Learning styles: a complete guide for doctors and medical educators

• Learning styles describe proposed differences in how people prefer to approach learning, but there is no single accepted model.
• VARK describes visual, auditory, read/write and kinaesthetic preferences, while Kolb and Honey and Mumford focus more on how people process experience.
• People clearly have learning preferences, but preference is not necessarily the same as the method through which somebody learns most effectively.
• The evidence does not convincingly support routinely matching teaching to a diagnosed learning style.
• In medicine, the nature of the task often determines the most appropriate method. Anatomy benefits from visual representation, auscultation requires sound, procedures require practice and communication requires interaction.
• Prior knowledge, cognitive load, retrieval practice, spacing, application, feedback and reflection are generally more useful when designing effective medical education.
• The aim should be to develop flexible, adaptable learners rather than encouraging doctors to define themselves by one preferred style.

Doctors spend a remarkable proportion of their professional lives learning. Medical students have to acquire an enormous body of scientific and clinical knowledge. Trainees must turn that knowledge into judgement, practical skills and professional behaviour. Consultants continue learning as evidence, guidelines, technology and models of care change.

At the same time, almost every doctor becomes a teacher. This may involve supervising a student on a ward round, explaining an ECG to a junior doctor, demonstrating a procedure, facilitating simulation, delivering formal teaching or giving feedback after a difficult clinical encounter.

It is therefore understandable that learning-style theories became attractive within medicine. They appear to offer a way of understanding why different learners respond differently to the same teaching and, potentially, how teaching could be adapted to them.

Most doctors will have encountered terms such as visual learner, kinaesthetic learner, activist, reflector or theorist. VARK, Kolb and Honey and Mumford remain familiar models on medical education programmes and Teach the Teacher courses.

The difficulty is that several separate ideas are often combined under the term learning styles. People undoubtedly differ in their preferences, previous knowledge, motivation, confidence and experience. The more controversial claim is that each learner possesses a relatively fixed style and learns better when instruction is deliberately matched to that style.

That distinction is central to understanding the subject.

For a broader look at how these theories fit alongside other approaches to clinical education, our guide to teaching methods for doctors explores Bloom's taxonomy, Miller's pyramid, cognitive load, scaffolding, simulation and other practical teaching techniques. Doctors wanting to develop their teaching more broadly may also find How to Develop Your Teaching Skills as a Doctor useful.

There is no single universally accepted definition of a learning style. Broadly, the term describes characteristic ways in which individuals prefer to receive, process or work with information. Different learning-style theories, however, describe rather different aspects of learning.

Some models concentrate primarily on the format in which information is encountered. A learner may express a preference for seeing information represented graphically, hearing somebody explain it, reading about it or experiencing it through practical activity. Other theories are more concerned with the way a person approaches an experience: whether they tend to observe before acting, seek an underlying theoretical explanation, experiment with solutions or look for immediate practical applications.

This distinction matters because learning style, learning preference, learning strategy and ability are sometimes used as though they were interchangeable. They are not. A doctor may prefer diagrams when studying anatomy, enjoy discussing difficult clinical cases with colleagues and find simulation particularly useful when preparing for emergencies. Those preferences can coexist and may change according to the subject, the doctor's experience and what they are trying to achieve.

Learning styles nevertheless remain remarkably prominent in medical education. A 2026 systematic review of learning-style typologies among medical students identified 123 studies involving more than 32,000 students across 33 countries. VARK was the most frequently used model, while multimodal preferences were particularly common.

That review is useful in showing how widely learning-style frameworks continue to be used. It is much less informative about whether teaching students according to those classifications actually improves educational outcomes, because most of the included studies were descriptive rather than experimental.

VARK is probably the learning-style model most familiar to doctors. It divides preferences into four broad categories: visual, auditory or aural, read/write and kinaesthetic. Learners who express substantial preferences across several categories are generally described as multimodal.

Part of VARK's appeal within medicine is that all four approaches are readily recognisable in medical training. Doctors learn from diagrams and images, lectures and conversations, textbooks and guidelines, patients and practical experience.

The more difficult issue is whether those represent fixed characteristics of different types of learner or simply different ways of learning different things.

