Read 2 articles: Willingham (2018) and Fallace (2019),Answer the questions below by providing short answers

 Read 2 articles: Willingham (2018) and Fallace (2019),Answer the questions below by providing short answers 

1.Who is the author(s) of Willingham 2018 reading? (Provide Full Name(s) and any other information about authors

2.What is the full title of the Willingham 2018 reading?

3.When was Willingham 2018 reading published?

4.What is the name of the publication of the Willingham 2018 reading?

5.Who is the author(s) of Fallace 2019 reading? (Provide Full Name(s) and any other information about author(s)

6.What is the full title of the Fallace 2019 reading?
7.When was Fallace 2019 reading published?
8.What is the name of the publication of the Fallace 2019 reading?
9.Write 4-5 sentences that describe what the Fallace 2019 reading is about:

10.Write 4-5 sentences about how you see these two readings as similar and/or different (think about content, format, and any other information included/not included in the document)

11.What questions does this exercise raise for you? What are you curious to learn more about?

Educational Researcher, Vol. 48 No. 6, pp. 349 –355
DOI: 10.3102/0013189X19858086

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The learning-styles concept appears to have wide accep-tance not only among educators,” Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2009) reported,

“

but also among par-
ents and the general public” (p. 106). In recent decades, the idea
that teachers should align their instruction with students’ par-
ticular learning style, cognitive style, and/or learner preference
has become commonplace in the literature on effective teaching.
For example, Darling-Hammond and Baratz-Snowden’s (2005)
influential text, A Good Teacher in Every Classroom, states that
teachers ought to develop “teaching strategies that respond to
different learning styles and approaches” (p. 22), and the
InTASC (Counsel for Chief State School Officers, 2013) teach-
ing standards invite educators to incorporate “multiple
approaches to learning that engage a range of learner prefer-
ences” (p. 19). Despite the general acceptance of the learning
style idea, many recent studies (Hushmann & O’Loughlin,
2019; Knoll, Otani, Skeel, & Van Horn, 2017; Pashler et al.,
2009; Reiner & Willingham, 2010; Willingham, Hughes, &
Dobolyi, 2015) have questioned the effectiveness of aligning
instruction with the alleged learning styles of individual stu-
dents. That is, psychologists have been critical of the idea that
students and/or teachers are able to identify a specific learning
style or preference through which students learn best (e.g.,
visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and that teaching through that
aligned style will lead to improved learning. Although skepti-
cism and confusion over learning styles have escalated in recent
years (Lake, Boyd, & Boyd, 2017), the research on learning

styles had been problematic from the start, and scholars are
uncertain exactly when and how the learning style idea first
emerged. “Experts aren’t sure how the concept spread,” one
journalist (Kahzan, 2018) admitted in an article on the “myth”
of learning styles, “but it might have had something to do with
the self-esteem movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s” (p. 1).
In fact, the learning style idea first emerged in the 1960s.

In this intellectual history, I trace the origin, emergence, and
early history of the learning style idea. Hollinger (1985) defines
intellectual history as “the discourse of intellectuals” (p. 131).
My objective is to trace the long-term and immediate intellectual
discourses that gave rise to the learning style idea and document
the moment in which scholars diverged from the race/ethnicity-
specific language that had previously been affiliated with the
term. In the tradition of intellectual history, I am not focused on
judging the validity of the research on learning styles, nor am I
concerned with evaluating the efficacy of the learning style idea
itself. Rather, I trace the nature and evolution of the discourse
surrounding the idea and how it connected to broader ideas,
contexts, and conversations about race, ethnicity, anthropology,
and psychology. I define learning style—used alongside related
terms such as cognitive style, learning preference, and thinking
style—vaguely as the historical notion that individual students
acquire and process knowledge in specific ways and that

858086 EDRXXX10.3102/0013189X19858086EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHEREducational Researcher
research-article2019

1William Paterson University, Montclair, NJ

the Ethnocentric Origins of the Learning style Idea
Thomas Fallace1

In recent years, researchers have questioned the legitimacy of the so-called myth of learning styles and expressed confusion
about exactly when and why the idea first emerged. this historical study traces the origin and emergence of the learning
style idea. the author argues that the learning style idea originated in the 1960s as part of a broader effort to reach inner-
city African American youth that certain educators deemed culturally deficient. by the time scholars developed learning
style inventory instruments for mostly white children, they removed the race-specific language, and educators quickly
forget the ethnocentric origins of the learning style idea.

