Do kids learn better when taught in their 'learning style'?
Children labelled as auditory or visual learners did not learn more when material was delivered in their preferred mode, and most children had no clear preference at all.
Source
Providing Instruction Based on Students' Learning Style Preferences Does Not Improve Learning
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Counterbalanced crossover: every child received a listening and a reading comprehension passage set on consecutive days, then completed a learning-styles inventory; comprehension was compared by learning-style preference.
- N
- N=107 · 125 children took part; 107 with both comprehension and learning-style scores entered the correlations, and 34 with a clear auditory (12) or visual (22) preference entered the meshing ANOVA.
- Population
- Children aged 10-11 in the fifth grade of one public middle school in rural Pennsylvania.
- Outcome
- Listening and reading comprehension scores (adapted Gates-MacGinitie passages with written questions) in relation to auditory and visual learning-style scores.
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What they did
In one rural Pennsylvania school, 125 children aged 10-11 heard one set of comprehension passages through earbuds and read another set on iPads on separate days, with order and test form counterbalanced; the questions were always written. They then completed a popular children's learning-styles inventory that rates auditory and visual preference. The researchers correlated preferences with reading and listening scores and, following Pashler and colleagues' recommended design, compared children with a clear auditory or clear visual preference to look for the crossover interaction that learning-styles theory predicts.
What they found
Visual preference did not predict better reading comprehension, and auditory preference was weakly negatively related to listening comprehension rather than positively. The difference between a child's visual and auditory preference did not predict the difference between their reading and listening scores. Only 34 children had a clear single preference; among them, visual learners scored higher on both tests and both groups did better when listening, so there was no crossover and no learning-style by instruction interaction. Around 68% of children showed similar auditory and visual preferences.
The limits
What it doesn't show
All children came from a single rural school, so results may not generalise to other populations. The comprehension questions were always written, which the authors note might favour visual learners and mask a learning-styles effect. The critical meshing comparison rested on only 34 children with clear preferences (just 12 auditory), giving limited power, and instruction lasted only a single session per mode. The study only tested auditory versus visual styles with short text passages, not kinesthetic styles, other content or longer instruction.
Key terms
- Learning styles
- The popular idea that people have a preferred sensory mode (such as visual or auditory) through which they learn best.
- Meshing hypothesis
- The claim that learning is best when instruction matches a person's preferred learning style.
- Crossover interaction
- The pattern needed to support meshing: each style group does best with its own matched instruction, so the best method differs between groups.
- Counterbalancing
- Varying the order and version of conditions across participants so order or form effects do not bias the comparison.
- Crossover design
- A design in which each participant experiences every condition, here both listening and reading instruction.
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Quiz yourself
Which result would have supported the meshing hypothesis?
Common questions
Does this study mean children have no preferences about how they learn?
No. The authors stress that preferences exist; the question was whether being taught in your preferred mode improves learning, and it did not.
Why did visual learners do better on everything?
The authors suggest that by this age a preference for listening may reflect weaker reading skill, so 'auditory learners' may actually need more reading practice, not less.
What would have counted as evidence for learning styles?
A crossover: visual learners scoring highest after reading and auditory learners scoring highest after listening. Instead both groups did better after listening.
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