How Our Learning Styles Affect Our Lives
By ANNA HAMBLET ‘22
One afternoon in fourth grade, the entire grade assembled to determine our learning styles. I discovered that I was a visual learner, and that result held true when my grade did the same activity again in 7th and 8th grade. According to psychologicalscience.org, the classic learning style theory popularized in the 1970’s categorizes students as either visual, auditory, or kinetic learners. Visual learners learn best when they can see something, so slideshows and videos cater well to them. Alternatively, auditory learners learn via listening, so lectures and audio books are most effective. Finally, kinetic learners learn best by doing, so hands-on activities provide the greatest benefit. However, since this ideology was developed, people have added more styles, with some claiming that reading/writing is a fourth. Others include up to 7 or 8 different categories.
Throughout my education, many of my teachers have encouraged this notion of varied approaches, so I was surprised to learn earlier this year that many psychologists have recently poked holes in this ideology. The American Psychological Association reports that little to no science backs the idea of three, or even more, learning styles. Furthermore, the study suggests that this focus on classifying and targeting students harms our education: Students and teachers waste valuable time, money, and energy attempting to tailor their instruction to these broad categories, avoiding universally beneficial strategies. Although the assignment of learning styles is intended to help students optimize their education, these labels actually encourage us to box ourselves in and avoid discovering how we individually learn. According to a March 2018 study published by the American Association for Anatomy, students who blindly followed what their supposed learning style suggested performed no better on tests than those who did not.
Although three specific learning styles may not exist, it's certainly true that everybody learns differently. While we may not all be distinctly visual, auditory, or kinetic learners, each student finds certain methods more beneficial than others.
Recently, due to the pandemic, we have been entrusted with our own learning more than ever before. Most Milton classes were already quite student-guided, but as we now see our teachers only once a week, we have become personally responsible for the vast majority of our learning and time management. Our learning styles no longer affect just how we choose to study for a certain test, but how we have learned an entire quarter of material.
Even though the popularized umbrella theory of specific learning styles is full of falsities, the future of our education remains uncertain, and we will have to guide our own learning more than ever. Since I arrived at Milton in 6th grade, teachers have encouraged me to discover myself as a learner and take responsibility for my academics beyond my list of visual learner study strategies. I no longer remember all the strategies on this apparently obsolete list nor the various facts I crammed into my brain using them. However, Milton’s core ideology of self-guided learning, apparent in projects ranging from DYO’s to independent research for history papers, has continued to serve me well. Indeed, the math department’s flexible teaching prepared me for the similarly unstructured online learning. Distance learning is obviously less than ideal, as is most of what’s happening right now. But while the majority of us will probably learn less than we would’ve had school taken place as usual, taking our learning into our own hands has inspired personal growth and discovery in many students.
We students, now not experiencing the pressure to get good grades or teachers’ meticulously checking each assignment, should seize the opportunity to determine how we learn best and challenge ourselves to continue working without being pushed. Although the “myth” of learning styles has been debunked, its foundation-- that each student has a unique method of efficient and reliable learning-- has taken on renewed importance. To make the best of distance learning, we have to listen to what our best teachers have preached for years and figure out how to be the best learners we can be.