Keywords: cognitive processes/development; historical analysis; history; individual differences; learning processes/

strategies; psychology

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350 EDucAtIONAL REsEARcHER

researchers/teachers can identify a particular learning/cognitive
style in which a student can most effectively learn. Specifically, I
trace the idea of learning styles from interwar anthropological
research on cultural difference to postwar research on “culturally
deprived” (Riessman, 1962) and “culturally disadvantaged”
(Johnson, 1970) children to the idea that there might be a “Black
learning style” (Cureton, 1978; Hale, 1982; Slaughter, 1969) to
the construction of several learning style inventory tools in the
1970s (Dunn, Dunn, & Price, 1975; Kolb, 1976). I demon-
strate how the learning style idea originated in an effort to reach
inner-city African American youth that certain educators
deemed culturally deficient (Martinez & Rury, 2012; Scott,
1997; Valencia, 1997). However, by the time scholars developed
popular learning style inventory instruments for mass distribu-
tion for presumably White children, they removed the race-
specific language and shifted the focus from identifying the
learning styles of groups to identifying the learning styles of indi-
viduals. As a result, educators quickly forget the ethnocentric
origins of the learning style idea.

Cultural Difference

The idea that students differed from one another in ways that
required some kind of individualized instruction originated
during the progressive education movement (Cremin, 1961;
Zilversmit, 1993). Scholars justified the idea of accommodating
individual differences through child-centered rationales, which
recommended hands-on learning catered to students’ interests,
and intelligence testing, which outlined the alleged differences in
student intellectual potential and ability. Both student-centered
instruction and intelligence testing recognized that student dif-
ference was a major issue facing schools and that a rational, sci-
entific approach to curriculum could meet that challenge
(Kliebard, 1995; Zilversmit, 1993). However, in no way did pro-
gressive educators acknowledge that students may have different
learning styles; the focus was solely on different levels of intelli-
gence, ability, knowledge, or academic potential. The idea of dif-
ferent learning styles did not emerge until after World War II in
response to changes in anthropological conceptions of cultural
difference.

Prior to World War II, most White anthropologists employed
a hierarchical approach to culture that viewed all societies, past
and present, on a universal scale of sociological development
leading from savagery to barbarianism to civilization (Stocking,
1968). All of the cultures that met the criteria for civilization
were White, while all of the cultures that met the criteria for
barbarian and savage were non-White. Thus, the ethnocentric
hierarchical model served as justification for White supremacy in
the United States and the world until the late 1930s. However,
during the early 20th century, a group of American anthropolo-
gists led by Franz Boas, and his former students Margaret Mead
and Ruth Benedict, questioned the efficacy of the hierarchical
model of culture and sought to replace it with a contextualized,
contingent, relativistic approach to culture based on cultural dif-
ference (Stocking, 1968). Drawing on their ethnographies of
indigenous cultures, Boas, Mead, and Benedict described societ-
ies in terms of qualitative differences instead of approaching

them in terms of quantitative and technological accomplish-
ments. During this time, leading African American scholars such
as W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson also employed a relativ-
istic approach to culture by documenting the cultural achieve-
ments of Blacks in the past and present. However, White scholars
mostly ignored the work of Du Bois and Woodson and contin-
ued to employ a hierarchical model toward communities of color
through the 1930s. Innate/biological explanations of racial dif-
ference, especially among psychometricians, continued as well.

The Boasian view of culture slowly gained influence between
the 1900s and 1920s, but it really did not take hold until the rise
of Nazism in the late 1930s (Barkan, 1992). Anthropologists led
the charge to attack the racial science that the Nazis were using
to justify their genocidal policies against racial minorities. In
response to the Nazis’ assault on minorities, the American
Anthropological Association passed a resolution in 1938 stating:
“Anthropology provides no scientific basis for discrimination
against any people on the ground of racial superiority, religious
affiliation, or linguistic heritage” because the “psychological and
cultural connotations [of race], if they exist, have not been ascer-
tained by science” (American Anthropological Association,
1939, pp. 29–30). Shortly thereafter, Benedict (1940) published
Race: Science and Politics, and Montagu (1942) published Man’s
Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Both books were best-
sellers, and both drew on recent anthropological research to
attack the scientific basis of racism. Benedict and Montagu
insisted that there was no scientific basis for the biological ori-
gins for cultural traits and that culture—in the new, contextual-
ized, relativistic version of the word—was the best way to
describe differences among people of the world. As Mead (1940)
asserted during World War II, “scientific research has docu-
mented the absence of any proof of reliable differences in intel-
ligence and emotional make-up; differences, that is, which are
impervious to the forces of cultural change” (p. 202).