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Visual learning

Visual learners are traditionally described as people who prefer information represented graphically or spatially. Diagrams, flowcharts, algorithms, graphs and other visual representations may therefore be particularly attractive.

Medicine contains many areas where visual representation is genuinely important. Anatomy is inherently spatial. Dermatology and histopathology involve visual pattern recognition. Radiologists develop expertise partly through repeated exposure to patterns within images. ECG interpretation requires the learner to connect a graphical representation of electrical activity with cardiac anatomy and physiology.

Preference and modality are not the same thing

The medical context exposes one of the limitations of learning-style labels. A student who understands the brachial plexus much more readily from a diagram than from several paragraphs of prose has not necessarily demonstrated that they are a visual learner. The brachial plexus is a spatial structure, and a diagram is simply a highly efficient way of representing spatial relationships.

The distinction is between choosing a format because it suits the learner's supposed style and choosing it because it suits the information being taught. Much of effective medical education involves the latter.

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Auditory learning

Auditory learners are described as preferring spoken information and learning through listening, conversation and discussion. Lectures, podcasts, tutorials and case discussions may therefore appeal particularly strongly.

Discussion has an important role in medical learning because it can make normally hidden reasoning visible. Listening to an experienced clinician work through a difficult case provides access not just to the eventual answer but to the way information is being weighted and interpreted.

Conversation can also expose misconceptions. A trainee may read a guideline repeatedly without recognising that they have misunderstood an underlying principle. The misunderstanding may become obvious when they have to explain their reasoning aloud.

This does not mean that a person who enjoys discussion will necessarily retain all information better when it is delivered orally. Much of the educational value comes from the reasoning, retrieval and explanation taking place during the discussion.

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Read/write learning

Read/write learners are described as preferring information represented through words. They may gravitate towards textbooks, journal articles, guidelines, written notes and summaries.

Regardless of preference, doctors require considerable proficiency in learning from written material. Clinical guidelines, systematic reviews, formularies, research papers and organisational policies remain fundamental sources of professional knowledge.

Written material also permits precision. A doctor learning an unfamiliar prescribing regimen should not rely solely on remembering what somebody said during a teaching session.

The category therefore illustrates another limitation of rigid classification. Even a doctor who strongly prefers practical learning must be able to interpret complex written information safely.

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Kinaesthetic learning

Kinaesthetic learning is associated with experience, physical activity and doing. Within medicine this may include clinical examination, simulation, role play, using equipment and performing procedures.

This category often appears particularly convincing because some aspects of medicine simply cannot be mastered through reading. A doctor cannot become competent at lumbar puncture, intubation or suturing by studying the procedure alone. Knowledge has to be translated into performance through observation, practice and feedback.

That requirement, however, arises principally from the nature of procedural competence. Every doctor learning lumbar puncture eventually requires practical experience, irrespective of whether a questionnaire identifies them as kinaesthetic, visual or read/write.

David Kolb's experiential learning theory has had a particularly strong influence on professional education. It remains highly relevant to medicine because it treats learning as a process in which experience is examined, understood and used to shape subsequent behaviour.

Kolb described a cycle involving concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation.

The value of this model is that it helps explain why simply accumulating clinical experience does not necessarily make somebody better. Experience becomes more educational when it is reflected upon, connected with wider concepts and then used to change future performance.

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From clinical experience to learning

Concrete experience
Clinical practice continually provides experiences from which doctors can potentially learn. A trainee manages a deteriorating patient, performs a difficult procedure, handles disagreement within a multidisciplinary team or conducts a consultation that does not go as expected.

At this stage, an event has occurred. Learning has not necessarily occurred simply because the event was experienced.

Reflective observation
The experience becomes educational when it is examined. A trainee may recognise that the initial assessment was sound but that too much time was spent establishing a diagnosis before dealing with immediate physiological instability. They may realise that escalation was delayed or that communication within the team became unclear.

Reflection begins to expose the relationship between decisions, behaviour and outcomes.

For doctors interested in developing this aspect of teaching and supervision further, our guide to giving effective feedback in medical education looks at how feedback, reflection and subsequent improvement fit together in clinical learning.

Abstract conceptualisation
The individual experience can then be connected with broader knowledge and principles. The trainee may revisit the ABCDE approach, escalation thresholds, relevant physiology, situational awareness or human factors.

