2-9 Integrate All Your Senses Into Learning – The Pitfalls of "Learning Styles"

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about the concept of learning styles. To help keep you on track with your learning, I’d like to give you some quick insight into what researchers have found and what it means for you. People receive and process new information in different ways. Pretty much all researchers agree with that idea. But what supporters of learning styles theory propose is something more. That people learn best when information is presented in a person’s preferred learning style. Visual learners for example would recall and understand better if they can see the material as opposed to audio learners who would recall and understand the material better, if they can hear the material. But here’s what researcher Beth Rogowsky and her colleges had found when they carefully analyzed some of the most common learning styles. If you take a standardized adult learning style inventory that shows you’re a visual learner, you actually don’t do any better when you’re reading the words, than if you hear the words. Likewise if you test out as an auditory learner, you don’t learn any better when you hear the material as opposed to when you can see it. In other words, there is no statistically significant difference when it comes to the relationship between a learning style preference and instructional method for your ability to comprehend the materials. Not only has research shown then that targeting your best learning style, doesn’t appear to help you learn better, it seems like relying on your preferred style weakens your ability to learn using other senses. For example, if you think you’re an auditory learner and you try to focus on learning by listening, what that means is you’re getting less practice with reading, using your eyes. But being able to read well is an important skill in today’s world. In fact, if you’re an auditory learner, that’s what you think you are, and you catered to your supposed need for auditory materials, then you’re actually undercutting your ability to learn using one of the most common and important ways that most people receive information, that is, using visual means. How are you going to do well on typical standardized test, for example, if you don’t practice the highly visual art of reading. It seems we often learn best when we can integrate what we’re learning using a lot of our different senses including hearing, seeing and perhaps especially being able to feel with our hands, like what you’re hopefully doing right now, seeing me, listening to what I’m telling you and maybe even taking notes of it with a pen or pencil in your hand. And feeling the paper on your notebook. Learning styles forms a big industry. Authors and companies make a lot of money from the tests they devise, administer, and teach workshops about. So there’s a big push to the idea that teaching to learning styles is important, even if there’s a lack of scientific evidence for these claims, and even if teaching to learning styles can actually be harmful. So, a word to the wise, whenever you’re learning something, try to take advantage of all of your senses. Don’t characterize yourself as just having one preferred learning style. Instead think of yourself as an all inclusive type learner, you’ll learn so much better as a result.