The new relativistic definition of culture was a doubled-
edged sword for communities of color in the United States. On
the one hand, it removed the biological justification for racism
and suggested that social inequalities between Whites and Blacks
were the result of race prejudice, unjust social policies, and cul-
tural difference instead of intelligence, innate potential, or
immutable traits. The culturally relativistic approach opened the
door for a more egalitarian view of racial difference. On the
other hand, the new definition of culture inspired sociologists
and anthropologists to replace theories of biological deficiency
with newer theories of cultural deficiency that depicted commu-
nities of color as somehow pathological, damaged, or less devel-
oped than their White counterparts. As Frederickson (2002)
explained, cultural racism “is a way of thinking about difference
that reifies and essentializes culture rather than genetic endow-
ment, or in other words makes culture do the work of race”
(p. 141). Starting in the 1960s, social scientists drew on their
ethnographic studies of low-income communities of color to
construct new theories of cultural deficiency that while certainly
less dismissive than the former biological theories of race, never-
theless approached communities of color through a deficiency
lens, suggesting that they were somehow ontologically less devel-
oped than their middle-class White peers. That is, White scholars

August/sEptEmbER 2019 351

perceived people of color as having a culture to the same degree
as middle-class Whites, but that culture was still deemed some-
how pathological and/or deficient (Martinez & Rury, 2012;
Scott, 1997; Valencia, 1997).

Personality Type and Cultural Deficiency

By the early 1960s, several trends converged to underscore a new
focus on the alleged cultural deficiency of students of color living
in cities, leading eventually to the suggestion that Black students
may have their own learning style. First was the rediscovery of
poverty ushered in by Harrington’s (1962) book, The Other
America. In addition to people of color, Harrington’s study also
depicted poor Southern Whites in Appalachia as part of the
nearly 25% of Americans living in poverty. Furthermore, based
on his study of the poor in Mexico City, Lewis (1961) intro-
duced the “culture of poverty” thesis, suggesting that genera-
tional poverty created a self-perpetuating set of pathologies that
impoverished people transmitted across generations, making
assimilation to middle-class life difficult for youth living in pov-
erty. Controversial reports such as Moynihan’s (1965) The Negro
Family and Coleman et al.’s (1966) Equality of Educational
Opportunity garnered further evidence that the learned cultural
traits of people of color may be the biggest impediment to their
success in school and that their impoverished condition was in
part the fault of their own cultural attributes. The Moynihan
report notoriously named the poor Black experience as “a tangle
of pathology” (p. 29), and the Coleman et al. report demon-
strated that family background, not per pupil expenditure, was
the biggest determinate of success in school.

Second, the Civil Rights movement brought attention to the
plight of oppressed groups. As African American leaders won
political and legal victories, they soon shifted their attention to
issues of economic and social inequality. To combat these social
and economic inequalities, President Johnson’s Great Society
and War on Poverty initiatives funded compensatory educa-
tional services such as the Head Start preschool program. The
Great Society drew federal funding and research dollars to previ-
ously neglected urban areas populated by people of color. The
engagement of urban, African American youth became a central
concern for educators looking to bring equitable outcomes to
students of color. Policymakers designed the Head Start and
other preferential and compensatory programs to address the
perceived cultural deficiencies of poor students in an attempt to
close the achievement gap between White and Black students.
However, many of the volunteers, workers, and researchers
applied middle-class biases to urban youth, which further per-
petuated the view that African Americans were culturally
deficient.

Third, cognitive psychologists began questioning the alleged
passivity of the human mind, as conceptualized by behavioral
psychologists, and reenvisioned the mind as open, interactive,
and culturally contingent. Specifically, cognitive psychologists
considered the ways that preexisting cognitive schema and cul-
tural attributes affected the process of learning, thus blurring the
line between individual and group consciousness. Piaget argued
that the child’s mind developed through epistemic stages that

shaped and distorted how new knowledge was processed (Piaget
& Inhelder, 1969). Bruner (1960) suggested that learning was a
form of enculturation to academic ways of thinking. As Bruner
(1966) argued: “Knowing is a process, not a product” (p. 72).
Both Piaget and Bruner questioned the immutability of intelli-
gence and emphasized the importance of early childhood educa-
tion on future learning. More significantly, during this time,
scholars began to consider the impact of cognitive differences, or
“personality” (Allport, 1955; Jung, 1923), on learning, and a few
studies even suggested that there were different ways that the
mind approached a problem.

