{"id":75434,"date":"2025-01-07T00:01:38","date_gmt":"2025-01-07T05:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=75434"},"modified":"2025-01-07T00:01:38","modified_gmt":"2025-01-07T05:01:38","slug":"heres-what-happens-when-teachers-tailor-their-lessons-to-students-individual-learning-styles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/heres-what-happens-when-teachers-tailor-their-lessons-to-students-individual-learning-styles\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s what happens when teachers tailor their lessons to students\u2019 individual learning styles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Students do better when lessons are tailored to individual learning styles \u2013 but not so much that it\u2019s worth the investment of time and money.\u00a0That\u2019s the main finding<\/a>\u00a0of a recent peer-reviewed study I co-authored.<\/p>\n

There\u00a0has been a big push<\/a>\u00a0to try to\u00a0tailor a teacher\u2019s instruction<\/a>\u00a0to a student\u2019s preferred learning style. That\u2019s because some people say they are visual learners, meaning they learn and retain content best through visual aids, such as charts and pictures. Others say they are auditory learners \u2013 they need to hear the lesson. Still others may have different learning styles.<\/p>\n

As a result, teachers may wonder whether they should invest the time and resources into matching their instruction to each student\u2019s specific learning style.<\/p>\n

So Christine Litzinger, a graduate student in educational foundations and research, and I analyzed data from 21 studies with more than 1,700 participants from every stage of education, from elementary school to adult courses.<\/p>\n

In each of these studies, researchers had students learn something new with instruction either matched or unmatched to their learning styles. When we analyzed their results together, we found that, overall, students with matched instruction performed slightly better on tests compared with students given unmatched instruction.<\/p>\n

But the benefits were\u00a0not enough to justify the time and money<\/a>\u00a0it would take to assess every student\u2019s learning style and personalize instruction. Doing so would require substantial resources, as different groups of children would need different materials. Importantly, students would be limited to certain methods of learning and would miss out on opportunities to develop skills in other styles. For example, visual learners would miss out on developing their listening skills.<\/p>\n

Why it matters<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Learning styles are a contentious topic in education.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, nearly 90% of educators agree with\u00a0matching instruction to students\u2019 learning styles<\/a>\u00a0to accommodate their diverse needs.<\/p>\n

Education researchers like me, on the other, take a different view. While we generally agree that students have different learning needs, we tend to\u00a0discourage the practice of matching instruction<\/a>\u00a0to learning styles because most individual studies have found\u00a0no benefits to matching<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Providing matched instruction to individual students involves a lot of\u00a0time and resources<\/a>, since teachers need to accurately identify each student\u2019s learning style and then find or create customized materials for each student.<\/p>\n

Multimodal instruction<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 in which students learn some lessons in one modality, such as text, and another lesson in a different one, such as videos \u2013\u00a0may be more efficient<\/a>, though the\u00a0research is not fully clear<\/a>\u00a0on its benefits yet. In this method, students are exposed to a variety of modalities and learn to engage with all of them. But teachers don\u2019t need to teach every lesson in different modalities to accommodate each individual student.<\/p>\n

Multimodal instruction can also help reach students who don\u2019t have a clear, singular learning style. Many of the studies in our meta-analysis did not include these students, so it is unclear how matched instruction would work for them.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next<\/strong><\/h4>\n

It\u2019s possible that students may learn more with matched instruction, not necessarily because that is their learning style, but rather because they have more skills in that particular modality, such as reading text versus comprehending audio. One reason they may be more skilled in one modality over another is simple preference. If a student prefers to read rather than listen to audio, they are likely to have practiced reading more than listening and are thus more skilled at it.<\/p>\n

So the question is, are skills \u2013 even preferences \u2013 the same as learning styles? In future research, I plan to examine how skills in a particular modality relate to learning styles, disentangling these terms.<\/p>\n

Author Bio:<\/strong> Virginia Clinton-Lisell is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the University of North Dakota<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students do better when lessons are tailored to individual learning styles \u2013 but not so much that it\u2019s worth the investment of time and money.\u00a0That\u2019s the main finding\u00a0of a recent peer-reviewed study I co-authored. There\u00a0has been a big push\u00a0to try to\u00a0tailor a teacher\u2019s instruction\u00a0to a student\u2019s preferred learning style. That\u2019s because some people say they […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15645],"tags":[351631],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-75434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-learning-styles"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHere\u2019s what happens when teachers tailor their lessons to students\u2019 individual learning styles - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/heres-what-happens-when-teachers-tailor-their-lessons-to-students-individual-learning-styles\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Here\u2019s what happens when teachers tailor their lessons to students\u2019 individual learning styles - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Students do better when lessons are tailored to individual learning styles \u2013 but not so much that it\u2019s worth the investment of time and money.\u00a0That\u2019s the main finding\u00a0of a recent peer-reviewed study I co-authored. 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