The “learning styles” doctrine has become widely accepted in education and has been co-opted to a wide variety of other disciplines, including as a means of strengthening interpersonal communications between advisors and clients in the financial planning profession. The “learning styles” doctrine posits that a variety of different optimal learning styles exist, such as “visual learning”, “auditory learning”, or “kinesthetic learning”, and that educators should adapt their teaching or counseling styles to best match these preferred learning styles in order to achieve optimal retention of information.
However, this doctrine has become widely accepted without wide consideration of the validity or experimental methodology of the underlying evidence. A 2009 paper titled “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence” published in “A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science” by Drs. Pashler et al. takes a meta-analysis approach to evaluating the existing scientific evidence to investigate the veracity of this “learning styles” hypothesis. The authors propose that any robust validation of this “learning styles” hypothesis requires well designed experimental testing and propose the necessary experimental methodology and criteria.
Utilizing this proposed experimental methodology and criteria, the authors’ review of the relevant literature reveals little evidence to support the “learning styles” hypothesis. The majority of published literature is not experimental in nature or not methodologically suitable for testing this hypothesis. The few quality experimental studies that have tested this hypothesis found evidence that contradicted the “learning styles” hypothesis.
Thus, the authors find no convincing evidence supporting the “learning styles” hypothesis, and the best experimental evidence available counters this hypothesis. The authors conclude that that there is no demonstrable utility of classifying learning styles based on the available literature, though concede that the literature is not exhaustive to all possible versions of learning styles and further well designed experimental research may be warranted. Further, the authors stress that the focus should remain on identifying and utilizing those educational modalities with strong evidence and the potential to enhance everyone’s learning.