Jung (1923) first introduced the personality traits of individ-
uals and how they differed in degrees of introversion, extrover-
sion, sensitivity, intuition, thinking, feeling, judging, and
perceiving. Myers-Brigg (1962) turned Jung’s personality types
into the popular Myers-Brigg personality type inventory.
Furthermore, in Psychological Differentiation, Witkin, Dyk,
Fattuson, Goodenough, and Karp (1962) suggested that some
learners were “field-dependent” while others were “field-
independent” in their ability to solve problems; the former
required social support while the latter did not. In The Silent
Language (1959) and the Hidden Dimension (1966), Hall stud-
ied the unspoken language of gestures and nonverbal cues. He
concluded that some cultures communicate in sophisticated
ways through nonverbal cues and spatial recognitions that are
missed and/or ignored by middle-class, White culture, which
tended to be highly verbal. “People from different cultures not
only speak different languages,” Hall (1966) explained, “but,
what is possibly more important, they inhabit different sensory
worlds” (p. 2). Hall included examples of how urban dwellers
draw on different spatial cues than those living in suburban and
rural areas, suggesting that urban youth had different cognitive-
cultural approaches to their lives.

Collectively, this new scholarship reenvisioned the mind as
context-bound, interactive, socially mediated, and culturally
influenced. This new approach drew attention to the conditions
and environments in which students were raised by suggesting
that urban students experienced the world differently than sub-
urban and rural ones. More importantly, this work underscored
the idea that personalities, cultures, and environments inter-
vened in the way students responded to stimuli. Instead of envi-
sioning the mind as a blank slate that behaved in accordance
with universal laws, as behaviorists suggested, cognitive psychol-
ogists and cultural anthropologists forged a new interactive and
culturally informed approach to mind that opened the door for
the idea that students (and/or groups of students) potentially
learned differently. Under this new conception, the development
of individual personality and acculturation of the individual to
social/ethnic groups worked conterminously. As a result, the line
between the individual and his or her culture was blurred and
conflated.

Drawing on these developments in cultural anthropology,
social policy, and cognitive psychology, Riessman (1962)
authored The Culturally Deprived Child. Riessman suggested for
the first time that differences in student achievement might be
due to differences in “styles of learning” (p. 64). Riessman
identified poor Appalachian Whites, Puerto Ricans, Mexican

352 EDucAtIONAL REsEARcHER

Americans, and Native Americans as culturally deprived, yet the
examples in the book focused almost exclusively on urban and
particularly male African American youth. In his book, Riessman
used the terms “cognitive style,” “type of thinking,” “style of
learning,” and “style of thinking” interchangeably (pp. 64, 115),
yet subsequent learning styles theorists would later distinguish
these concepts from one another (see Curry, 1983). Under the
heading, “Another Style of Thinking,” Riessman asserted,
“Deprived children are capable of developing abstract, symbolic
thinking. They appear to develop this type of thinking in slower,
more direct fashion; that is they require more examples before
‘seeing the point’” (p. 115). Riessman pointed to the untapped
potential of urban youth and advocated for addressing their par-
ticular style of learning, writing:

The underprivileged child has a cognitive style or way of learning
that includes a number of features that have unique creative
potential: his skill in non-verbal communication (his is not word
bound). His proclivity for persisting along one line (one track
creativity), his induction emphasis on many concrete examples,
and his colorful free association feeling for metaphor in language,
perhaps best seen in his use of slang. These potentialities,
indigenous to his cultural heritage, must be fully explored in any
program concerned with developing talent among underprivileged
groups. (p. 115)

Although Riessman stated repeatedly that he was trying to tran-
scend the deficit approach to culture by “emphasizing the posi-
tive aspects of their culture, which, hitherto, have been largely
ignored” (p. xiii), it was difficult to read his characteristics of
culturally deprived children and their learning style as preferable
to the learning style of mainstream, middle-class, White stu-
dents. In other words, despite his best intentions, Riessman
could not completely transcend the hierarchical view of culture
because he judged the culture of students of color against the
standard of White mainstream culture. Elsewhere in the book,
Riessman decried the “anti-intellectualism and narrow practical-
ity of the deprived,” again demonstrating that he was working, at
least partially, through a deficit lens (p. 129).

