Students seemed to be interested in their learning styles, but not enough to actually change their studying behavior based on them.
Husmann thinks that the students had fallen into certain study habits, which, once formed, were too hard to break. Husmann found that not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, but those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests. The survey then gave them some study strategies that seem like they would correlate with that learning style. In a study published last month in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education, Husmann and her colleagues had hundreds of students take the VARK questionnaire to determine what kind of learner they supposedly were. Or at least, a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. (Students, meanwhile, like to blame their scholastic failures on their teacher’s failure to align their teaching style with the student’s learning style.)Įither way, “by the time we get students at college,” says Polly Husmann, a professor at Indiana University, “they’ve already been told, ‘You’re a visual learner.’ Or aural, or what have you.” student at Central Michigan University who has studied learning styles. “Teachers like to think that they can reach every student, even struggling students, just by tailoring their instruction to match each student’s preferred learning format,” says Abby Knoll, a Ph.D.
Teachers told students about it in grade school. Everyone was special-so everyone must have a special learning style too. He wasn’t the first to suggest that people have different “learning styles”-past theories included the reading-less “VAK” and something involving “convergers” and “assimilators”-but VARK became one of the most prominent models out there.Įxperts aren’t sure how the concept spread, but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s. (“I learned much later that vark is Dutch for “pig,” Fleming wrote later, “and I could not get a website called because a pet shop in Pennsylvania used it for selling aardvarks-earth pigs!”) Today, 16 questions like this comprise the VARK questionnaire that Fleming developed to determine someone’s “learning style.” VARK, which stands for “visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic,” sorts students into those who learn best visually, through aural or heard information, through reading, or through “kinesthetic” experiences. For example, when asking for directions, do you prefer to be told where to go or to have a map sketched for you? What were they doing differently?įleming zeroed in on how it is that people like to be presented information. In the course of watching 9,000 different classes, he noticed that only some teachers were able to reach each and every one of their students. In the early ’90s, a New Zealand man named Neil Fleming decided to sort through something that had puzzled him during his time monitoring classrooms as a school inspector.
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