Do you learn better by watching or listening? The myth of learning styles

There are people who claim to learn better by seeing images, others need to hear an explanation, and some prefer to practice directly to understand what they are studying. You have probably heard phrases like “I have a visual memory” or “I learn by doing,” and you may even have identified with one of them.

This classification has influenced the way of studying and teaching for decades. However, scientific research has been questioning one of its main premises for years**: that people learn better when they receive information in the way they consider most suitable for them.**

What is surprising is how much this idea is still accepted. A review published in 2020 in Frontiers in Education, which gathered 37 studies with more than 15,000 teachers from 18 countries, found that 89.1% believed that adapting teaching to the student's learning style improved their outcomes.

But what happens when that belief is put to the test?

Having a favorite way to study does not mean learning better with it

The learning styles theory has become popular through models like VAK or VARK, which classify students as visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinesthetic. According to this approach, knowing each student's style allows adapting materials and explanations to facilitate their learning.

The problem is that personal preferences do not always match the results.

A person who enjoys watching educational videos may feel they learn more from them than from reading a text, but that feeling does not guarantee that they understand the concepts better or will remember them later.

A meta-analysis published in July 2024 in Frontiers in Psychology analyzed 21 studies with 1,712 participants to check what happened when teaching matched the “assigned” style of each student.

The researchers found a small overall statistical benefit, but the results were much less conclusive when examining the central hypothesis: that visual learners would perform better with visual teaching and auditory learners would gain an equivalent advantage with auditory teaching. Only about 26% of the measures analyzed showed that pattern. Given these results, the researchers concluded that the benefits were not consistent enough and the available evidence was too limited to justify educational centers adapting their teaching methods to these classifications.

This does not mean completely ignoring preferences, since choosing a format we find pleasant can encourage the willingness to study. What cannot be assured is that we all have a dominant learning channel to which our training should be adapted.

What we are learning is also important

Imagine two students have to learn human anatomy. One considers themselves auditory and the other visual. Would it make sense for the first to study only by listening to descriptions of the organs and the second by using images?

To understand the overall arrangement of muscles, bones, or organs, visual resources are especially useful, regardless of personal preferences. However, when the goal is to learn how to perform a clinical technique, observing a demonstration and practicing it becomes fundamentally important.

The same applies outside the healthcare field. Learning the pronunciation of a language requires listening to sounds, while interpreting a map requires working with spatial information.

Therefore, it is clear that the most appropriate teaching strategy largely depends on the content, the skills to be developed, and the student's prior knowledge.

This explains why combining explanations, texts, images, demonstrations, and practical activities makes sense from an educational point of view. Each resource serves a different function and allows working on complementary aspects of the same subject.

This combination is also present in the Academic Model of Universidad Mundae, which integrates theoretical content, digital resources, and practical and simulation experiences. In healthcare degrees, where understanding scientific fundamentals must be accompanied by the development of clinical skills and decision-making ability, using different training resources responds to the very demands of learning.

When labels end up limiting learning

It is important to understand that, beyond their effectiveness, classifying students according to a specific style also has consequences. Someone convinced they learn better with images might discard other methods before checking if they work for them.

The Education Endowment Foundation, in its updated 2025 review, warns that labeling students as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic can limit their progress and condition their perception of their own abilities. Instead, it recommends paying attention to factors such as prior knowledge, specific difficulties, and each student's development.

After all, learning also involves developing skills we do not yet master, even when that requires stepping out of our comfort zone to do so.