November 13th 2025, I’m hosting a campus Conversation Table titled “Learning Styles is a Myth—Change My Mind.”
It’s a playful nod to the Steven Crowder meme, but it also reflects a serious reality: one of the most
widespread beliefs in education has almost no scientific evidence behind it.

Completing my teacher education in the early 2000s meant that I was fed a lot of learning styles throughout my years, and I really just saw it as a different way of differentiating education and thinking about different ways to create activities in the classroom. And, I thought it really helped me plan activities.

Years after and more recently over the past month, I’ve been reading deeply into the literature—including conceptual analyses, meta-analyses, and even entire monographs—trying to understand not only why learning styles don’t work, but also why so many educators still believe in them.

What I’ve found confirms the claim borne out in article after article: learning styles is one of the most persistent neuromyths in education.

And neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and decades of classroom research all converge on the same conclusion:
Teaching to students’ preferred learning styles does not increase learning. And, knowing what we know about the brain, and how learning truly happens, it is interesting to see the myth persist.

The problem is not that teachers believe students are different. They are. They all have preferences. Preferences in music, in clothing, in hairstyle, in AI chatbot they use. And so, it makes sense that learners of today (and yesterday, probably) would want designated themselves a learning preference. 

Good teachers already differentiate in meaningful ways: by readiness, prior knowledge, scaffolding,
feedback, and accessibility needs. None of this depends on assigning students to a “style.”

If learning styles had strong evidence, I would teach them. Instead, I teach about the brain. I teach about what works. If matching to styles improved achievement, I would advocate for it and my preservice teachers would know all about it with examples from my teaching career. 

Show me the data, and I’ll gladly change