Despite a lack of scientific evidence, the concept of learning styles — the idea that individuals learn best through a particular format like visual, auditory or kinesthetic — continues to be one of the most persistent myths in corporate training.
In this episode of The Business of Learning, we sat down with Tom Whelan, Ph.D., director of corporate research at Training Industry, to learn more about the learning styles myth — and what the research actually says about how we learn.
Tune in now to hear the conversation, where we discuss:
- Why the learning styles myth has persisted over time, despite a lack of research.
- Training Industry’s research on learner preferences — and why a multimodal approach is key.
- How to adapt your programs if you’ve traditionally designed training around learning styles.
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The transcript for this episode follows:
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Sarah Gallo: Hi. Welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, senior editor here at Training Industry.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: And I’m Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editor in chief. If you’re in learning and development, you’ve probably heard of learning styles. The idea that people learn best through a specific format like visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. It’s a concept that’s been widely accepted for years. The catch? Research doesn’t actually support it. So why does the learning styles myth persist? And more importantly, how can L&D teams design and deliver training that truly meets learners’ needs? We’ll answer these questions and more in today’s episode. With this, we have Dr. Tom Whelan, director of research at Training Industry. Tom, thanks for speaking with us today.
Dr. Tom Whelan: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here again.
Sarah Gallo: Yes. Welcome back Tom on the podcast. And to kick things off, as Michelle mentioned, this idea of learning styles really remains one of those persistent myths in corporate training. Why do you think this idea has really stuck despite that lack of, um, research and scientific support?
Dr. Tom Whelan: So, to me this, this is one of the most interesting neuro myths for, for how long. It’s, it’s stuck around. Because to be honest, like I feel it’s, it’s one of those things that some of us know is, is. It doesn’t really have a foundation. But for everybody else that does buy into it, like I was interested in like, well, what, where does it come from? Like what, was there some initial foundational study where it worked fantastically and, and we’ve just over applied it? And turns out the answer to that is no. So, I did some digging: Prior to the 1960s, the idea of learning styles was an approach that was developed to work with, with students that had learning disabilities that affected their reading, and even then, the data that they had, uh, know, in support of this tech techniques suggested that it really wasn’t all that effective. So, kind of from the jump it hasn’t been good or useful for all that much. It got overextended to apply to students in, and more topics than reading, even though it was never intended to do any of that. And I think part of the reason that that was done is because the idea folds nicely into other things that we know, or other things that we learned over time between like the early 20th century when, when this idea first had its genesis. And the rest of the 20th century, you know, so things like, like a localization… So, for instance, certain things happen in certain areas of the brain and that area of the brain dictates it, you know, to some extent, but we know it’s now that it’s more about networks and systems working together. Also, the idea of when multiple intelligences became something that people were interested in or, or thought there was something behind, you know, like that, that suggests, well, surely there has to be these differences that are meaningful between individuals and how they might learn. And it all seems kind of like common sense, I feel like when we explain it to each other. But the problem is data doesn’t care about what we think should be common sense. And wishes we might. There is simply nothing to suggest that learning styles is not a dead-end street. And if, I mean, if my opinion doesn’t mean all that much, I have some quotes that I pulled from, from some studies that, that I think attempt to drive the point home. So this first one comes from a review of the use of learning style frameworks in health science education [that] a group from University of Florida in Gainesville put out in 2020. And to quote directly from their paper, most studies that attempted to find a correlation between learning style and learning outcomes found none. That’s none, not, not something they found none. And they go on to say, in cases were a correlation was found, it was weak or inconsistent with findings from other unpublished studies. You know, so that’s, that’s one. Another paper from 2015 that came from a researcher in the UK said, speaking of learning styles, their use in all forms of education has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited in the research literature. So now, now that stuff is out there, unfortunately it doesn’t help that the research literature itself can be kind of hard to parse. Not all fields have really caught up I think with everybody that’s been looking at this. So despite their best intentions, sometimes professionals are led to believe that learning styles might be