Willingham’s ideas on the myth of learning styles

• Students have different learning styles and thus would learn better if teachers created lessons tailored to each preferred style.
• Visual Learners


  may learn best from reading a text book
• Auditory Learners


  learn best from listening to teachers or podcasts
• Kinaesthetic Learners


  may learn best from actually having a physical hands on approach.
• learners may express a preference for the way they learn, when they are tested under experimental conditions, it makes no difference to their learning.
• Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork (2008) conducted a comprehensive review of the research into the effectiveness of students being taught by their preferred learning style.
• Most of research did not follow experimental procedures and was therefore not able to effectively test the validity of learning styles (should have been randomly assigned to groups and receive different ways of learning the same information).
• Those which used appropriate research methods failed to find evidence that using people preferred learning styles improved performance. An individual’s ability, background knowledge and interest in a subject has a more influential effect on learning than learning styles.
• The idea of learning styles influencing learning has persisted because of confirmation bias
• When evaluating our beliefs we tend to take notice of information that supports our views and ignore information that contradicts it.
• Teachers should be more concerned with the whether the method of teaching best first the content rather than concerning themselves with using videos for visual learnings or podcasts for auditory learners. 
• Meaningful knowledge

  Teachers should create links between the information rather than giving students a list of facts to memorise
• Meaning is more important than trying to teach a child using their preferred learning styles
• Children will learn the information more deeply and are more likely to recall it in their long-term memory
• Teachers should be careful when setting homework and consider whether it will actually benefit the students
• Teachers should not worry about trying to make the information relevant to the student’s personal interests as it doesn’t improve learning
• Students can’t think like scientists or historians as this is only possible over many years of study
• Willingham recommends that teachers think very carefully about what benefit there is for students to conduct scientific experiments