The theory is wrong, but, curiously, people act as though it’s right - they try to learn in accordance with what they think is their style. The auditory learners should have remembered statements better if they focused on the sound rather than if they created visual images, and visual learners should have shown the opposite pattern. Next, researchers read statements, and participants rated either how easily the statement prompted a mental image (a visual learning experience) or how easy it was to pronounce (an auditory learning experience). In the workplace, a manager might send one employee a memo but communicate the same information to another in a conversation. In the classroom, a brief test would categorize children as this type of learner or that, and then a teacher could include more of this or that in their schooling. If one of these theories were right, it would bring important benefits. The best known proposes that some of us like words and others like pictures, but other theories make different distinctions: whether you like to solve problems intuitively or by analyzing them, for example, or whether you prefer to tackle a complex idea with an overview or by diving into details. Over the last several decades, researchers have proposed dozens of theories, each suggesting a scheme to categorize learners. These theories are influential enough that many states (including New York) require future teachers to know them and to know how they might be used in the classroom.īut there’s no good scientific evidence that learning styles actually exist.

Researchers have formalized those intuitions into theories of learning styles.

They would rather listen to an explanation or view a diagram. You must read this article to understand it, but many people feel reading is not how they learn best.

Aural learners