Teaching to a student's 'learning style' (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic) improves learning.

The idea that each learner has a fixed style — and learns best when teaching matches it — is one of education's most popular beliefs, endorsed by a large majority of teachers worldwide. The claim is testable: to support it, you would need to show that visual learners do better with visual instruction while auditory learners do better with auditory instruction (a crossover interaction).

In a landmark review, Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer & Bjork (2008) found almost no properly designed studies met that bar, and the few that did failed to find the predicted interaction. People do have media preferences, and matching content to the material (diagrams for geography, sound for music) helps — but tailoring the medium to a person's supposed style does not. The 'meshing hypothesis' is not supported, and time spent diagnosing styles is better spent on methods that reliably work, like retrieval practice and spacing.