widely endorsed because it depends on who they’re listening to, or where they’re getting their information from. You know, like, so, I don’t want to be mistaken, like, I’m not saying there’s some nefarious, like big learning styles out there hatching some plot to, you know, steal all our training money. It’s just people doing the best with the best information they have on hand. The problem is sometimes these channels of communication haven’t picked up all that best information, or at least, at least not yet. And if, if I may go on, also despite the argument in favor of it seemingly coming from like neuroscience and how the brain works and stuff from the same view learning styles is, is just plain silly. Because unless we’re legally deaf or blind or there’s some other biological reason that affects our ability to take different forms of sensory information, we use everything. ou know, everything like, just like the movie title, “everything, everywhere, all at once.” Like your whole brain is on all, all the time. You don’t get to turn it off. Like that’s not how it works. You know, you don’t direct traffic in your own brain activity, you know? So yes. When you take in auditory information, say if you’re listening to, you know, a recording of a, of an educational lecture. You’re using the parts of your brain, that process sound, but guess what else? You use everything else because it’s always online and running and we need it all in order to make sense of, of anything, um, rather than it being some sort of like toolbox that we open only when we need it. And we don’t really have any say in how this works. This is just how it works. But the silliest bit of the whole learning styles thing according to much brainier critics than I, is this idea that if we match training with somebody’s learning style that’s going to result in better outcomes. and it relies on a false dilemma about sensory inputs. You know, that surely there has to be one primary or one best route of information for any bit of knowledge or skill that we’d ever want to learn. And I mean, effectively it’s [an] argument that misrepresents the question of choosing a learning modality by making it about choosing between ways of catering to individual differences that aren’t in fact actually meaningful. And kind of like, well, maybe why does some of that persist? Some defunct ideas about the brain are just hard to kill, you know, like for instance, Freud’s theories are ridiculous. But yet, they still lurk in a lot of the, the corners of what we understand to be modern thought, and learning styles are, are kind of similar. We can admit that they’re bogus out loud, but we’ll turn around and subtly let these ideas influence our decision making or the choices that we’re making. And to try to bring this all back to earth, my main gripe with the need to have a counterpoint around learning styles not being real is because it’s really not about the learner in the first place. You know? And I think that’s the part that a lot of people … it’s easy to get turned around about, particularly if we bring in the idea of preferences in place of styles, and are thinking like, “Oh, well if, if we just plug different things in the equation, then surely this will work.” And that’s just not the case.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Well, thank you so much for breaking that down for us and walking us through all of that science behind that is definitely helpful. Can you share some more about Training Industry’s research on learner preferences? Because I know we’ve done a lot of research around that.
Dr. Tom Whelan: We have. It’s one of the things that we’re interested in, and one of the things that we’re continuing to do new research on. But in a nutshell, what we found so far is that preferences are surely important, but they’re certainly not alone in their impact. And when organizations can align what they’re offering insofar as like the learning experience is concerned with what their employees think they like, those employees are more likely to think positively about that training. They’re more likely to attempt to carry over some of it, or some of that content to the job. In other words, like addressing the preferences of learners influences the perceived effectiveness of the training that they take. So when they see training as more effective, our data says that it’s positively related to the attitudes of learners when it comes to how their clarity of how they see their job and, and the work that they’re doing, how they feel about their job and positively affects their job satisfaction. Their sense of their work being central to like their self-definition to who they are. And even their perceptions of, how much support do I get from my supervisor? How much do I feel like this employer actually has a vested interest in me? So if we can, you know, cater to some of those preferences, it helps training, effectiveness and results in a more positive employee experience. The tricky bit is the difference between, I’m, I know I’m sort of setting up, I think where we’re going next, but the, the tricky bit is distinguishing where do preferences start and end and where are they meaningful and where does the, the actual process of learning start and end to which preferences maybe don’t really apply anymore.
Sarah Gallo: Definitely. And I guess going off of that, to kind of touch on that nuance there, can you walk us through maybe the key distinctions between a preference and an actual cognitive learning process? Because we know that many people may believe they have a unique way of learning.
