Releasing students from the cognitive straitjacket of visual-auditory-kinaesthetic learning styles

Lewis A Baker, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey, UK Learning styles pervade common nomenclature in schools and are found in many strategic-planning documents for raising achievement in learners. This is the so-called meshing hypothesis; matching a student’s preferred learning style to instruction improves a student’s learning (Lethaby and Mayne, 2018; Aslaksen and Lorås, 2018). A learning style can be defined as ‘cognitive, affective, and physiological traits [that indicate] how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to learning environments’ (Keefe, 1982, p. 44, quoted in Sharp et al., 2008, p. 294). As it stands, at least 12 distinct learning styles (and more than 60 derivatives) have been outlined, which try to categorise a learner’s preference for processing information (Coffield et al., 2004). By far the most popular model of learning style is the visual-auditory-kinaesthetic (VAK) model and its corollary VARK (reading/writing).