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The idea that individual people are visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners and learn better if instructed according to these learning styles is .

There is no proof of the value of learning styles as educational tools. According to experts, believing in learning styles amounts to believing in astrology. But this "neuromyth" keeps going strong.

A 2020 review of teacher surveys revealed that in their preferred learning style. There has been no decrease in this belief since the approach was debunked as early as 2004, despite efforts by , , , and over that period. A offered since 2004 to whomever can prove the benefits of accounting for learning styles remains unclaimed.

Meanwhile, licensing exam materials for teachers in 29 states and the District of Columbia . Eighty percent of used in pedagogy courses mention learning styles. , who may falsely attribute any learning challenges to a mismatch between their instructor's teaching style and their own learning style.

Myth of learning styles is resilient

Without any evidence to support the idea, why do people keep believing in learning styles?

One possibility is that people who have might be more susceptible to these ideas. For instance, someone might learn about distinct brain areas that process visual and auditory information. This knowledge may increase the appeal of models that include distinct visual and aural learning styles. But this limited understanding of how the brain works misses the importance of multisensory brain areas that integrate information across senses.

Another reason that people may stick with the belief about learning styles is that the evidence against the model mostly consists of studies that have failed to find support for it. To some people, this could suggest that enough good studies just haven't been done. Perhaps they imagine that finding support for the intuitive—but wrong—notion of learning styles simply awaits more sensitive experiments, done in the right context, using the latest flavor of learning styles. Despite scientists' efforts to improve the reputation of and encourage their publication, .

But our recent research results do in fact contradict predictions from learning styles models.

who study individual differences in perception. We do not directly study learning styles, but our work provides evidence against models that split "visual" and "auditory" learners.

Object recognition skills related across senses

A few years ago, we became interested in why some people become visual experts more easily than others. We began measuring individual differences in visual object recognition. We tested people's abilities in performing a variety of tasks like matching or memorizing objects from several categories such as birds, planes and computer-generated artificial objects.

Using statistical methods historically applied to intelligence, we found that almost 90% of the differences between people in these tasks were for object recognition. We found that "o" was distinct from general intelligence, concluding that book smarts may not be enough to excel in domains that rely heavily on visual abilities.

Discussing this work with colleagues, they often asked whether this recognition ability was only visual. Unfortunately we just didn't know, because the kinds of tests required to measure individual differences in object perception in nonvisual modalities did not exist.

To address the challenge, we chose to start with touch, because vision and touch share their ability to provide information about the shape of objects. We tested participants with , varying the format of the tests and the kinds of objects participants touched. We found that people who excelled at recognizing new objects visually also excelled at recognizing them by touch.

Moving from touch to listening, we were more skeptical. Sound is different from touch and vision and unfolds in time rather than space.

In our latest studies, we created a battery of —. We measured how well people could learn to recognize different bird songs, different people's laughs and different keyboard sounds.

Quite surprisingly, the ability to recognize by listening was positively correlated with the ability to recognize objects by sight—we measured the correlation at about 0.5. A correlation of 0.5 is not perfect, but it signifies quite a strong effect in psychology. As a comparison, the between identical twins is around 0.86, between siblings around 0.47, and between cousins 0.15.

This relationship between recognition abilities in different senses stands in contrast to learning styles studies' failure to find expected correlations among variables. For instance, people's on measures of pictorial, auditory or tactile learning.

Better to measure abilities than preferences?

The myth of learning styles is resilient. and the perceived possible benefits of asking students how they prefer to learn.

Our results add something new to the mix, beyond evidence that accounting for learning preferences does not help, and beyond evidence supporting better teaching methods—like and —that actually do foster learning.

Our work reveals that people vary much more than typically expected in perceptual abilities, and that these abilities are correlated across touch, vision and hearing. Just as we can expect that a student , we should expect that the student who learns best from visual instruction may also learn just as well when manipulating objects. And because cognitive skills and perceptual skills are not strongly related, measuring them both can provide a more complete picture of a person's abilities.

In sum, measuring perceptual abilities should be more useful than measuring perceptual preferences, because . It's possible that learners may benefit from knowing they have weak or strong general perceptual skills, but critically, this has yet to be tested. Nevertheless, there remains no support for the "neuromyth" that teaching to specific learning styles facilitates learning.

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