Learning styles: where’s the evidence?

Whereas modern medicine owes much of its success to its reliance upon evidence-based treatments, most popular techniques of instruction have not been subjected to thorough empirical scrutiny. A particularly glaring and costly result of this, we argue, is the wide acceptance of the idea that instruction should be tailored to a student’s so called learning style. For example, students might be divided into visual learners and verbal learners (on the basis of a learning style test given to each student) and then provided with instruction that emphasizes pictures or words, respectively. The visual–verbal distinction is only one simple example of the many proposed taxonomies; a recent review described 71 different schemes.1