Riessman’s book received criticism from both those who
rejected his cultural relativism as well as those who thought he
had overemphasized the cultural deficiency of urban Black stu-
dents. As Cynthia P. Deutsch (1965) argued,

Riessman’s argument on cultural relativism does not take into
consideration the increasing industrialization of our society and
the consequent greater dependence on verbal communication
which lead to a greater need for facility in verbal skills such as
reading and writing. (p. 143)

Drawing on the research of Martin Deutsch, she insisted that
language acquisition was critical to learning and that the urban
Black youth had verbal deficits that needed to be corrected, not
catered to. On the other end of the spectrum, African American
author Ralph Ellison (1963/1986) insisted that there “is no such
thing as a culturally deprived kid” (p. 65). Suggesting that Black
students were culturally different, not deprived, Ellison argued
that poor African American kids could draw on a rich “social
fabric” based on “basic ingenuity” that had been overlooked by

White educators. He implored educators “to find out what
[Black children] have” and asked, “What do they have that is a
strength?” (p. 65). He insisted that instead of language deficits,
Black children had “great virtuosity with the music, the poetry of
words” (p. 67). Citing Ellison, Castro (1971) likewise ques-
tioned Riessman’s assertion that students of color had verbal
deficits and demonstrated the consistencies in the language pat-
terns of African American youth, which she had studied in her
research by using drama and games to access their rich linguistic
knowledge.

In an article for the Journal of Negro Education, Riessman
(1964) attempted to respond to both critiques of his approach—
that he was too dismissive and not dismissive enough of urban
Black youth. Carefully replacing the term culturally deprived
with economically disadvantaged and/or educationally deprived,
Riessman again outlined “the content-centered not form-
centered mental approach” of urban youth and their “physical
and visual style in learning” (p. 230). He also listed additional
deficits of the educationally deprived such as “poor auditory
attention poor time perspective, inefficient test-taking skills, and
limited reading ability” of “disadvantaged youth” (p. 230).

Others took Riessman’s learning style idea even further.
Dismissing Riessman’s relativistic approach to culture as too
empathetic and irrational, Johnson (1970) likewise identified a
learning style of the culturally disadvantaged. However, Johnson
was more overt in his deficit language. “[T]he learning style of
the culturally disadvantaged is not efficient,” Johnson explained,
“it is slow, physical, nonverbal, problem-centered, and concrete-
oriented—like the learning style of a young child” (p. 33).
Johnson listed further deficits of culturally disadvantaged youth,
such as “negative attitude towards intellectual tasks,” “inability
to recognize adults as information sources,” “ineffectiveness to
verbal stimuli,” “present-oriented,” “slowness with intellectual
tasks,” and “inability to deal with multiple problems” (pp. 36–
39). Johnson’s assertion that the learning style of the culturally
disadvantaged was “like the very young child of any culture or
social class” linked his assessment to the largely debunked ethno-
centric theory of recapitulation—the idea that the development
of the individual retraced the sociological/psychological history
of the human race and that non-White cultures/minds repre-
sented earlier childlike stages of White cultures/minds. Pre-
Boasian anthropologists in the early 20th century used the
theory of recapitulation to justify domination over non-White
and premodern cultures that were characterized as childlike,
undeveloped, inchoate, and savage (Fallace, 2015). By adopting
the “child” metaphor, Johnson unwittingly linked his approach
to the hierarchical theory of culture he was trying to challenge.
“The term culturally disadvantaged . . . is a relative term,”
Johnson explained. “The disadvantaged materializes when the
child leaves his primary cultural group to function in the domi-
nant culture” (p. 3). Thus, according to Johnson, the deficits of
the culturally disadvantaged were contingent, not absolute.
Nevertheless, Johnson approached students of color as ontologi-
cally less formed than their White counterparts and espoused
cultural assimilation in lieu of cultural preservation.