A single clinical event therefore begins to contribute to a broader mental model that can be applied in other situations.

Active experimentation
The final part of the cycle involves applying that learning. During a later emergency the trainee may prioritise stabilisation more effectively, allocate tasks more explicitly or escalate sooner.

The new approach produces another experience, and the process continues.

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Kolb's four learning styles

Kolb's theory also produced four commonly described learning orientations: diverging, assimilating, converging and accommodating.

Diverging combines experience with reflection and is associated with examining situations from several perspectives. Assimilating places greater emphasis on reflection and abstract conceptualisation. Converging connects conceptual understanding with practical problem solving, while accommodating is more strongly associated with experience and experimentation.

These descriptions can be useful in considering how somebody tends to approach learning, but they become much less useful when treated as permanent identities. Clinical practice demands all of these processes. Effective doctors need to observe, understand, reflect, decide and act.

Peter Honey and Alan Mumford developed another influential model, derived partly from experiential learning. Their four categories - activist, reflector, theorist and pragmatist - are particularly accessible and have consequently become common in workplace education.

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Activists

Activists prefer involvement and new experiences. Workshops, simulation, role play, group activity and practical challenges may therefore appeal to them.

The tendency is easy to recognise in clinical education. Some trainees volunteer immediately during simulation or want to attempt a procedure as soon as they have seen it demonstrated.

Active participation can be extremely valuable, but activity is not synonymous with learning. A simulation can be memorable and enjoyable while producing little lasting improvement if the objectives are poorly defined or the feedback and debrief are superficial.

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Reflectors

Reflectors tend to observe, review and consider information before reaching conclusions. They may particularly value watching others, reviewing cases, receiving feedback and having time to analyse an experience.

Reflection is deeply embedded in postgraduate medical education, although its educational value depends on its depth. Simply documenting an event and describing it as useful achieves little. Productive reflection examines reasoning, assumptions, behaviour, consequences and potential alternatives.

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Theorists

Theorists tend to seek the structure underlying what they are learning. They value concepts, evidence, models and logical explanations.

Medicine provides enormous scope for this approach. Understanding physiology transforms a collection of apparently arbitrary observations into a coherent system. Understanding why a treatment works also helps clinicians recognise when it might fail or cause harm.

Theory alone is nevertheless insufficient. A doctor can understand the theory of leadership without being an effective leader, just as somebody can memorise a consultation framework while still communicating poorly with patients.

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Pragmatists

Pragmatists are interested in application and tend to value techniques, examples and knowledge that can be translated into practice.

This is particularly recognisable in postgraduate medical education. Busy clinicians often engage more readily when the relevance to their clinical work is obvious.

An exclusive focus on immediate usefulness can, however, become limiting. Some knowledge acquires its practical significance later, and deeper conceptual understanding often helps clinicians adapt when familiar rules no longer fit the situation.

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is frequently discussed alongside learning styles, although the concepts are different.

Multiple-intelligence theory proposes several forms of intellectual capability, commonly including linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic abilities.

Gardner himself has explicitly distinguished the concept from learning styles. The important point is that ability, preference and instructional method are not the same thing. A doctor may possess exceptional spatial ability without preferring all information to be presented visually. Someone with highly developed interpersonal skills may still prefer independent reading when learning factual material.

The controversy becomes clearer when two separate propositions are distinguished.

The first is that people have preferences about learning. This is readily observable. Doctors differ in their enthusiasm for lectures, podcasts, textbooks, discussion, simulation and independent study.

The second proposition is considerably stronger: that individuals possess identifiable learning styles and achieve better educational outcomes when teaching is deliberately matched to those styles.

This second proposition is usually referred to as the meshing hypothesis.

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The evidence for matching teaching to learning style

A genuine test of the meshing hypothesis requires more than demonstrating that learners enjoy their preferred format. Learners have to be classified by style and then taught through different instructional approaches, with everyone subsequently assessed using comparable outcome measures.

Evidence for matching would require a genuine interaction: one instructional method would work particularly well for one type of learner while another method would work better for another.

