What Is Your Preferred Learning Style?

Do we actually learn better through our preferred learning style?

This is a tricky one, I must admit. We all probably have the feeling we are better at learning new skills in a certain way — for instance, by seeing, hearing, or feeling (physically enacting) how to perform them. But is it also true?

There are literally thousands of books, articles, websites, conference presentations, theses, et cetera, that allude to the benefits of aligning a teacher’s teaching style to a student’s learning style. The idea that students learn new information better by learning it through their preferred learning style is also very popular amongst teachers. They will certainly — and correctly — notice that different students experience enlightenment from different approaches. One student might respond to an image much better than to spoken words, which the teacher might take into account the next time when trying to explain something new to the same student.

There are several issues with the supposed benefits of matching teaching style to learning style. For one, different theories apply different learning and teaching styles. I already mentioned the popular visual, auditory, and kinesthetic categories, but others use a classification into activists, reflectors, theorists, and pragmatists (Honey &…