From Eurekalert:

Learning styles challenged
There is no evidence supporting auditory and visual learning, psychologists say

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you’re not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student’s particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public.

The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report published this month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The report, authored by a team of eminent researchers in the psychology of learning—Hal Pashler (University of San Diego), Mark McDaniel (Washington University in St. Louis), Doug Rohrer (University of South Florida), and Robert Bjork (University of California, Los Angeles)—reviews the existing literature on learning styles and finds that although numerous studies have purported to show the existence of different kinds of learners (such as “auditory learners” and “visual learners”), those studies have not used the type of randomized research designs that would make their findings credible.

Unfortunately, in psychology, empirical verification is not a high priority, while making stuff up that sounds good is. In psychology, it seems as if the heuristic “if SWPLs find it emotionally uplifting, it’s probably wrong” works well. At least that’s what I’m coming to believe.

My Occam’s razor hypothesis to explain the “learning styles” myth is that dumber people learn better with pictures, while smarter people can learn effectively from both pictures and text. This hypothesis is backed up by centuries of traditional wisdom, and it ought to be experimentally tested. By calling dumber people “visual learners” and smarter people “verbal learners” (though they probably learn from pictures better than the former group as well), you get to be more polite, though wrong.