Visual and auditory learners - have these categories been debunked?

People are commonly classified as being either visual or auditory learners. If you are a visual learner you will understand information with greater ease through the medium of pictures, including graphs, charts, maps and diagrams. If you are an auditory learner your learning will be facilitated through the spoken word.

The prevalent opinion in the education sector is that 40% of us are visual learners - this goes for both adults and children, and that 30% of people are auditory learners, with the remaining 30% being kinaesthetic learners. Kinaesthetic learners are thought to gain understanding through physical activities, or manipulating models.

The belief that children fall into different learning categories has been around for many decades, but it wasn`t until the early 1990`s, when the New Zealander cognitive scientist Neil Fleming proposed the VAK/VARK model, that the different learning groups were properly codified.

The actual science behind these different categories of learning has however been recently challenged. Scientists from the universities of California and St. Louis have recently published a paper in the Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, that says there is little actual robust evidence to suggest matching the mode of teaching to people`s preferred style helps them to learn any better. The study points out that more than three decades of academic literature, along with hundreds of studies, have yielded no evidence to suggest matching the method of teaching to a child`s mode of learning facilitates their understanding.

The study suggests that the learning categories themselves have simply come out of earlier theories, some going back to Carl Jung`s work of the 1960`s. It is not uncommon for theories to come about this way, growing out of earlier studies; but whereas in the empirical sciences, especially mathematics and physics, this can lead to great discoveries, in the social sciences it can give credence dubious conjectures - neuromyth`s like we only use 10% of our brains.

The study, entitled Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, casts doubt over the idea that different learning styles even exist, proposing that humans have a tendency to categorise and simplify, a natural urge to put people into groups.

`It seems that the idea of finding out ``what type of person one is`` has some eternal and deep appeal.`

`It is also natural and appealing to think that all people have the potential to learn effectively and
easily if only instruction is tailored to their individual learning styles.`

Learning itself is a mysterious process - how does the brain store information, and are we fundamentally changed as a person when we learning something new? Despite an abundance of clinical data, the human brain refuses to give up most of its secrets. It seems to be made up of nothing but interconnecting nerves, and totally lacks any kind of mechanised microstructures. The kidney has the bowman capsule, a device that encourages filtration; the heart has valves, that ensure the force of its contractions pump blood in the right direction. The brain seems to lack any kind of demarcated structures. There are nerves, and there are areas where these nerves interconnect with other nerves. These connections, called synapses, can alter - they can change their `degree` of connectivity, encouraging or inhibiting the flow of charge. This malleability, this manner of making new connections, must be in some way linked to learning. Different parts of the brain appear to have localised functions, seem to be specialised towards certain roles. There is a small part of the left cerebral hemisphere called the Broca`s area, which appears to associated with language. Patients with injuries to this area may lose the ability to speak, or understand the written word. There are visual and auditory cortexes, sectors of the brain that seem to process sensory data from the eyes and ears.

Of course we all have differing levels of ability - one person may have an ability for music, while another may be gifted at drawing. This truism does not however mean that there are associated learning categories - that a person who is musically gifted will learn best via the spoken word, or that a child who enjoys painting will learn best through diagrams, and other visual representations.