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Idea · From the Margen catalogue

Nobody ever found the visual learner

Four psychologists — Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork — reviewed the evidence for learning styles in 2008: the idea that each person does better when taught through 'their' channel, visual, auditory or hands-on. They were looking for one specific kind of experiment, the crossover, the only one able to prove it. Out of hundreds of published papers they found a handful, and all of them pointed the other way: matching channel to student did not improve the marks.

The experiment is easy to picture. You sort students into visual and auditory; half of each group gets the lesson in their channel and half in the opposite one; you compare. If the theory holds, each should win with their own. In 2019 Husmann and O'Loughlin set it up that way with more than four hundred anatomy students: those who studied according to their profile did not score higher.

What does decide the outcome is the material, not the person. Geography is learned better with maps, and that goes for everyone; the pronunciation of a language is learned with sound, and that goes for everyone too.

So tomorrow, before you sit down with something, don't ask what kind of learner you are. Ask what the thing you want to learn is made of, and study it in that format: map, sound, gesture or text.