In the past four decades, learning styles have progressed from being an interest of a few academics to a concept that has been applied by countless teachers and researchers at all levels of education. At the same time, a number of educational and cognitive psychologists have argued vehemently against taking learning styles into account when designing instruction, basing their arguments almost entirely on a lack of demonstrated validity of the “meshing hypothesis,” which asserts that matching instruction to students’ individual learning style preferences maximizes the students’ learning. This paper describes and reviews the origins of a learning style model that has been applied extensively in engineering education and an online instrument that has been accessed by millions of users to assess students’ preferences for different approaches to instruction defined by that model. The paper goes on to show that the challenges to learning styles are mostly fallacious, since they are based on statements (including the meshing hypothesis) the challengers attribute to learning style proponents which most proponents reject. The point of learning styles is not to match instruction to individual students’ learning style preferences, but rather to teach in a manner that balances the preferences of students with different learning styles. Strategies suggested for attaining such a balance are fully compatible with both cognitive science and empirical educational research.
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