The ‘nonsense’ learning styles myth has made a huge comeback: Hattie

Drawing on 17 meta-analyses, Hattie and his University of Melbourne colleague Dr Timothy O’Leary found there has been a clear resurgence in the deep-rooted yet entirely invalid theory.

“We were surprised when we started looking at the research and the textbooks, and when we started to go onto various sites of teacher education programs around Australia and the US, to continually still find learning preferences there upfront, without even a question that they may be discredited,” Hattie tells EducationHQ.

“That is sad. But to be fair, it’s the reflection on those of us who have more of a passion about learning strategies that we haven’t done our job well enough.”

As Dr Carl Hendrick points out, the central myth of learning styles is quite simple.

“…it’s not that students have different learning preferences but that students learn better when taught in their preferred modality, usually visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or otherwise,” the Professor of Education at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam noted in a recent Substack post. 

The ‘most troubling’ impact of the myth is that it encourages low expectations, he argues.

“Labelling a student a ‘kinesthetic learner’ or a ‘visual learner’ easily becomes shorthand for what they can’t do.

“[Hattie and O’Leary’s] paper cites evidence that teachers disproportionately associate kinesthetic styles with low achievement and visual styles with high ability.

“In other words, learning styles become a euphemism for ability grouping, cloaked in pseudoscientific legitimacy.”

Indeed, a 2023 UK study found parents, teachers and children rated those students described as ‘visual learners’ as more intelligent than those described as ‘hands-on learners’.

Teachers and parents also predicted that visual learners would achieve higher grades across most core school subjects, such as maths, social sciences and languages.

Hands-on learners, however, were perceived to be more skilled in non-core subjects, like PE, music and art, with the exception of science where were seen as being equally proficient.

“This behaviour is concerning considering that learning styles are unscientifically founded seemingly arbitrary categories,” researchers warned at the time. 

Keen to avoid writing yet another paper that shows learning styles are “a load of nonsense”, over three years Hattie and O’Leary set about identifying exactly what is driving the myth’s resurgence in the mainstream.

Hattie says a shift in the language used to frame and describe the theory is a big part of it.

“Over time we noticed the change in language that the learning styles people are using.

“And also, their studies have moved more away from their original notion, which was the ‘matching’ hypothesis – that you should teach to the students’ preferred learning styles – to looking more at correlates…” he explains.

Professor John Hattie says the myth is seemingly very hard to kill off in education. 

Researchers advocating for learning styles as a theory to guide teachers’ practice have also adopted language from the science of learning, muddying the waters even further, Hattie suggests.

“The problem is, most of us – even us in the business – have a very poor level of language of learning; it’s invisible, it’s in the brain.

“We don’t know a lot about working memory, we don’t know a lot about cognitive load, we don’t know a lot about all the jargon that’s filled brain research, which isn’t very credible.”

Without solid language to accurately describe learning, Hattie says it’s easy to buy into myths and ideas that sound appealing but have no credible basis.

“And so, we’ve delved back to our folklore anecdotes of how we think we learn.”

Much of the learning styles research scrutinised was flawed and often conflated learning styles with learning strategies, Hattie adds.

As Hendrick notes, while correlational studies often showed ‘modest’ relationships between learning preferences and achievement, these studies do not test the core claim of matching instruction to learning styles.

“Many also fail to account for prior knowledge or strategy use which are much stronger determinants of learning outcomes,” he adds.

According to Hattie, we have identified about 400 learning strategies, and “it turns out that some are much more impactful than others, but it depends how you use them.”

“And that’s what makes it very hard,” he says.

“We’ve got a fancy name for that in education, we call it ‘self-regulation’, when you can regulate your own learning.

“And that’s a skill that we believe should be taught to students. It’s not easy, but it’s the nature of the business.”

The researcher would like to see Australia’s more recent move to the science of learning within ITE and teacher professional learning to gain more urgent momentum.

“I worry that some of it is about looking at myths about the brain, which we know from the research, learning that doesn’t make much difference.

“But looking particularly at more understanding of learning strategies, about how memory works, about cognitive load, about all the things that we’ve been learning and knowing about learning,” Hattie says.

This is really the key to system-wide improvement, Hattie suggests.

“I think that’s really critical.

“It’s very rare to see courses on the science of learning as a critical part of teaching, as a critical part of professional learning.

“There are good examples of it out there, but we want more – faster and better.”