Do Learning Styles Matter?

“Do learning styles matter?”  My EDU professor posed this question to the class this semester, and in doing so, he initiated a heated debate. The consensus seemed to be that learning styles do indeed matter, and that teachers should try their best to cater their lessons to the different learning styles contained within their classrooms (visual, kinesthetic, auditory, etc.) But in looking at this issue more closely, I think that what is most important in terms of learning styles and lesson planning is that educators should adjust and fit the modality to the content, rather than the different learning styles of the students.  If teachers ignore this strategy and design their lessons with their students’ preferred modalities in mind (instead of with the lesson content in mind/ best fit strategy) I think they will be selling their students short.  For example, if I were teaching a lesson on Beethoven, I would try to incorporate a strong auditory component, which would ideally make the lesson more powerful and memorable.  The more meaning the students assign to the lesson, the better chance they will have to retain the information that was presented.  If I were putting together a lesson plan on the Pyramids of Egypt, I would incorporate a strong visual component to the lesson.  In each of these examples, choosing the modality that best fits the content trumps the different preferred learning styles of the students in my opinion.  All this being said, I think it’s critically important to mention the role of learning styles when it comes to student responses to instruction.  It's this area where I believe that the students' modalities should be taken into account.  I think students should be able to demonstrate their competency in the modality of their choice, if possible.  For example, if students were studying the Civil War, visual learners might choose to summarize their learning through pictures/illustrations, kinesthetic by constructing a three-dimensional battlefield, etc.