In the early ‘90s, a New Zealand man named Neil Fleming decided to sort through something that had puzzled him during his time monitoring classrooms as a school inspector. In the course of watching 9,000 different classes, he noticed that only some teachers were able to reach each and every one of their students. What were they doing differently?
Fleming zeroed in on how it is that people like to be presented information. For example, when asking for directions, do you prefer to be told where to go or to have a map sketched for you？
Today, 16 questions like this comprise the VARK questionnaire that Fleming developed to determine someone’s “learning style.” VARK, which stands for “visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic,” sorts students into those who learn best visually, through aural or heard information, through reading, or through “kinesthetic” experiences.
He wasn’t the first to suggest that people have different “learning styles” – past theories included the reading-less “VAK” and something involving “convergers” and “assimilators” – but VARK became one of the most prominent mondels out there.
Everyone was special – so everyone must have a special learning style too. Teachers told students about it in grade school. Teachers like to think that they can reach every student, even strggling students, just by tailoring their instruction to match each student’s preferred learning format.
Either way, “by the time we get students at college,” says Polly Husmann, a professor at Indiana University, “they’ve already been told, ‘you’re a visual learner.’ Or aural, or what have you.”
The thing is, they’re not. Or at least, a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. In a study, Husmann and her colleagues had hundreds of students take the VARK questionnaire to determine what kind of learner they supposedly were. The survey then gave them some study strategies that seem like they would correlate with that learning style.
Husmann found that not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, but those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests.
Husmann thinks that the students had fallen into certain study habits, which, once formed, were too hard to break. Students seemed to be interested in their learning styles, but not enough to actually change their studying behavior based on them. And even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered.
“I think as purely reflective exercise, just to get you thinking about your study habits, VARK might have a benefit,” Hasmann says. “But the way we’ve been categorizing these learning styles doesn’t seem to hold up.”
Another study found that students who preferred learning visually thought they would remember pictures better, and those who preferred learning verbally thought they’d remember words better.
But those preferences had no correlation to which they actually remembered better later on – words or pictures. Essentially, all the “learning style” meant, in this case, was that the subjects liked words or pictures better, not that words or pictures worked better for their memories.
In other words, “there’s evidence that people do try to treat tasks in accordance with what they believe to be their learning style, but it doesn’t help them,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told me. In 2015, he reviewed the literature on learning styles and concluded that “learning styles theories have not panned out.”
That same year, a paper found no relationship between the study subjects’ learning-style preference(visual or auditory) and their performance on reading-or listening–comprehension tests. Instead, the visual learners performed best on all kind of test.
Therefore, the authors concluded, teachers should stop try to gear some lessons toward “auditory learners.” “Educators may actually be doing a disservice to auditory learners by continually accommodating(容纳、适应) their auditory learning style,” the researchers wrote, “rather than focusing on strengthening their visual word skills.”