Learning-Style Myth
The belief that you learn more when instruction matches your preferred modality. Controlled studies have repeatedly failed to find that effect.
Two claims travel together and only one has failed. People have reportable preferences about how information reaches them. The myth is the meshing hypothesis: that matching instruction to preference produces better learning.
Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork set out the problem in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2008: verifying meshing requires a crossover design, almost no published study used one, and those that did contradicted it. Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal (2015) found no interaction between preference and format on comprehension. Aslaksen and Loras (2019) reported the same null on immediate recall and working memory. Kratzig and Arbuthnott (2006) had already shown stated perceptual style barely tracks measured performance on modality-specific memory tasks.
Belief remains widespread in education, as Kirschner (2017) and Newton (2015) documented. Do not use it to rule out a format, which is the one use of the framework that can leave you worse off than having never taken the questionnaire.
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