The influential review by Pashler and colleagues, Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, examined the literature using this more demanding standard. The authors found very little research employing designs capable of testing the hypothesis properly and concluded that there was not an adequate evidence base for routine use of learning-style assessments to determine instruction.

That conclusion is sometimes simplified into the claim that learning styles do not exist. This misses the important distinction. People clearly have preferences and abilities.

What lacks convincing evidence is the idea that educational outcomes reliably improve when teaching is matched to a diagnosed learning style.

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Learning preferences are not the same as effective learning

Learning preferences still matter. They can affect engagement, confidence and willingness to participate. A learner who enjoys an educational activity is more likely to engage with it.

The problem comes when preference is assumed to predict effectiveness.

Repeatedly reading familiar notes, for example, can create a strong sense of fluency. The material becomes easier to process and therefore feels increasingly well known. Yet the learner may struggle to reproduce it once the notes are removed.

By contrast, retrieving information from memory feels more demanding. That additional difficulty can be productive because it exposes gaps and strengthens subsequent access to the information.

For medical educators, the practical lesson is to respect preferences without allowing them to dominate instructional design.

Matching the method to the medicine

A more useful approach is to match the teaching method to the knowledge or skill being developed.

Anatomy benefits from spatial representation because anatomy is spatial. Auscultation requires exposure to sounds because auditory discrimination is part of the competence. ECG interpretation requires actual ECGs. Procedural competence requires physical practice. Communication requires interaction. Critical appraisal requires engagement with research. Clinical reasoning develops through repeated work with clinical problems.

This approach does not imply that all learners should receive identical teaching. Their previous knowledge and experience still matter enormously. It simply places the educational task ahead of an assumed learning-style category.

This principle runs through our broader guide to teaching methods for doctors, which looks at how the chosen teaching method should follow the intended learning outcome rather than personal habit.

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Prior knowledge and expertise

Prior knowledge is one of the strongest determinants of how a learner processes new material.

Teaching atrial fibrillation to a medical student is quite different from teaching it to an FY1 or a cardiology registrar. The student may still be constructing a basic understanding of cardiac electrophysiology. The FY1 may understand the diagnosis but need support with acute management and anticoagulation. The registrar may be considering much more nuanced questions about rhythm control, comorbidity or intervention.

These differences are educationally more important than whether each learner has been classified as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic.

Expertise also changes how information is organised. Experienced clinicians possess interconnected mental structures that allow them to recognise patterns and process information efficiently. Novices have fewer such structures and can become overwhelmed by information that appears relatively straightforward to an expert.

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Cognitive load and medical learning

Cognitive load theory is particularly useful in medicine because working memory is limited, while clinical problems can contain numerous interacting pieces of information.

The AMEE guide to cognitive load theory in medical education describes working memory as a potential bottleneck for learning when the demands of a task exceed what the learner can process at one time.

A new FY1 learning to manage severe hyperkalaemia may need to consider the potassium result, ECG changes, immediate treatment, drug doses, monitoring, renal function, underlying causes and escalation. The clinical problem itself already creates substantial cognitive demand.

Poor teaching can add unnecessary burden. A slide containing twenty bullet points, several unexplained ECGs, competing algorithms and irrelevant graphics forces the learner to devote limited mental capacity to navigating the presentation rather than understanding the clinical problem.

Good educational design therefore reduces unnecessary complexity, organises information coherently and calibrates support to the learner's current expertise.

For doctors who regularly teach using slides or formal presentations, our guide to how to give an effective presentation explores the practical implications of this in more detail.

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Retrieval practice

Retrieval practice involves actively recalling information rather than repeatedly exposing oneself to it.

A doctor revising diabetic ketoacidosis might initially study the relevant guidance. Subsequent learning becomes more powerful when the material is put away and the diagnostic criteria, fluid strategy, insulin treatment, potassium management, monitoring and complications have to be reconstructed from memory.

Retrieval exposes gaps that passive review can conceal and strengthens the ability to access the information later.

It can be incorporated easily into medical education through question banks, flashcards, viva practice, case discussion, teaching somebody else or asking learners to reconstruct an algorithm from memory.

A systematic review of retrieval and distributed practice in health-professions education included 56 studies and 63 experiments. Forty-three of those experiments demonstrated significant benefits from retrieval practice, distributed practice or both compared with control or comparison conditions.

