The article exaggerates a little bit. The myth is that every person has one specific style in which they learn best, and that this is how they should ALWAYS be taught.

Different ways of learning different subjects will be more or less effective for different students. All the studies linked in the article show that students perform best when presented new information in multiple representations, so they can then focus on the style that is working best for them in that case.

My "learning style" is a consequence of my attention span (I've got ADD). I tend to start thinking about tangents even (or especially) during the more interesting lectures. After 30mins I'm often hopelessly lost. Books (or video lectures for that matter) let me rewind when I "snap back" after those tangents.

My main point being: maybe learning styles don't exist in the traditional sense, but external factors (ADD being just one of them) can lead to another type of "learning styles" that manifest in effectively the same way.

That isn’t really germane to the grandparent poster’s point.

Feel free to replace his or her shorthand “learning style” with something like “personal preference, past experience, and miscellaneous psychological factors”.

Whether or not the published work about “learning styles” was solid science with meaningful conclusions for guiding formal pedagogy, it is all but impossible to argue that different students don’t respond better to different books.

Or so some studies say. But the quality and reliability of soft science studies like these is an even bigger myth -- and the reproducibility crisis is real.

In any case, whether learning styles are a myth or not, learning preferences about teaching styles are very real, and what works for someone to keep them engaged can bore someone else to tears and drive them off a course.

I won't downvote you because I disagree with you (who does that???)...

look, sure this broad idea about learning styles may be false, but you cannot I think disagree that a book may be more or less suitable for someone depending on their particular strengths and weaknesses, and that OP's point.

The point of using learning styles should never be to pigeonhole someone into a limited form of data consumption. It needs to used to teach them build a bridge from where they are, to where they need to be. It should be about teaching the student how to process any type of information from any type of source. In order to do that, we need to know how they process, so they can build a system that allows them the best use of whatever it is they're learning.

The brain needs to be progressively challenged just like any muscle and achieving a state of mild confusion while consuming new information does just that.

I didn't mean to use the term that way, just that different textbooks can be more effective than others.