Do certain people learn better certain ways?

In this educational mythbuster we will be examining the myth of "Do certain people learn better certain ways?". Over the years within the classroom you would hear students or fellow classmates saying, I learn best *this way*..., but is that really the case? In this post we will investigate if this is a true or false statement. I know I have the belief that I do learn best by verbal and visual instruction, but is that really true? 

The answer is no according to the Association for Psychological Science. Some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way is a myth (Learning Styles Debunked: There is No Evidence Supporting Auditory and Visual Learning, Psychologists Say. Retrieved October 02, 2016, from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/learning-styles-debunked-there-is-no-evidence-supporting-auditory-and-visual-learning-psychologists-say.html). In the Psychological Science in the Public Interest a new major report was released saying that “auditory learners” and “visual learners” are not a valid type of learning description. In the cases where past studies have supported those ideas, they did not use the type of randomized research designs to make it valid (Hall, E. (2016). The tenacity of learning styles: a response to Lodge, Hansen, and Cottrell. Learning: Research and Practice, 2(1), 18-26.).

The claim that we have to adapt our design to accommodate different learning styles has been repeatedly debunked by research (Finley, T. (2015). Are Learning Styles Real - and Useful? Retrieved October 02, 2016, from http://www.edutopia.org/article/learning-styles-real-and-useful-todd-finley). Learning styles were just something that were a popularized idea. Teachers should recognize not all students learn the same but also there are no set categories to place different types of learning in. Just like in any concept of school and teaching, all students should not be shoved into a generic “cookie cutter”, but rather all treated as individuals.

Although this myth is busted a suggestion to counter these old ideas, is to support active learning. This is the idea that students must take control of their learning, regardless of the way the material is presented to them, “People must learn to recognize when they understand and when they need more information” (Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn.). As a teacher we all want our students to be proactive, so the next question we would need to answer is how to do this, how do we get our students to not peg themselves as a specific type of learner but rather become a constant learner.