By the mid-1960s, the learning style idea had first entered the
discourse via Riessman, and it did so in the context of teaching
“culturally deprived” children. Riesmann’s book was not

August/sEptEmbER 2019 353

specifically about learning styles, yet it did represent the first
time the term had been used in an educational context as a way
to improve educational outcomes. However, not all scholars
using the cultural deprivation paradigm adopted or discussed the
idea of learning style. Conversely, not all scholars who employed
the idea of learning styles linked the idea to cultural differences
and deficits. Even those who applied the learning style idea to
urban youth, such as Strom (1965), used it in inconsistent ways.
As Strom pointed out in his book, Teaching in the Slum School:
“Not only is instruction influenced by different types of learning
but recent studies suggest that children differ in their preference
of learning styles” (p. 78). However, instead of outlining the
divergences between the middle class and culturally deprived
learning style, Strom pointed to an “authoritarian method of
learning” versus a “spontaneous style of learning in which trial
and error, experimentation, and idea modification are utilized”
(p. 78). Thus, Strom suggested that the “authoritarian” and
“spontaneous” learning styles cut across class and racial types,
thus paving the way for the race-blind learning style inventories
of the 1970s.

Is There a Black Learning Style?

By the end of the 1960s, controversial research by Jensen (1969)
reasserted innate explanations of racial disparities in intelligence.
In this context, the learning style idea took on new relevance as
an alternative to biological/innate explanations for disparities in
school achievement among racial groups. The learning style the-
sis suggested that the low achievement of African American stu-
dents was due more to a mismatch between the instruction of
White middle-class teachers and the learning style of urban
Black students than it was due to innate deficiencies in intelli-
gence and/or cognitive potential (Cohen, 1969; Slaughter,
1969). In this sense, Riessman’s thesis was more liberal and
humane than Jensen’s argument for the innate inferiority of stu-
dents of color. Nevertheless, race-based learning style idea con-
tinued to be attacked by those who rejected his culturally
relativism and those who thought he had not gone far enough in
recognizing the positive attributes of Black students.

One empirical study by Smith (1966) employed different
learning styles with Jobs Corps participants of different races and
ethnicities. Reasserting the behaviorist approach to learning,
Smith concluded that race made no difference in how individu-
als learned. “As has been long maintained by behaviorists,” Smith
concluded, “the burden of learning lies with the teacher and the
institution of learning, not with the learner” (p. 3). Although
Smith found that ethnicities could not be aligned with specific
learning styles, he argued that race, “particularly Negroes,” did
make a difference in regards to behavior (p. 3). Smith found that
when Blacks made up over 40% of the class, their achievement
and behavior degenerated, but when they made up less than
40% of the class, their achievement and behavior improved.
This finding reinforced the cultural deficit approach to African
American youth because it implied that the cultural traits of
Black students impeded their own learning, but only when the
relative number of Black students was great enough to exert their
cultural influence on the rest of the class. Yet paradoxically,

Smith’s study directly challenged the idea that there was a Black
learning style.

Despite evidence and argument to the contrary, the idea per-
sisted that Blacks learned differently than Whites. Articles pub-
lished in the 1970s (Cureton, 1978; Gantt, 1972; Johnson,
1970) cited Riessman as justification for the idea that a Black or
culturally disadvantaged learning style could be identified and
addressed. “Is there a black learning style, a learning style espe-
cially suited to innercity [sic] students?,” Cureton (1978, p. 755)
bluntly and provocatively asked. “I believe there is,” he answered
(p. 755). Even those who were critical of the research on learning
styles were still hesitant to rule out the possibility that learning
styles could somehow be aligned with race. As Costello and
Payton (1973) argued, “It seems necessary to separate . . . those
cultural differences which preserve diversity in our culture, and
those differences in learning style that limit individual develop-
ment and may have nothing at all to do with preserving cultural
diversity or ethnic identity” (p. 100). In summary, there were
several learning style typologies in circulation by the 1970s.
Some scholars identified Black/White and/or assimilated/cultur-
ally deprived learning styles, while others used introverted/extro-
verted or authoritarian/spontaneous typologies. Some recognized
issues of race, ethnicity, and/or class and made it central to their
rationale for why addressing learning styles was so important.
However, by the time a few innovative scholars decided to design
learning style inventories for mass distribution in schools, issues
of race/ethnicity were ignored.

