Students do better when lessons are tailored to individual learning styles – but not so much that it’s worth the investment of time and money. That’s the main finding of a recent peer-reviewed study I co-authored.
There has been a big push to try to tailor a teacher’s instruction to a student’s preferred learning style. That’s because some people say they are visual learners, meaning they learn and retain content best through visual aids, such as charts and pictures. Others say they are auditory learners – they need to hear the lesson. Still others may have different learning styles.
As a result, teachers may wonder whether they should invest the time and resources into matching their instruction to each student’s specific learning style.
So Christine Litzinger, a graduate student in educational foundations and research, and I analyzed data from 21 studies with more than 1,700 participants from every stage of education, from elementary school to adult courses.
In each of these studies, researchers had students learn something new with instruction either matched or unmatched to their learning styles. When we analyzed their results together, we found that, overall, students with matched instruction performed slightly better on tests compared with students given unmatched instruction.
But the benefits were not enough to justify the time and money it would take to assess every student’s learning style and personalize instruction. Doing so would require substantial resources, as different groups of children would need different materials. Importantly, students would be limited to certain methods of learning and would miss out on opportunities to develop skills in other styles. For example, visual learners would miss out on developing their listening skills.
Why it matters
Learning styles are a contentious topic in education.
On the one hand, nearly 90% of educators agree with matching instruction to students’ learning styles to accommodate their diverse needs.
Education researchers like me, on the other, take a different view. While we generally agree that students have different learning needs, we tend to discourage the practice of matching instruction to learning styles because most individual studies have found no benefits to matching.
Providing matched instruction to individual students involves a lot of time and resources, since teachers need to accurately identify each student’s learning style and then find or create customized materials for each student.
Multimodal instruction – in which students learn some lessons in one modality, such as text, and another lesson in a different one, such as videos – may be more efficient, though the research is not fully clear on its benefits yet. In this method, students are exposed to a variety of modalities and learn to engage with all of them. But teachers don’t need to teach every lesson in different modalities to accommodate each individual student.
Multimodal instruction can also help reach students who don’t have a clear, singular learning style. Many of the studies in our meta-analysis did not include these students, so it is unclear how matched instruction would work for them.
What’s next
It’s possible that students may learn more with matched instruction, not necessarily because that is their learning style, but rather because they have more skills in that particular modality, such as reading text versus comprehending audio. One reason they may be more skilled in one modality over another is simple preference. If a student prefers to read rather than listen to audio, they are likely to have practiced reading more than listening and are thus more skilled at it.
So the question is, are skills – even preferences – the same as learning styles? In future research, I plan to examine how skills in a particular modality relate to learning styles, disentangling these terms.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
