HAMBURG — Some people say they retain things best when they hear them. Others swear by reading, while some believe they only really grasp something if they can see it, or even touch it. And what about you? Have you ever identified yourself as a particular type of learner? If so, you might be in for a letdown. Research has long shown that classifying people into learning types (visual, auditory, or tactile) is completely unhelpful.
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“The concept probably persists because it’s so easy to grasp and sounds appealing,” says Tim Fütterer, who researches and teaches at the Hector Institute for Empirical Educational Research in Tübingen. His work focuses on teaching quality and teacher training. He says the myth of learning styles keeps cropping up in conversations with German teachers and students.
Neuroscientist Katharina von Kriegstein agrees. “There is no research that shows learning types actually exist, in the sense that it makes sense to group people into different categories,” she says.
Von Kriegstein is a professor of cognitive and clinical neuroscience at the Technical University of Dresden. Still, the idea has become so popular that she often hears it mentioned by teacher training students, and she believes it is important to correct the record.
Even teachers are convinced that tailoring lessons to perceived learning styles improves their teaching. At least, that is what several surveys from the early 2010s suggested. More than 90% of teachers polled in China, the UK, the Netherlands, Turkey and Greece believed in the existence of different learning styles.
It does not help
A 2008 review, now cited thousands of times, already showed that even though people believe they belong to a certain learning type, learning in a way that matches that type does not give them an advantage. Another study found that when self-identified auditory learners listened to a teacher or reading-writing types took notes in their own words, their results did not improve.
The idea of learning styles has been around for more than 50 years. In 1975, German biochemist Frederic Vester introduced the concept in his popular science book Thinking, Learning, Forgetting. He believed that people learn best through a specific sensory channel or a combination of two, such as audiovisual input.
The belief in learning types may actually do harm to children.
As a biochemist, rather than a didactician, education researcher or cognitive psychologist, Vester laid the groundwork for a myth that is still going strong. In the 1980s, New Zealand educational researcher Neil Fleming developed the VARK model, which is still widely used. VARK stands for Visual, Auditory, Reading (which Fleming defines as both reading and writing), and Kinesthetic, meaning tactile or movement-based learning.
Today we know the learning styles theory has little scientific basis. Worse still, the belief in learning types may actually do harm to children. In 2023, one study found that assumptions about learning styles can influence how children are evaluated. In this study, parents, teachers, and children aged 6 to 12 were asked which learning style they thought indicated higher intelligence.
The supposed visual learner came out ahead of practical or tactile learners. In another part of the study, parents and teachers predicted that visual learners would do better in core subjects like math and English, while practical learners would excel in physical education or music. Even though research does not support the usefulness of learning styles, the concept can reinforce harmful biases.
What does neuroscience say?
Biochemist Vester already suspected that people learn better through a combination of two channels (hearing and seeing, for example) than through just one. Neuroscience has now confirmed this. Multisensory learning, or using multiple senses at once, helps us remember things more effectively.
This is also a focus of research for neuroscientist von Kriegstein. In one of her studies, she explored how we recognize voices, and how our brains learn.
The experiment worked like this: Test subject A meets person B for a short conversation, either face-to-face or via video call. Crucially, A sees B during the exchange. The next time they interact, they speak by phone, so there is no visual contact. Person A is now better at recognizing and understanding B’s voice than they would have been if they had never seen B’s face. That initial multisensory meeting, both visual and auditory, improved voice recognition. The surprising part is that during the second interaction, not only are the brain’s auditory areas activated, but the regions responsible for recognizing faces also light up. Using more than one sense during the first encounter strengthens memory and understanding later.
The benefits of multisensory learning
This and similar findings are part of a growing body of evidence that multisensory learning benefits education in schools and universities. For instance, if a French teacher demonstrates the word boire by miming the action of drinking, students are more likely to remember the vocabulary.
Neuroscientist von Kriegstein showed how lasting that effect can be. In one 2020 study, children remembered words better even six months later when they had learned them with a gesture, not just by hearing them. The effect was even stronger when students performed the gesture themselves, rather than just watching the teacher. Matching images had a similar benefit.
Von Kriegstein believes part of multisensory learning’s success can be explained by a neuroscientific principle called predictive coding. “We believe the brain holds a model of everything it has already learned about the world,” she explains. “When we learn something new, the brain updates that model.”
If a gesture shows the connection, the brain can update its model more easily.
So, each time we perceive something, the brain expects it to fit with what it already knows. It is initially confusing for the brain that the French word boire means the same thing as the English word “drink.” But if a corresponding gesture shows the connection, the brain can update its model more easily.
Math class also benefits from multisensory methods. If a teacher gestures to a formula on the board while explaining it, students understand the concept more clearly and retain it more effectively.
According to education researcher Fütterer, any presentation is more effective when it includes not just words on slides but also graphics or images that visually reinforce the material. On the other hand, an unrelated or distracting photo can backfire by adding unnecessary cognitive load and making it harder for the brain to process the information.