Declaring itself the “first comprehensive approach to the
assessment of an individual’s learning style in grades 3 through
9,” Dunn et al. (1975) published the first comprehensive
Learning Style Inventory in 1975 (p. 5). Admitting that the
“questions in the instrument” were “highly subjective and rela-
tive,” Dunn et al. admitted that their inventory merely assessed
how “students prefer to learn, not the skills they use” (p. 6).
Dunn el al.’s inventory was complex and involved 22 areas in the
domains of environment, emotionality, sociological, and physi-
cal needs. The next year, Kolb (1976) published a simpler
Learning Style Inventory that identified only four learning styles:
convergent, divergent, assimilationist, and/or accommodationist.
Kolb cited the work of Bruner (1960), Jung (1923), and Myers-
Brigg (1962) as justification for his learning style inventory. In
contrast, Dunn et al. did not cite any of the cognitive or anthro-
pological research justifying the existence of learning styles, but
they did cite several empirical studies demonstrating that stu-
dents learned better when instruction was aligned with their
learning style. Despite Riessman’s prominence in the literature,
neither Dunn et al. nor Kolb cited him as the originator of the
learning style idea. Generally, those who did cite Riessman in
connection with learning styles tended to align certain learning
styles with particular racial, ethnic, cultural groups or classes,
while those who did not cite him tended to approach learning
styles in more individualistic terms.

By the time Dunn et al. (1975) and Kolb (1976) published
their learning style inventories, psychologists had completely
purged the deficit language from the history of the learning style
idea. Neither Dunn et al. nor Kolb addressed the issue of whether
certain racial or socioeconomic groups learned differently. It is

354 EDucAtIONAL REsEARcHER

possible that scholars deliberately avoided the issue of race in an
attempt to avoid the controversy that had embroiled the work of
Riessman. Or more likely, they were unaware of the work of
race-specific learning style theories altogether and believed that
race, ethnicity, and culture were completely irrelevant to the way
that individuals learn. Either way, Dunn et al. and Kolb had
redirected the discourse on the learning style idea away from
racial stereotypes and deficit language despite the fact that schol-
ars had been discussing the learning style ideas and its link to
race/ethnicity for over a decade before the learning style invento-
ries had been constructed and the fact that some African
American authors continued to pursue the idea that Black stu-
dents may have a learning style that was incompatible with
White schools (Hale, 1982; Shade, 1982). Once the race-neutral
learning style inventories become popular for use with White
students, the discourse shifted to the discussion of emerging
issues, such as the consolidation of multiple learning style frame-
works, judging the efficacy of the theories, and assessing its role
in improving student learning (Curry, 1983; Dunn et al., 1981).
However, the learning style idea was still conceptually messy and
controversial. Curry’s (1983) review of the literature on learning
styles ignored the issue of race/ethnicity and class, identified over
a dozen learning theory frameworks, and concluded that there
was “bewildering confusion of definitions surrounding learning
style conceptualization” (p. 3). The same year Curry presented
her findings, Gardner (1983) published his influential Frames of
Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences that, although not
technically a learning theory, nevertheless provided further evi-
dence and momentum for the idea that individual students pos-
sessed divergent learning strengths, preferences, and styles.

Conclusion

Whether the learning style idea is valid and/or worth pursing
today is beyond the scope of this article, which focuses solely on
the ethnocentric origins of the idea. Nevertheless, advocates
should be aware of its problematic early history. During the
1960s and 1970s, the learning style idea was plagued by two
recurring issues. First, the existence of learning styles was
assumed before it had been fully clarified and empirically estab-
lished. Throughout its early history, scholars expressed skepti-
cism of both the existence of learning styles and the assigning of
learning styles to particular racial/ethnic groups (Costello &
Payton, 1973; Smith, 1966), yet scholars continued to explore
and apply the idea nevertheless. Second, many scholars conflated
the culture of social groups with the psychology of individual
students (Cureton, 1978; Gant, 1972; Hale, 1982; Riessman,
1962; Shade, 1982). As a result, they failed to distinguish clearly
where individual psychology ended and enculturation to social
groups began, especially when approaching students of color.
This created a paradoxical construct wherein ethnicity/race
explained everything when it came to the alleged learning style
of low-income students of color (e.g., Cureton, 1978; Hale,
1982; Riessman, 1962), yet race/ethnicity explained nothing
when it came to the alleged learning styles of middle-class White
students because White students’ race was regarded as irrelevant
(Dunn et al., 1975; Kolb, 1976; Myers-Brigg, 1962). As a result,
scholars paradoxically perceived students of color to have a

particular collective learning style tied to their culture while they
perceived White students to have individual learning styles com-
pletely independent of culture. Both views reflected a conceptual
inconsistency that reflected the ethnocentrism of the period.

