I Taught Learning Styles for Years. Then I Actually Looked It Up.
I Taught Learning Styles for Years. Then I Actually Looked It Up.
What happens when you check something you were sure about... and then do the same thing again an hour later?
I believed in learning styles.
Not casually. Not as a thing I'd heard once. I built with it.
Here's what I did with it, and this part matters. I taught the same material more than one way. Visual, spoken, hands-on. I never pinned a person to a label and taught them narrowly inside it. To me it was always a preference, not an identity.
Hold onto that distinction. It turns out to be the whole difference between a harmless mistake and a costly one.
I wasn't even looking for this
I was researching something else entirely: handwriting, and whether writing on paper anchors ideas differently than typing does. Good rabbit hole. I'll write that one next.
Somewhere in there I asked a side question. Does this work the same for everybody, or does it depend on the person?
That question walked me straight into the research on learning styles. And the research does not say what I thought it said.
What the studies actually tested
The claim inside learning styles theory has a name. Researchers call it the meshing hypothesis: the idea that people learn better when the teaching method matches their preferred style. Visual learners are taught visually, auditory learners are taught by listening, and so on.
That claim is testable, which is the good news. To prove it, a study has to produce a specific result called a crossover interaction. Visual learners have to beat auditory learners when both get visual instruction, and auditory learners have to beat visual learners when both get auditory instruction. The lines have to cross.
In 2008, Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork reviewed the literature looking for exactly that. They found one study offering even partial support, and two that clearly contradicted it. ([Summary here] (https://www.deansforimpact.org/about/news-and-blog/2016/04/28/learning-styles-what-does-the-research-say).)
What they wrote next is the part I keep returning to. People do have real preferences for how they receive information. But, in their words, "The existence of those preferences says nothing about what they might mean or imply for anything else" (https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/the-problem-with-learning-styles-debunking-the-meshing-hypothesis-in-english-language-teaching/).
Preference is real. Preference is just not the same thing as processing.
Then I found the number
I assumed I'd been careless. I had not been careless. I'd been ordinary.
In 2012, Sanne Dekker and colleagues surveyed 242 teachers in the UK and the Netherlands with 32 statements about the brain, 15 of them false. "Over 90% agreed that individuals learn better in their preferred learning style." (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00429/full)
It replicates nearly everywhere it's been tested. [97% in Greece. 91% in Spain. 76% of US educators.](https://www.landmark.edu/research-and-training/blog/neuromyths-are-misconceptions-about-the-brain-dangerous)
There's a word for this kind of belief, and I love it. It's called a neuromyth: an idea about how the brain works that sounds scientific, spreads widely, and turns out not to be true. Usually it starts from a real finding that got stretched past what it actually showed. Left brain versus right brain is one. The idea that we only use 10% of our brains is another.
This wasn't a personal failure of research skill. It was in the water. Everybody drank it.
The finding that stopped me cold
Same Dekker study. On average, the teachers surveyed believed 49% of the neuromyths presented to them.
Then this: teachers who read popular science magazines scored higher on general brain knowledge. And more general brain knowledge predicted increased belief in neuromyths.
Read that twice, because I had to.
Knowing more about the brain made people more likely to believe things about the brain that were false. The authors concluded that educators enthusiastic about applying neuroscience find it genuinely hard to separate pseudoscience from science, and that general knowledge does not protect them.
Curiosity is what got me into this. Curiosity is what makes anyone susceptible. If you read widely, love ideas, and get excited about how the mind works... you are not immune. You are the target audience.
What's actually true underneath it
Here's where it turns, because the idea I'd been carrying wasn't nonsense. It was a distorted copy of something real.
The real thing is called dual coding theory, developed by Allan Paivio in the 1970s. We process information through two connected systems, one verbal and one visual. Information encoded in both is remembered better than information encoded in only one. Richard Mayer built this into the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, which holds that [people learn better from words and pictures together than from words alone](https://www.structural-learning.com/post/dual-coding-a-teachers-guide).
Look closely at what that says, and what it doesn't.
It says teaching through more than one channel works better. It does not say it works better for visual people. It works better for everyone. That's the exact fault line. The failure mode across learning styles research is that one method usually turns out to be better for all groups, which is the opposite of what the theory predicts.
So the practice I'd built was sound. Teaching the same concept more than one way is genuinely better. The reason I'd given myself for doing it was borrowed, and I'd never checked it.
Nobody was harmed. My students did fine. Which is exactly why it survived unexamined for years.
And then I did it again, about an hour later
This is the part I'd rather leave out. So here it is.
Reading all that, I thought: maybe it's the combination. The more senses you involve, the deeper the experience goes.
It sounds right. It felt right. It's adjacent to something real. It is also not quite true.
Mayer's redundancy principle says people learn better from graphics plus narration than from graphics plus narration plus on-screen text. Adding a channel made it worse.
In a 2001 study, participants watched an animated, narrated lesson about how lightning forms. One group saw on-screen text identical to the narration. A control group saw no text at all. [On the recall test, the control group significantly outperformed the identical-text group.] (https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/07/YueBjorkBjork2013_redundancy.pdf) On the transfer test, the no-text group beat both text conditions.
Fewer channels. Better learning.
The reason is something called extraneous processing, which is mental effort spent on anything other than understanding the material. Your brain stops learning about lightning and starts checking whether the words match the voice.