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Spaced and distributed learning

Medicine presents a substantial problem of retention. Knowledge that was understood very well at one point can become surprisingly difficult to retrieve months later if it has not subsequently been used.

Distributed practice addresses this by spreading learning over time rather than concentrating it into a single period. It becomes particularly useful when combined with retrieval, so that learners repeatedly have to recover knowledge after some forgetting has occurred.

This principle explains much of the educational value of spaced-repetition systems. The underlying principle is more important than the particular software used.

Spacing can also be built into formal teaching. Important concepts introduced early in a course can reappear later in cases, discussion and practice rather than being covered once and treated as complete.

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Interleaving and clinical discrimination

Traditional revision often groups similar material together. A learner might complete a large number of asthma questions before moving to COPD and then pulmonary embolism.

Clinical practice is not organised in this way. Patients present with breathlessness, chest pain or collapse, and the clinician has to determine the underlying cause.

Interleaving mixes related categories and problem types. The learner has to recognise what sort of problem is in front of them before applying the appropriate solution.

This is particularly relevant to clinical reasoning because diagnostic expertise depends not simply on recognising individual diseases but on distinguishing them from plausible alternatives.

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Elaboration and self-explanation

Elaboration connects new information with existing knowledge.

Memorising that ACE inhibitors can cause hyperkalaemia produces an isolated fact. Understanding the relationship with aldosterone, renal potassium handling, renal impairment and interacting medication creates a much richer network of knowledge.

Self-explanation adds another layer by requiring learners to articulate the reasoning that connects the available information with their conclusion.

This occurs naturally during good clinical teaching when a supervisor asks a trainee to explain why they favour one diagnosis or management option over another. The value lies not only in whether the conclusion is correct but in making the reasoning process visible.

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Worked examples and progressive independence

Complex problem solving can overwhelm novices when too much independence is expected too soon.

Worked examples allow learners to observe how an experienced person structures a problem before having to reproduce the complete process independently.

Arterial blood gas interpretation is a good example. An inexperienced learner may initially benefit from seeing several cases worked through systematically, with explicit attention to pH, the primary disturbance, compensation, oxygenation and clinical context.

The learner can then complete progressively larger parts of the interpretation independently until the support is no longer required.

The same principle appears throughout clinical teaching: demonstration is followed by supported practice, and support gradually decreases as competence increases.

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Multimodal teaching

The weakness of the evidence for learning-style matching does not mean teaching should be restricted to a single format.

Complex subjects often benefit from complementary representations. A diagram of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system alongside a concise explanation can make relationships clearer than either might achieve alone. An ECG accompanied by explanation allows the learner to connect a visual pattern with the underlying physiology.

Each element should nevertheless have an educational purpose. Decorative images do not improve learning simply because some learners identify as visual, and dense paragraphs of text do not become more effective because the lecturer reads them aloud.

Multimodal teaching works best when different forms of representation contribute something different to understanding.

Learning practical and procedural skills

Procedural learning demonstrates particularly clearly why medical education cannot be reduced to a preferred learning style.

Consider central venous access. The trainee needs knowledge of indications, contraindications, anatomy, equipment, asepsis and complications. Anatomical and ultrasound images are useful because spatial understanding matters. Observation allows an experienced operator to demonstrate the sequence and make normally invisible decisions explicit.

Simulation may allow initial practice without exposing patients to unnecessary risk. The learner then progresses to supervised clinical performance, receives feedback, reflects on difficulties and repeats the procedure until the individual elements become increasingly integrated.

Knowledge, explanation, visual representation, observation, practice, feedback and reflection all contribute to competence.

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Learning communication skills

Communication skills require a similarly integrated approach.

A doctor can read extensively about breaking bad news and memorise a communication framework without necessarily becoming skilled at the conversation itself.

Conceptual knowledge provides a foundation, but doctors also need observation, practice, feedback and experience. Simulation and role play allow them to experience how conversations change in response to emotion, misunderstanding, uncertainty and silence.

The goal is to progress from knowing the principles of effective communication to being able to apply them flexibly with a real person.

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Learning clinical reasoning

Clinical reasoning develops as knowledge becomes increasingly organised around meaningful clinical patterns.

