In You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner, the education scholar debunks the idea that everyone has an optimal “learning style.”
What led you to this subject?
I once had a student who wrote lesson plans based on psychologist Howard Gardner’s identification of seven cognitive capacities: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Gardner never meant those different types of intelligence to be learning styles, but this student treated them that way, and wrote seven lesson plans, putting in a tremendous amount of work. But the lessons were just terrible. I could tell, based on my experience, that a lot of these activities were not going to be successful with students. I think that was the first time that I wondered where this learning styles idea came from. I couldn’t find anything on it; I really hit a dead end. I found that identifying its origins was a complicated question, and no one had ever really gotten to the bottom of it.
What negative effects has the learning styles idea had?
The most dangerous label is the “kinesthetic” one, because historically that label was aligned with nonwhite students, dating all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. Educators were basically saying that Black and Hispanic students needed hands-on learning, while white students were better at learning through reading. So, we can see how that’s a problem. In 2023, an article came out about how researchers had interviewed students, parents, and teachers about what words came to mind when they heard “kinesthetic learner” versus “visual learner.” They found that for visual learner, it was “smarter,” and for kinesthetic learner, it was “sportier.” So not only is that a problem in terms of how the teachers are approaching the students, but also how the students think about themselves.
How will this book be received, given that many teachers use this theory?
I think the theory will quietly go away. It’s just one of those things people took for granted, but nobody’s really wedded to it. I don’t think I’m going to get any kind of pushback, because, as I discovered, there’s really no evidence in favor of it, and there never was. I just don’t know how widely the word will spread. Daniel Willingham, a psychologist, has been working for years at bringing down this theory. But he was looking at current research. What I’m asking is, where did it come from? And was it ever true? And what I’ve found is, no, it was never true. There was never research to support this idea. In fact, I was surprised by how many warnings psychologists gave about labeling people based on their research. And then the educators went ahead and labeled people anyway.
