Learning Styles: a Tall Tale or Lined With Truth?

An empty classroom with fifteen wooden
  desks and chairs facing a blackboard
 and a turned-off smart-board.

 Many teachers start out their school year by asking students what way they learn best. This is a question that has become so popular that many of us don't dare question its validity. However, is this information that has seemingly become common knowledge true? Learning styles is a teaching theory used by millions of individuals in the education system each year. It derives from the idea that everyone learns best in different ways that can be allocated to one of four groups: Visual, Auditory, Reading & Writing, or Kinesthetic. While it is true that we all often have a preference for the way we learn, this doesn't necessarily mean that our learning is impacted by only using said preference, as learning styles suggest. In fact, there is no evidence proving that catering to one specific learning style has actually caused any rise in learning. Instead, what has caused a ripple in the learning styles theory is that instead of tailoring lessons towards one form of learning, evidence proves that the more ways we receive information, the more likely we are to remember it. So instead of focusing on only one way to learn, we should provide students with multiple ways to gain this information. This does not have to be complicated and can be as simple as having a lecture with visualizes, a video, a primary source/textbook, and the opportunity to create whatever they are learning about with clay. Therefore, instead of trying to cater to only one or two ways of learning, we should attempt to cater to them all when able.  

I grew up in a school system where learning styles were always something asked at the first of the year and pushed towards being implemented. While it seemed to work great, I missed out on vital information from the forms of learning styles hardly implemented, such as Kinesthetic. There were also subjects that, even when catered to my preferred learning styles, Visual and Auditorial, I didn't retain as much of the info as I should have. This shows that even when you attempt to tailor and cater to specfic learning styles, your students may not gain all of the info they need to gain. Not only this, but my experiences don't take into account the fact that many students who are Deaf, Deafblind, or Hard of Hearing are not able to utilize one or more of these supposed learning styles. Therefore, if they are not able to utilize these ways to learn, in my opinion, it is even more imperative that we provide our lessons in multiple facets for these students to properly learn these lessons. In the end, we all do have preferences for how learn, but we learn best when we are provided the necessary information in many different ways and in the case of Deaf, Deafblind, and Hard of Hearing students it is imperative we do this.