What Is Learning Styles?

The term learning styles is based on the assumption that individuals differ in regards to what mode of instruction is most effective for them. Educational practitioners have long stressed that optimal instruction requires diagnosing these individual styles and designing instruction accordingly. It is based on two fundamental flaws that I give the following rebuttal: 1) there appears to be no credible scientific evidence establishing learning styles exist (Riener & Willingham, 2010), and 2) assuming [1], it must be therefore true that people can learn in a variety of ways outside of one particular learning style. However, before abandoning the learning style paradigm completely, I will still contend that the research in this area has not

Their hypothesis posits that there should be a correlation between a person’s preferred learning style and their corresponding level of learning. They premised their research on the assumption that “sound” evidence requires robust documentation from properly designed experiments, including appropriate control and treatment groups and a statistically significant difference between these groups. In other words, they set out to confirm whether certain instructional methods proved more effective for students with one specific “learning style” over another. Their research indicated that both children and adults express preferences about how information is presented to them and that people differ in the extent to which they have a preference for different ways of thinking and processing information. However, in their research there was no evidence for any correlation between one preferred learning style over another, thus failing the conditions for their hypothesis. Furthermore, in their review of literature they found very little in the way of experimental studies on the topic of learning styles despite the enormous amount of research supporting the concept. Therefore, their conclusion was that there is not adequate evidence justifying learning style preference. Consequently, as an educational practitioner, I must now contend with the question of how to most effectively design learning under the assumption that the learner can learn from any of the present modalities (auditory, visual,