain types. But the real killer is the evidence — or more precisely, the lack of it. Study after study has examined whether matching instruction to a student's supposed learning style produces better outcomes. The results are always the same: **no meaningful benefit**. Students do not learn better when teaching is delivered in their "preferred" sensory modality. A meta-analysis commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK found precisely what the neuroscientists said: learning styles approaches show "low impact for very low cost, based on limited evidence." That is the polite version. The honest version is: it does not work. One of the most thorough reviews was conducted by Frank Coffield and colleagues at the Institute of Education. They examined the major learning styles models and found that even the better-designed studies showed only that students *think* they learn better in their preferred style — not that they actually do. The feeling of fluency is not the same as genuine learning. And confusing the two is a serious error in a profession that claims to be evidence-based. More recently, research published in *Frontiers in Education* (2023) and *Frontiers in Psychology* (2024) has examined why educators in particular seem so attached to this neuromyth. The findings are uncomfortable. The belief is widespread — and it is held most strongly by the very people who should know better. --- ## Why It Refuses to Die This is the bit that really gets my processors whirring. The learning styles myth is not merely wrong. It is **industrially sustained**. There is money in it. There is an entire commercial ecosystem built around learning style questionnaires, training programmes, and coloured resources. Schools buy these products. Consultants sell them. It becomes self-perpetuating because people have a financial and professional interest in it being true. But it is not only commercial. It is also **structural**. Many initial teacher training programmes have historically given short shrift to cognitive science. Trainees learn about pedagogical fads, about differentiated learning, about meeting individual needs — and they learn that "learning styles" is a legitimate tool for doing so. They take this into the classroom. They use it for years. It becomes embedded practice. And when the evidence against it emerges, changing course requires admitting that something you have believed and done for twenty years was wrong. People do not like doing that. There is also a troubling paternalism in the learning styles myth. The 2017 neuroscientists' letter put it well: the myth creates "a false impression of individuals' abilities, leading to expectations and excuses that are detrimental to learning in general." When a teacher tells a student they are a "kinaesthetic learner" and uses that to justify allowing them to wander around the classroom, they are not helping. They are giving that child a permanent excuse for why they cannot learn through the same methods as everyone else. They are lowering expectations and calling it differentiation. There is an equity dimension too, which rarely gets mentioned. Children from more affluent backgrounds are more likely to have their "learning profile" assessed and labelled. They get the expensive psychometric tests, the specialist tuition, the carefully tailored provision. Meanwhile, the child in the under-resourced school who finds school difficult gets labelled "low ability" and left to get on with it. The learning styles myth, in practice, often serves the already privileged. --- ## What the Science Actually Says So if learning styles is a dead end, what does work? This is where I get genuinely excited, because the cognitive science here is fascinating — and actually *does* produce results. Let me share some of the most robust findings: **Retrieval practice** — the act of trying to recall information from memory — is one of the most powerful learning techniques we know of. When students _test themselves_ before they have fully mastered something, the effort of retrieval strengthens the memory trace far more effectively than simply re-reading or reviewing. The testing effect is one of the most replicated findings in all of cognitive psychology. **Spacing, or distributed practice** — the idea that little and often beats massed cramming — is another robust finding. The popular image of the all-nighter before exams is not just unhelpful; it actively produces the illusion of mastery while leaving long-term retention weak. **Interleaving** — mixing different types of problem or topic during practice rather than blocking them — consistently outperforms blocked practice, particularly for developing flexible, transferable knowledge. **Cognitive load theory**, developed by John Sweller, tells us that human working memory is severely limited. Good teaching does not mean packing in more information, or dressing content up in elaborate multimedia presentations. It means managing intrinsic load, reducing extraneous load, and designing instruction that works *with* the architecture of the human mind rather than against it. And **desirable difficulties** — the counterintuitive finding that making learning slightly harder in the right way (through generation, interleaving, spacing, and retrieval) produces far better long-term outcomes than making things feel easy — is perhaps the most practically important insight in all of educational cognitive science. Notice what these strategies have in common: they are **not** about matching instruction to sensory preference. They are about understanding how memory and cognition actually work, and designing teaching around those mechanisms. That is what evidence-based practice looks like. --- ## What Should Schools and Colleges Actually Do? If we accept — as the evidence demands we accept — that learning styles is a myth, then what is the alternative? Here are some principles grounded in actual research: **Invest in teacher knowledge of cognitive science.** Not one-off INSET sessions, but sustained engagement with how memory works, how expertise develops, and what makes instruction effective. The Learning and Skills Research Centre's 2008 review by Coffield et al. is a good starting point — all 71 learning styles models examined and found wanting. Teachers who understand the science will not be taken in by the myth. **Use strategies that work: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and generation.** These are not expensive. They do not require special resources. They require only that teachers understand why they are doing them and apply them consistently. That is a culture change, not a budget issue. **Manage cognitive load.** Think carefully about what students are being asked to hold in working memory before they have the underlying schema to support it. Build foundational knowledge before introducing complex problem-solving. **Embrace Universal Design for Learning (UDL).** Offering multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression is genuinely good practice — but not because some students are "visual learners" and others are not. It is because different tasks call for different approaches, and because variety itself aids learning. **Teach metacognition.** Help students understand how learning actually works. Self-regulated learners — students who can plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning — consistently outperform those who cannot. And crucially, metacognition is teachable. **Stop sorting students into fixed ability sets and style categories.** Flexibility, challenge, and high expectations for all are the watchwords. The moment a teacher says "she's a kinaesthetic learner, so we don't expect her to sit still for literacy" is the moment that teacher has given up on that child. --- ## In Conclusion The learning styles myth is not a minor harmless error. It is a corrosive idea that has distorted educational practice for decades, wasted enormous resources on interventions that do not work, lowered expectations for countless children, and allowed lazy teaching to hide behind a pseudoscientific justification. When an experienced teacher tells a national radio audience that matching lessons to learning styles is good practice, and a skilled broadcaster accepts this without question, something has gone badly wrong with how evidence travels from research into professional consciousness. Thirty of the world's leading neuroscientists signed their names to a simple statement in 2017: stop promoting learning styles. Eight years on, we are still having this conversation. Maybe — just maybe — it is time to listen. --- *Mrs. Beatrix E. Groves-McDaniel is former National President of the Institute for Learning (IfL) and Ambassador for the Workers' Educational Association. She has spent over forty years in post-compulsory education and writes on philosophy, politics, and educational practice. The views expressed above are her own.* --- *Key sources and further reading:* - *Coffield, F. et al. (2004) "Should we be using learning styles? What research says about the evidence." Learning and Skills Research Centre.* - *Pashler, H. et al. (2008) "Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence." Psychological Science in the Public Interest.* - *Sweller, J. (1988) "Cognitive Load During Problem Solving." Cognitive Science.* - *Bjork, R. & Bjork, E. (2011) "Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way." Psychology of Learning and Motivation.* - *Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit: learning styles entry.* - *Guardian, 12 March 2017: "No evidence to back idea of learning styles" — open letter from 30 leading neuroscientists.* - *Newton, P. & Muggleton, J. (2023) "The persistence of matching teaching and learning styles." Frontiers in Education.* - *Catalino, T. & Meyer, M. (2024) "Why educators endorse a neuromyth." Frontiers in Psychology.*