Dr. Tom Whelan: And I mean I had, I mean, there, there’s research that has looked at those beliefs as well. I think it’s in this section, I’ll talk about it at, at some point in our conversation. But to me, the differences between, you know, a preference and an actual process of learning is our preferences are inherently subjective. And our cognitive processes are not, you know, like we can prefer a classroom to a video, but we do not actually have a preferred mode of sensory information processing. We can prefer whatever we like, but you, me, everybody we know has eyes, ears, brains, et cetera, pretty much have the exact same engine components. So we don’t really work differently. And what we prefer, that can be a grab bag of good information, bad information, past experiences, wild guessing, superstitions we may have … in other words, completely subject to our whims and emotions. And the reality of these two is like, preferences have a much more indirect effect on learning outcomes. And that’s just because we can imagine maybe there’s a link there, it doesn’t mean that it’s real. And the other thing is these indirect effects that, that, you know, preferences have aren’t always going to be what we think they are. Sometimes it can be what, you know, stats nerds would call a moderator. Like it only matters sometimes. Like if one thing is high, well then these preferences matter. But if, you know, if you have this set of conditions, well the preferences aren’t really going to drive all that much. You know, so it’s not always going to have the convenient relationship that we might like it to. And why might that be? Again, preferences are not really directly important to the mental process of learning. And as an example, in our own data, we found when looking at learner preferences that organizations can use, you know, some methods of delivery and they will see increased training effectiveness for, for that training independent of whether a learner preferred those methods or not. A study I found published actually in 2022, where it was endorsing learning styles and hilariously, one of the things that they concluded is, you know, that they found people with different learning styles, but everybody preferred one format of training for this particular, you know, thing that they were trying to get people to do. You know, again, it’s because the learning has to do with the content, what you’re trying to get people to learn. Not necessarily, it doesn’t have anything to do with really how their brain works. Again, unless, as I maybe alluded to earlier, there’s something, there’s a biological reason that their brain works differently. You know, if it’s just you and me, I prefer red, you prefer blue. It’s like, that’s not going to change how the nuts and bolts function in our head. And so preferences are important to things like learner motivation and engagement. But again, not to how any learning itself actually happens. And you know, and individuals are shaped by a lot of different forces, but our senses aren’t going to function differently. So in that way, how we get new knowledge and skills into us is pretty agnostic to who we’re talking about. So when it comes to trying to match something to a modality, the knowledge or skill someone learns is defined by what that content needs for it to persist in their memory. Not by who that person is, or who might be trying to learn the information. And I think there’s a reflex with learning professionals to want to argue against this sense of, you know, well, the learner doesn’t matter, just on principle … because of course they do. Of course they matter. They just don’t necessarily … or who that learner is doesn’t necessarily matter here. Like when we’re talking about how learning functions.
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Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely. I think you, you already touched on this, that, learner preferences affect motivation and engagement tremendously. So I’d like to dig in a little more around that. How can L&D teams leverage that without falling into the learning styles trap?
Dr. Tom Whelan: So this is, I feel like I have to set this up by saying I’m not trying to suggest that any L&D professionals out there be disingenuous. But I feel like it’s a little bit of slight of hand and marketing in a sense. Because I think an important subtext to what we’ve been talking about in that this isn’t really about the learners. Is that it doesn’t matter all that much where the learners themselves buy into learning styles or not like, so if they believe in the myth, really irrelevant to, to what they are capable of learning. And it’s been shown that whether or not somebody believes they’re one type of learner or another. Doesn’t have any bearing on their ability to, to learn from content. You know, or if somebody’s like, I’m a visual learner, and you make them take something that’s mostly audio, they’re not lost in the woods and just like incapable of retaining anything, they’re going to learn things. And this, this has been shown in research, you can ask somebody what type of learner are you? And they’ll confidently tell you this, and, you know, in the lab, none of that really bears itself out. I feel like in a way, rather than trying to frame this as an information battle that needs to be won among learners and L&D teams, it’s sort of only the L&D teams that need to be wary of the learning styles trap. Because what a preference is ultimately tells you really absolutely nothing about which modality might be better for the outcomes, but tons about the range of methods that could be employed to meet a, a training need, you know, so if we’re choosing modalities based on what the content is, what the objective of the training is, you know, like what is it we’re trying to affect? And then constrain the options that we make available to employees based on their preferences. Then we can, without being liars, say that the multimodal efforts that we’re making are in service of learner preferences. You know, obliging the preferences about is about getting them to engage with it. Yeah, we can totally sabotage that engagement with the wrong delivery modality. They may like the experience, sure. But that does not automatically mean that they’ve learned anything at all, you know, so, I think like, like whether your learners believe it or not. Doesn’t matter. As long as the L&D team is approaching it with this idea of what we need to do instead of maybe looking at like, we need to make sure we have a visual version of everything and an auditory version of everything, you know, and this version and that version. It’s like, don’t throw them all out, but maybe look at what makes sense for this content and then just give people those options.
