Learning styles: where’s the evidence?

2012/06/12 by Doug Rohrer, Harold Pashler · 4 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Learning Styles and Cognitive Differences #Evaluation of Teaching Practices #Innovative Teaching Methods #Citation #Library science #Psychology #Computer science

paper · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.2012.04273.x

openalex publication_date 2012/06/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Whereas modern medicine owes much of its success to its reliance upon evidence-based treatments, most popular techniques of instruction have not been subjected to thorough empirical scrutiny. A particularly glaring and costly result of this, we argue, is the wide acceptance of the idea that instruction should be tailored to a student’s so called learning style. For example, students might be divided into visual learners and verbal learners (on the basis of a learning style test given to each student) and then provided with instruction that emphasizes pictures or words, respectively. The visual–verbal distinction is only one simple example of the many proposed taxonomies; a recent review described 71 different schemes.1

Citations

• Learning Styles
• Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?

Cited by

• Is learning styles-based instruction effective? A comprehensive analysis of recent research on learning styles
• Evidence-Based Higher Education – Is the Learning Styles ‘Myth’ Important?
• A test of two alternative cognitive processing models: Learning styles and dual coding
• Learning styles [wikipedia]

Related

• Learning Styles: An overview of theories, models, and measures
• Learning Styles
• The Myth of Learning Styles
• Learning With Style
• The learning styles hypothesis is false, but there are patterns of student characteristics that are useful