“Visual Type? Not My Type”: A Systematic Study on the Learning Styles Neuromyth Employing Frequentist and Bayesian Statistics

Abstract

The term learning styles (LS) describes the notion that individuals have a preferred modality of learning (i.e., vision, audition, or kinesthesis) and that matching instruction to this modality results in optimal learning. During the last decades, LS has received extensive criticism, yet they remain a virtual truism within education. One of the major strands of criticism is the fact that only a handful of studies have systematically put the LS assumptions to the test. In this study, we aimed to explore whether learners who are visual types will be better at learning sign‐words (i.e., ecologically valid stimuli) compared to auditory and kinesthetic types. Ninety‐nine volunteers (67 females, mean age = 28.66 years) naive to Greek Sign Language (GSL) were instructed to learn 20 GSL sign‐words. The volunteers further completed two LS questionnaires (i.e., the Barsch Learning Styles Inventory and the Learning Channels Inventory) and they also reported what their LS they believed was. No evidence of a difference in learning sign‐words among individuals with different LS (as identified by either of the LS questionnaires or by direct self‐report) was found, neither using a frequentist nor using a Bayesian approach to data analysis. Moreover, inconsistencies between the way participants were classified based on the different measures and direct self‐report were detected. These findings add further support to the criticism of the LS theory and its use in educational settings. We suggest that research and practice resources should be allocated to evidence‐based approaches.