And the latter is exactly what they found. When they looked at the results of Experiment 2, learning style no longer mattered. Strategy mattered. The way they students studied mattered. When their study strategy (verbalizing landmarks or visually drawing them) matched the way they were assessed (either on their verbal recognition of landmarks or their visual memory of spatial navigation), they performed best. This means that likely, in Experiment 1, verbal learners were using their preferred strategy and therefore performed better on the verbal test… not because they are verbal learners, but because they used a verbal strategy!
Implications
Let’s think of the implications of this for our own students. As an educator, this very clearly means that you should match instruction to material. What do you want your students to learn? Teach them that way. And ideally provide both modalities so that they can remember things in more than one way.
But this also has implications for what our learners are doing on their own. I recently heard an educator say that they advise their visual learners to study in a way that matchers their learning style in order to maximize engagement. That’s an intuitive and commendable goal, but this study shows that it may be misguided. If the material really is not appropriate for purely visual study, that student may be at a disadvantage because they have not maximized their learning by using the strategy that best matches the material.
Bottom Line
The bottom line from this study is that we should match our learning and teaching strategies to the material that we are learning and the way in which we will need to use it later on. This does indicate that the way individuals are using the learning styles hypothesis could be worse than just “not effective” – it might actually be hurting students.
Reference:
(1) Kraemer, D. J., Schinazi, V. R., Cawkwell, P. B., Tekriwal, A., Epstein, R. A., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2017). Verbalizing, visualizing, and navigating: The effect of strategies on encoding a large-scale virtual environment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(4), 611.