Sarah Gallo: Definitely. While we’re talking about modalities, I’m wondering, Tom, if there’s any, um, factors that learning leaders really should consider when determining the best training delivery modalities for their programs. What should they be paying attention to there?
Dr. Tom Whelan: Sure. And thank you for asking the question. Because I think it’s very easy to tear down the idea of learning styles, but then it’s like, what do you offer as, as the alternative? And similarly, I think it’s easy for a lot of us to default to the extremes without really realizing it. You know, so either we’re thinking about the learner and wanting to protect their emotional relationship to the training and the organization, because heaven forbid they’re disengaged with learning, because yeah, that never happens. And naturally they’re always thinking about strengthening their competencies and their career advancement because there’s no employee that isn’t concerned with that all the time So we’re either in that world or we’re slaves to the almighty budget. You know, so learning technology, like what’s available to us, makes some of our choices, kind of by default, or modalities are dictated by where content might already exist off the shelf, or where it can be done for the cheapest. So rather than thinking about what’s best, it’s just, well, what can we stand up and get out there? And, you know, those two I think are extremes and neither of them are really winning strategies by themselves. And we’re never going to get away from those two factors, nor should we. But they’re a little more than like boundaries that we have to contend with. I mean, the data that we have shows that worrying about some notion of perfectly matching modality to preference isn’t really going to bear a whole lot of fruit. What we saw is that just like trying to have more options is better, like the more, the more you can offer multimodal experiences, the better that tends to be in terms of how employees react to it. As I’ve, or probably anybody that listening to this could guess, that the catch is the modality has to be appropriate for the content. You know, so, rather than thinking like, “Oh, there has to be some best match,” it’s arguably more a matter of making trade-offs and accepting some diminishing returns as you switch modalities. But you can’t decide that in the dark. Taking a spray and pray approach is going to waste a lot of resources. So in terms of what I think the recipe is or, or what the, the main factors are, I think they’re, to make it easy, there’s three: You have learner factors, so things like where do they have the appetite for, where do they have the time in their job for L&D, what do they have a basis of knowledge, you know, like all, all that type of … so having to do with the person. There’s job factors, so the content relevance of the training to that person’s job. Depending on what modality maybe you’re having them take that particular content in. What’s the opportunity cost of them not doing other tasks or not learning other skills, or other knowledge? So the job factors are also organizational factors, you know, what is their job environment like? Do they have the opportunity to engage with training in all modalities? Do they have, you know, is just where they work set up for them to take time out for learning? Are there other obstacles that are logistic in nature [and] have nothing to do with other things except just purely the machinations of the organization. Also things like, what’s the learning culture like? Do peers support learning? Does the supervisor support learning? What’s the climate in inside the company? So I think treating this monster like it has these three heads is the best way to win the battle of trying to improve enterprise learning. Because I think we, we often do fierce battles with one and get overconfident that we somehow hurt the other two in the process. You know, that if, if we solved learner issues, well then, anything with the job or anything with the company, it’s just going to fall in. And it’s like, if, I think if you run at all three at once and try to take a holistic approach, the dividends are going to end up being a lot better in the long run.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: I am wondering if you have any advice for training departments out there that may have traditionally designed their programs around the concept of learning styles. do you have any maybe tips or advice on how they can begin to kind of shift their mindset and focus on learner preferences and, and maybe incorporate a more effective blended learning approach?
