Are learning styles real? What the research says about visual and auditory learners

The quiz that told you how you learn

Picture a man in his forties signing up for a night class in accounting. On the first evening the instructor hands out a short quiz. Twenty questions later, he has a label: visual learner.

It feels like a key. It explains why lectures always slid off him. So he skips the reading, hunts for videos and color-codes every page. Five weeks in, he still freezes on the practice problems.

Many adults carry a label like this from school or a work training day. It is worth asking whether it holds up, because it decides which methods you try and which you skip.

What the big review found

The idea behind learning styles has two parts. First, people differ in how they like to take in information. Second, they learn best when teaching matches that liking. The second part is called the matching idea, and it is the part that matters for how you study.

Think about what a fair test of that would look like. You would sort people by style, teach some of each group one way and some the other, then compare. If the matching idea were right, each group would do best with its own method.

In 2008, a team of four researchers led by Pashler reviewed the evidence on learning styles.

Their verdict was blunt. They found "no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice." You can read the review by Pashler and colleagues yourself.

The book sums it up with care. People do have preferences, and they differ in abilities. Several studies with a proper design flatly contradict the matching idea. Many versions of learning styles have never been tested at all. So the honest answer is not "you have no style." It is "teaching to your style has not been shown to help."

What does hold up: match the method to the material

Here is the part we find more useful. Some methods help nearly everyone, and the right one depends on what you are learning.

Pictures and words together are a good example. Mayer studies how people learn from lessons. In his book Multimedia Learning (2009), his multimedia principle is simple: "People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone." He reported that this held in eleven out of eleven tests, with a median effect of d = 1.39. Those tests were about learners in general, not a group with a "visual" label. Mayer also noted it may apply more strongly to people new to a topic.

Timing matters too. In a 1991 study by Mayer and Anderson, people learned how a bicycle pump works. Some got the spoken words and the animation together. Others heard the words first and saw the pictures after. The together group did better on tests of creative problem solving. That study tested a dual-coding idea from Paivio: memory uses both a word code and an image code. The book points out that dual coding says nothing about some people being visual learners.

Not every kind of picture helps. Forming images in your head while you read was rated low in usefulness in the 2013 review by Dunlosky and colleagues. Drawing is better supported. For single words, drawing reliably helped memory in seven experiments by Wammes, Meade and Fernandes (2016). For real course material, Fiorella and Zhang (2018) found drawing beat reading alone, with mixed results against other active methods.

Another popular chart is worth naming here. The "learning pyramid" says we remember 10 percent of what we read and 90 percent of what we teach. Letrud and Hernes (2018) traced its history and found versions going back more than 160 years. They concluded that "the models did not originate from empirical research."

Two tools to use instead of a style quiz

The chapter Examples, Pictures and Words Together in Stop Rereading gives two tools that fit the material, not the learner.

Three Examples Rule (PROMISING) is for a definition you can recite but miss in a real question. Find three examples that look different on the surface. Put them side by side and write one sentence on what they share. Add one example of the neighbor idea you keep confusing it with. Only then read the textbook definition. The badge rests on Rawson, Thomas and Jacoby (2015), where examples beat extra study of definitions. It also draws on a review by Alfieri and colleagues (2013) of learning by comparing cases. The number three is the book's rule of thumb, which is why it is PROMISING.

Draw It, Then Say It (PROMISING) is for an idea with parts or steps. Close the book and draw it as boxes and arrows in three minutes. Explain the drawing out loud. Then open the book, compare and fix it in a second color. Redraw it from memory the next day.

Reading So It Sticks covers the learning pyramid and a better way to read a chapter: questions before pages, then one paragraph of recall.

Back to the man in the accounting class. He does not need a new label. He needs to work the practice problems with the book closed, then check. For that, our page on why you cannot remember what you study is the next step.