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THOMAS FALLACE, PhD, is a professor of education at William
Paterson University, 602 Upper Mountain Ave., Montclair, NJ 07043;
fallacet@wpunj.edu. His research focuses on intellectual and curriculum
history.

Manuscript received June 4, 2018
Revisions received October 12, 2018; February 18, 2019

Accepted May 29, 2019

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth-of-learning-styles/557687

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth-of-learning-styles/557687

mailto:fallacet@wpunj.edu

AreYou a Visual or an Auditory
Learner? It Doesn’t Matter
One mental strategy may be much better suited than another to a

particular task.

By Daniel T. Willingham
Mr. Willingham is a psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Oct. 4, 2018

You must read this article to understand it, but many people feel reading is not how they learn best. They

would rather listen to an explanation or view a diagram. Researchers have formalized those intuitions

into theories of learning styles. These theories are influential enough that many states (including New

York) require future teachers to know them and to know how they might be used in the classroom.

But there’s no good scientific evidence that learning styles actually exist.

Over the last several decades, researchers have proposed dozens of theories, each suggesting a scheme to

categorize learners. The best known proposes that some of us like words and others like pictures, but

other theories make different distinctions: whether you like to solve problems intuitively or by analyzing

them, for example, or whether you prefer to tackle a complex idea with an overview or by diving into

details.

If one of these theories were right, it would bring important benefits. In the classroom, a brief test would

categorize children as this type of learner or that, and then a teacher could include more of this or that in
their schooling. In the workplace, a manager might send one employee a memo but communicate the

same information to another in a conversation.

Does such matching work? To find out, researchers must determine individuals’ supposed learning style

and then ask them to learn something in a way that matches or conflicts with it. For example, in an

experiment testing the visual-auditory theory, researchers determined subjects’ styles by asking about

their usual mental strategies: Do you spell an unfamiliar word by sounding it out or visualizing the

letters? Do you give directions in words or by drawing a map?

Next, researchers read statements, and participants rated either how easily the statement prompted a

mental image (a visual learning experience) or how easy it was to pronounce (an auditory learning

experience). The auditory learners should have remembered statements better if they focused on the

sound rather than if they created visual images, and visual learners should have shown the opposite

pattern. But they didn’t.

The theory is wrong, but, curiously, people act as though it’s right — they try to learn in accordance with

what they think is their style. When experimenters asked research participants to learn a new task and

gave them access to written instructions and to diagrams, the people who thought of themselves as

verbalizers went for words, and the self-described visualizers looked at pictures. But tests showed they

didn’t learn the task any faster because they adhered to their purported

style.

In another experiment, researchers eavesdropped on brain activity to show that people will mentally

change a task to align with what they think is their learning style. Researchers used stimuli that were

either pictures (a blue-striped triangle) or verbal descriptions (“green,” “dotted,” “square”). While in a

brain scanner, participants had to match successive stimuli, but they never knew whether a picture or

words would pop up next.

When self-described visual learners saw words, the visual part of their brain was active; they were

transforming the verbal stimulus into a picture. Likewise, verbal areas of the brain were active when

verbal learners saw a picture; they were describing it to themselves. But again, these efforts were in vain.

People performed the task no better when the stimuli matched what they thought of as their learning

style.

The problem is not just that trying to learn in your style doesn’t help — it can cost you. Learning style

theories ignore the fact that one mental strategy may be much better suited than another to a particular

task. For example, consider the theory that differentiates intuitive and reflective thinking. The former is

quick and relies on associations in memory; the latter is slower and analytic.

Whatever your purported style, intuitive thinking is better for problems demanding creativity, and

reflective thinking is better for formal problems like calculations of probability. An intuitive thinker who

mulishly sticks to his supposed learning style during a statistics test will fail.

Although conforming to learning styles doesn’t help, we can learn a few lessons from this research.

First, instead of trying to transform a task to match your style, transform your thinking to match the task.

The best strategy for a task is the best strategy, irrespective of what you believe your learning style is.

Second, don’t let your purported style be a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure or an excuse for resignation.

“Sorry I mixed up the dates — I’m just not a linear thinker” is bunk. Likewise, don’t tell your child’s

teacher that she is struggling in class because the teacher is not adjusting to her learning style.

Finally, the idea of tuning tasks to an individual’s style offered hope — a simple change might improve

performance in school and at work. We’ve seen that that doesn’t work, but this research highlights hope of

another kind. We are not constrained by our learning style. Any type of learning is open to any of us.

Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The
Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.”