Students do better when lessons are tailored to individual learning styles ' but not so much that it's worth the investment of time and money. That's the main finding of a recent peer-reviewed study I co-authored. There has been a big push to try to tailor a teacher's instruction to a student's preferred learning style. That's 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 ' they need to hear the lesson. Still others may have different learning styles. 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. 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...
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