Learning Styles

Learning styles refers to the widely held idea that individual students have a preferred mode of receiving information, commonly categorized into visual, auditory, reading or writing, and kinesthetic types under the VAK or VARK models popularized by researcher Neil Fleming in 1987, and that instruction is more effective when matched to a student's particular style. The concept has been enormously influential in teacher training and classroom practice since the late twentieth century, with large majorities of teachers surveyed in multiple countries reporting a belief in it. However, a comprehensive 2008 review by psychologist Harold Pashler and colleagues found no credible scientific evidence that matching instructional method to a student's self-reported or tested learning style improves learning outcomes, and subsequent research has continued to fail to find the specific matching effect the theory predicts, so that learning styles is now widely regarded within cognitive science as a popular but empirically unsupported theory, even as it remains in wide practical use.