Next Tuesday, our new book on educational myths in Dutch will hit the shelves. It is an update of Urban Myths about Learning and Education, which has been around for quite a while now. We hope to have an international release ready for next year!

The period between finishing a manuscript and the actual release is always a bit nerve-racking for one very specific reason. What if new research appears that we could not include, but that adds a nuance we have missed? This almost happened with a recent study on multitasking, but there was still time to make changes. In the end, we decided the study did not add enough to include it.

This week, a new study was published on what is probably one of the oldest educational myths around: learning styles. And luckily, this study mainly confirms what we wrote in the book. The work by Marietta Papadatou-Pastou and colleagues is interesting because they tested the learning styles hypothesis quite directly with 194 students aged 10 to 12. They used an approach in line with the work of Pashler. He is one of the key sources in the debate on the learning styles myth. 2027-92582-001

The hypothesis is not simply that people prefer, say, seeing or hearing information. They can, and often do. The crucial claim is that matching teaching to those preferences helps students learn better. In other words, a so-called visual learner should learn more from visual instruction. Meanwhile, an auditory learner should benefit more from hearing the same information.

And yes, this study focuses on this particular version of learning styles, rather than one of the more than 70 other classifications described over the years.

The researchers identified students’ supposed learning styles in two ways. They first asked students how they thought they learned best and then had them complete the Barsch Learning Style Inventory. Next, the students learned about weather forecasting, clouds, and climate change in three ways: visually, through audio only, or through a combination of both. After each presentation, they took a short knowledge test. Importantly, the same students experienced the different presentation formats. In a sense, they served as their own controls.

Did the matching matter then? No. Students did not show any improvement based on a match between the presentation format and their assumed learning styles. In addition, researchers found no support for the interaction effect predicted by the theory of learning styles. That is, visual learners performing better in visual conditions and auditory learners performing better in auditory conditions.

Something else did make a difference. Students performed better on average when they received information in the audiovisual condition than in the purely visual or purely auditory conditions. The authors connect this finding to research on multimedia learning. But crucially, this advantage appeared regardless of the students’ supposed learning style. And there was another problem for the learning styles idea: what students thought their learning style was corresponded rather poorly with what the questionnaire said it was.

Does this mean that the very last word on learning styles has now been said? Unfortunately not. After years of dealing with this myth, that much has become clear to me. And there are things this study cannot rule out either. For example, it focused on immediate recognition of recently presented information. It did not focus on longer-term learning or transfer. The researchers themselves also point to the weak reliability of the learning styles questionnaire they used. This is another familiar problem in the learning styles literature.

But for me, one thing is clear for now: we do not need a new edition of the book that comes out on Tuesday just yet.