Novices usually benefit from greater structure. Mechanisms, explicit comparisons, worked cases and explanation help them construct mental frameworks through which clinical information can be interpreted.

With experience, pattern recognition becomes increasingly important. Experienced clinicians recognise familiar constellations of features more rapidly because current information activates knowledge built through previous experience.

Clinical expertise nevertheless requires exposure to variation and feedback. Doctors need to encounter typical cases, atypical presentations and mimics, and they need to discover whether their judgements were correct. Experience without feedback can reinforce inaccurate assumptions just as readily as good ones.

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Reflection in medical education

Reflection has an important place in medical learning, although it is sometimes reduced to a portfolio exercise rather than used as a genuine educational process.

Useful reflection examines how the doctor interpreted a situation, the assumptions influencing their judgement, what they noticed or failed to notice, how other people responded, the consequences of their actions and what should change subsequently.

Its value lies in linking experience with future behaviour.

Superficial statements that an event was a useful learning experience contribute little. Reflection becomes educational when it strengthens understanding, reinforces effective behaviour or results in a different response the next time a comparable situation occurs.

Feedback is closely connected with this process. Our guide to giving effective feedback in medical education looks in more detail at how doctors can make feedback specific, constructive and useful rather than simply evaluative.

Learning-style labels become particularly problematic when they start to define what learners believe themselves capable of doing.

A doctor repeatedly told that they are a visual learner may come to believe that they cannot learn effectively from written information or discussion. Someone classified as kinaesthetic may conclude that theoretical study has little value. A reflector may become increasingly reluctant to participate spontaneously because immediate action appears inconsistent with their learning identity.

Medicine requires the opposite kind of development.

Doctors have to learn from guidelines, research papers, images, patients, conversations, clinical experience, lectures, data, feedback and mistakes. They cannot choose the format in which every important piece of information appears.

Medical education should therefore broaden a learner's repertoire rather than narrowing it.

Learning styles do not need to be either accepted uncritically or dismissed entirely.

VARK, Kolb and Honey and Mumford provide accessible ways of discussing the fact that people approach learning differently. They can stimulate useful reflection and remind educators that teaching should involve more than passive information transmission.

The difficulty arises when descriptive frameworks become prescriptive. A preference identified through a questionnaire should not become a diagnosis that determines how somebody is subsequently taught.

The evidence is particularly weak for the idea that educational outcomes improve simply because teaching has been matched to a supposed learning style. At the same time, stronger educational principles are available. Cognitive load helps educators manage complexity, while retrieval and distributed practice have direct evidence within health-professions education.

The result is a more useful form of individualisation. Learners are still treated as individuals, but attention shifts towards their previous knowledge, current expertise, the complexity of the task, opportunities for retrieval and practice, the quality of feedback and their ability to apply learning in increasingly realistic situations.

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Developing adaptable doctors

The ultimate purpose of medical education is not to produce better visual learners, auditory learners, activists or reflectors. It is to produce doctors who can learn effectively from many different sources and adapt their learning to the task in front of them.

Different areas of medicine naturally require different forms of learning. Anatomy requires spatial understanding. Auscultation requires auditory discrimination. Procedures require physical performance. Clinical reasoning requires knowledge, pattern recognition and discrimination between alternatives. Communication requires interaction and adaptation.

Effective educators work in the same way. They establish where the learner is starting, define the competence that needs to be developed and select teaching methods appropriate to it. They provide enough support for the learner's current stage without removing the intellectual work required for learning, and they progressively increase independence.

Learning preferences remain relevant because they can affect engagement and provide useful information about how an individual likes to approach unfamiliar material. They should inform teaching rather than dictate it.

For doctors who want to develop these skills more systematically, ISC Medical's live Teach the Teacher Course for Doctors combines educational principles with practical work on learner engagement, session design, presentation skills, teaching methods, feedback and teaching practice. Both the one-day Essentials course and two-day Comprehensive course are delivered live online.

You may also find these related guides useful:

• Teaching Methods for Doctors: A Practical Guide to Clinical Teaching Techniques
• How to Develop Your Teaching Skills as a Doctor
• Giving Effective Feedback in Medical Education
• How to Give an Effective Presentation