Over the past century, the concept of learning styles has spread throughout the educational establishment and popular culture. This concept asserts that everyone has a style of learning through which they learn best and that material presented in one’s preferred style will be learned more efficiently and effectively than material presented in a less compatible style. Also called “learning modalities,” “learning preferences,” “thinking styles,” “mind styles,” and “cognitive styles,” the learning styles have exponentially increased in popularity since the 1980s. One study (Howard-Jones, 2014) found that well over 90% of teachers believed in the learning style idea, and another study (Winninger et al., 2019) found that 80% of introductory texts in education and educational psychology presented the learning style idea to teacher candidates. Scholars have developed dozens of learning style typologies since the 1960s, but the most popular version since the 1980s has been the VAK model, which suggests that every student can be classified primarily as either a visual (V), an auditory (A), or a kinesthetic (K) learner. Despite the popularity of the model, numerous psychologists have dismissed it as a myth that has little empirical support. So where did the controversial and problematic visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (VAK) learning style typology even come from?
In a recently published article in History of Psychologyopens in new window, Thomas Fallace traces the long origins of the VAK learning style typology to student-centered educators such Marie Montessori, studies of personality by William James and Wilhelm Wundt, the ideational types of Ernst Meumann, the identification and assessment of learning disabilities such as dyslexia and auditory processing disorder, and the kinesthetic method of remedial reading instruction created by Grace Fernald. Prior to the 1960s, the VAK learning style typology was applied mainly to students with learning disabilities and to students who struggled to read. However, during the 1960s, the VAK learning style typology was extended to combat educational inequities in the teaching of urban students of color. By the 1970s, several educators had designed learning style inventories and assessments to be applied to all students and for all subjects. The idea gained further support with the popularity of Howard Gardner’s related theory of multiple intelligences in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the internet made online learning style inventories available for free to most teachers.
Fallace argues that the VAK learning style typology emerged from an unwarranted overextension of research on remedial reading; that is, the VAK typology was never meant to be applied to all students or to all subjects. Further, some of the earliest literature reviews of the effectiveness of VAK-specific teaching techniques consistently found the method to be ineffective. In other words, this was not a case of initial studies providing support for the VAK-based methods and then subsequent studies complicating earlier ones as the literature matured. To the contrary, the case for the VAK learning style typology had been conceptually problematic since its origins, and the empirical research supporting the idea has always been weak.
This article is in the Core of Psychology topic area.