Dr. Tom Whelan: Mm-hmm. I mean, to begin with, if it’s not clear, I think we need to throw out the idea that the modality through which content will be delivered to employees makes a difference in so far as like needing to cater to some difference in their. You know, sensory inputs or anything. I fee like we want to meet people’s preferences through having variance of the same content when possible. So, you know, a video course can be listened to or the transcript can be read. As long as there’s some acknowledgement that there’s probably going to be tradeoffs. And sometimes those tradeoffs aren’t about the learners, sometimes they are, but, but not always. And whether anyone learns or not from an alternative modality is going to be subject to the learner, like, kind of as we talked, learner factors, job factors, organizational factors, and this mixture changes at will, you know, so it’s never like you have a set recipe and you know, okay, we can just deploy this the same way every time. If this looks like a duck also, then let’s just roll it out the same way we did this other thing over here, and not, not explore it too much, even though maybe it’s going to a different type of learner, you know, maybe it’s relevant to the job in a different way. Maybe there’s a different time pressure for people to learn whatever. It’s, you know, all these different factors can change a training initiative. It’s never going to be necessarily exactly the same from one to the next. Also, I think when it makes sense to blend modalities or offer options. You know, there there’s no rule that says we have to take an all or nothing approach. Like, all options aren’t mutually exclusive. And also, and I think this is one of those like forehead slapping things, we don’t have to make all parts of a training blended or, or multimodal. It can just be portions, you know, like there, because if there’s some parts where like, no, you need to come in and do a hands-on skill, something or other, it’s like. Well, yeah, mandate that, but if, but if somebody wants to take the rest of the course content, either, in a video because they can’t get to a classroom thing or they’re in a different time zone. So even the virtual classroom offerings aren’t convenient for them. It’s like, if, if you can do it through an to another means, by all means do, you know? But, but there can be, and it’s okay for there to be parts of a training where you constrict maybe what options a learner might have. Like, there are all sorts of ways to meet the preferences of a wide variety of employees without overturning the learning cart, so to speak. I think once we can acknowledge and operate on the assumption that the processes that are underneath learning aren’t really dictated by the learner.
Sarah Gallo: Yeah, I think that’s important to remember. It’s not really an all or nothing approach. You can kind of start small looking at those portions. So great tip there, and I know we’ve covered a lot of ground today. But what’s one final takeaway you’d like to leave our listeners with before we do wrap up?
Dr. Tom Whelan: I mean, I know I feel like we’ve been beating this idea of learning styles pretty hard here. And I feel, I just want people to know if they’ve invested energy in this concept, like we want to point you in the right direction rather than make anybody feel foolish if they’ve, you know talked about this concept with peers or, you know, voiced favor for it with stakeholders and stuff, like, so … I think the main takeaway that we, I want people to walk away with is content matters to modality. The learner doesn’t. Their role is to learn, right? But what governs that learning process is fairly universal across employees. You know, now how do you get them to the training? Well, to drink the learning water. That, that’s where preferences come in, so you can play with preferences or try to meet employee preferences to get them to, to training. But then what happens in training, you know, I. Does what you want to persist in employees’ memory or the skills you want them to learn. Does that happen or not? That has to do with the content and the modality, not necessarily the person, you know, so it’s kind of like, it’s almost like, “Hey, bad news, there’s two fights.” You know, like you have to fight to get people to the training and then try to get them the content in the right format, in the right modality. You know, like once you’ve got them interested and, and knocking at the door.
Sarah Gallo: Definitely. Awesome. Well, on that note, Tom, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Dr. Tom Whelan: And thank you. It was a pleasure to be here again.
Sarah Gallo: For more resources on this topic, check out the episode description or visit the show notes on our website at TrainingIndustry.com/Podcast.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: And don’t forget to rate and review us wherever you tune in to The Business of Learning. Until next time.