So the rule isn't more senses. It's whether each channel is carrying different information. A diagram plus a spoken explanation, where the picture shows structure and the voice explains function, gives you two genuinely different things to connect. Narration plus identical text gives you the same thing twice and charges you for the comparison.
Complementary helps. Duplicate costs.
I corrected one belief and reached for the next appealing one inside of an afternoon. That's not a character flaw. That's just how minds work when nobody's checking.
About the AI part
I found these studies fast. Hours, not weeks. That's real, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
I also know that AI systems fabricate citations that look completely legitimate. Plausible authors. Real journal names. Formatted DOIs. Studies that do not exist.
So I opened every link in this article and confirmed each study says what I've said it says. Every one.
That's my answer to "what is truth," and it's less philosophical than I expected. Truth is what survives checking. The tool changed the speed. It did not change the obligation.
The window
I'm not embarrassed about this. I'm not embarrassed about the lesson I learned years ago, or the one I learned today, or the one waiting for me next month.
Here's what I keep thinking about.
The beliefs we never examine are almost always the ones we absorbed before we knew to ask. From a trusted source. Early. In a room where everyone already agreed. They don't arrive feeling like claims. They arrive feeling like knowledge, and that's precisely why they never get checked.
That's true of what I believed about learning styles. I suspect it's true of some of the quieter things we believe about ourselves, or perhaps even about God.
I'm not going to tell you those come apart the same way. Looking up a study is a lot simpler than that. But they get in the same way. And noticing where something came from is available to any of us, today, for free.
So the question I'm carrying out of this isn't "what else am I wrong about."
It's gentler than that. What have I been building on... that I've never actually checked?
Why this matters in Business
The real thing is called dual coding theory, developed by Allan Paivio in the 1970s. We process information through two connected systems, one verbal and one visual.
So the words we use and the images we connect with them ARE really what matters.
That sounds like something I have been saying for a while now! It drives home the need to be aligned across your Visual Branding and Marketing.
Join me on the next Live Brand Alignment Hot Seat
Definitions
Neuromyth. A belief about how the brain works that sounds scientific, spreads widely, and turns out not to be true.
Meshing hypothesis. The specific testable claim inside learning styles theory: that people learn better when the teaching method matches their preferred style.
Crossover interaction. The statistical result a study would need to produce to prove the meshing hypothesis. Across decades of research, it doesn't show up.
Dual coding theory. Allan Paivio's model that we process information through two connected systems, verbal and visual, and remember better when both are engaged.
Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. Richard Mayer's framework built on dual coding, holding that people learn better from words and pictures together than from words alone.
Redundancy principle. Mayer's finding that adding a channel carrying identical information makes learning worse, not better.
Extraneous processing. Mental effort spent on something other than understanding the material.
Working memory. The small amount of information you can actively hold and work with at one time. It's genuinely limited, and whatever the mechanics of a task consume is not available for thinking.
Sources
I've split these into the original research and the plain-language summaries, because the difference matters. If you only read one thing, read a primary study. It's less polished and far more honest than anything written about it.
Primary research
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119. DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x
Free full text, hosted by Robert Bjork's lab at UCLA:
Publisher version: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x
The review that went looking for proof of the meshing hypothesis and didn't find it.
Dekker, S., Lee, N. C., Howard-Jones, P., & Jolles, J. (2012). Neuromyths in Education: Prevalence and Predictors of Misconceptions among Teachers. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 429.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00429/full
The 90% figure, the 49% figure, and the finding that more brain knowledge predicted more belief in myths.
Papadatou-Pastou, M., Touloumakos, A. K., Koutouveli, C., & Barrable, A. (2021). The learning styles neuromyth: when the same term means different things to different teachers. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 36(2), 511–531. Published online July 2020.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10212-020-00485-2
Source of the international prevalence figures, including Greece and Spain.
Newton, P. M., & Salvi, A. (2020). How Common Is Belief in the Learning Styles Neuromyth, and Does It Matter? A Pragmatic Systematic Review. Frontiers in Education, 5, Article 602451.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2020.602451/full
Clark, J. M., & Paivio, A. (1991). Dual Coding Theory and Education. Educational Psychology Review, 3(3), 149–210.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225249172_Dual_Coding_Theory_and_Education
Yue, C. L., Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2013). Reducing Verbal Redundancy in Multimedia Learning. Journal of Educational Psychology.
https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/07/YueBjorkBjork2013_redundancy.pdf
Contains the description of Mayer et al. (2001), Experiment 2, the lightning study.
Rey, G. D., et al. (2026). A redundant redundancy principle? Examining the redundancy principle through cognitive load. Educational Psychology.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01443410.2026.2678483
Recent work testing whether extraneous processing actually explains the redundancy effect.
Mayer, R. E. (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.
Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and Verbal Processes. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Plain-language summaries
Deans for Impact, "Learning styles: what does the research say?"
Chartered College of Teaching, "The problem with learning styles: debunking the meshing hypothesis."
Landmark College, "Neuromyths: are misconceptions about the brain dangerous?" Source of the US educator percentages and the wider international comparison.
Structural Learning, "Dual Coding: A Teacher's Guide."
https://www.structural-learning.com/post/dual-coding-a-teachers-guide
Educational Technology, "Mayer's Principles of Multimedia Learning." A readable list of all twelve principles, including redundancy and modality.
https://educationaltechnology.net/mayers-principles-of-multimedia-learning/
Happy Learning!
