Visual Auditory and Kinesthetic Learning Styles are a Learning Myth

Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic. You’ve heard these terms before, referred to as learning styles. You might even have one that you prefer!

And they’re false.

It annoys me when an average person claims that they’re a particular kind of learner. However, it really grinds my gears when an educator talks about auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning. It’s still being used in educator certifications.

It’s an intuitive concept, for sure. It seems so reasonable that certain people learn differently and that having a preference to learn through your eyes vs. ears vs. doing seems reasonable. It’s seductive.

It’s pseudoscience.

Whether you are a professional educator, a manager of a team, or a leader transforming a growing business, you can drive more effective change by purging this myth and replacing it with a simple (and scientifically proven!) approach: More, More Often, and Over More Time.

The Proof That Learning Styles Are False

Other Neuromyths About Learning

There’s a magnificent study that not only breaks down Learning Styles, but also many other commonly-held learning beliefs. Classical music, dyslexia, and sugary drinks get debunked in the 2017 study Training in Education on Neuroscience Decreases but Does Not Eliminate Beliefs in Neuromyths

The study that’s most often cited as the nail in the coffin for learning styles is the Journal of Educational Psychology’s Matching Learning Style to Instructional Method: Effects on Comprehension published by Rogowsky, Calhoun, and Tallal. In that study, subjects were allowed to choose their preferred learning style and then were taught in that particular style. The researchers also tested to see if people who studied in their preferred style performed better.

The last sentence sums it up:

“In the current study, we failed to find any statistically significant, empirical support for tailoring instructional methods to an individual’s learning style.”

Here, read it for yourself. Or, if you prefer the more readable digests:

• The Problem with “Learning Styles”, from the Scientific American

• Learning Styles Debunked: There is No Evidence Supporting Auditory and Visual Learning, Psychologists Say, from the Association for Psychological Science:

• ‘Neuromyth’ or Helpful Model?, from Inside Higher Ed

Or, if you’re a fan of moving pictures and you LOVE education jokes, you’ll dig this video:

Bonus points if you catch the Myers-Briggs reference.

How To Teach If Learning Styles Aren’t True

The actual science underneath the pseudoscience is that the human brain is equipped to intake a lot of stimuli, process it, and use it to keep you from being eaten by tigers. Data collected by your eyes, ears, taste, touch, and more all come in to your head (and spine) and build neural connections.

• The lie behind visual auditory kinesthetic learning styles is that your brain is specialized for one type of data.

• The truth behind learning styles is that your brain is designed to synthesize data from lots of sources.

Here’s the key point: people learn better when they get to experience something multiple times in multiple formats over a period of time. There’s three ways to do this:

1. MORE

The more ways that someone can practice- private practice, 1-1 coaching, written reflections, gamification, etc.- the more likely they’ll improve.

“To get better at cold calling, let’s do a practice cold call, then write out a script, then have your peers give feedback, then cold call ten people and we’ll walk through the recordings together.”

2. MORE OFTEN

The more “at-bats” that someone can have to practice a skill, the more likely they’ll synthesize the information and learn how to do it better.

“To get better at cold calling, make more cold calls.”

3. Over More Time

The longer someone demonstrates a skill, such as spending months doing a job versus weeks, the more likely they’ll develop optimizations that deliver better outcomes.

“To get better at cold calling, you have one month to do 1,000 cold calls. That’s 200-300 calls a week. That’s 40-60 calls a day. It’s a lot, but by the end of the month, you’ll be a far better cold caller than today.”

Doesn’t that look/sound/feel like a better way of learning?

How Business Leaders Can Apply These Insights

With this new knowledge in hand, there’s a few changes that a leader can make to help their team be more successful. Most of them, though, stem from being empathetic. A business needs to accept that whenever someone is learning or changing a skill or behavior that they will get it wrong a few times before getting it right and that true change will happen over time, not overnight.

A business leader, though, CAN make a few quick tweaks that will set up a much better long-term trajectory of success:

1. Onboarding: Add practice time and a variety of practice-focused activities to a new hire’s schedule.

2. Performance Management: For anyone underperforming, identify three different forms of practice that the employee can attempt to improve performance (or ask the employee to read this article and come up with a few ideas!)

3. Strategic Goal-Setting: Assume that your business will fail at your next strategic goal. What learning-driven interventions would help reach that goal if you tried again? Implement those interventions now.

4. Hiring: Every business makes bad hires, but great businesses learn from those bad hires. Include multiple forms of debriefing when there’s regrettable attrition (i.e. someone leaves that you wished would stay)

5. Change Management: Every time you launch a new tool, system, or process, identify at least three ways that your team can learn the change. Popular options:

   1. An on-demand video walkthrough

   2. A live training session

   3. Weekly check-ins

   4. Office hours to work through issues

   5. Train someone to be a local expert (“Train the Trainer”)

If you don’t know where to start, we wrote up a short guide and assessment to help your organization identify learning gaps in how it runs the day-to-day business.

What other ways can your organization improve how it learns? Leave some suggestions in the comments!