First, you'd think that, if adjusting learning styles actually made people more interested, or if it made the whole experience feel more inclusive, and make people more drawn to it, the outcomes would be better, because that's how motivation works. The fact that there is no improvement in outcome suggests that that's just not happening.
Second, though, one might convincingly object that, well, maybe it's like that if you're only measuring short-term results, but maybe in the long run it improves results, because it makes school less unfriendly, for example. But there are several studies (e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022027021014189... ) which show that it actually leads to worse results because adjusting teaching style for everything is very unproductive from a pedagogical standpoint.
The studies I'm aware of devote little time on speculating whythat's the case, but in my experience, while teaching something in a manner that does't match a person's preference can be daunting or uninteresting, teaching something in a manner that matches a person's preference but not the topic itself (e.g. it's pretty hard to teach electric motor theory without a lot of pictures) makes it even more uninteresting and dreadful.
Edit: to be clear, what these studies contradict isn't that people have preferences regarding how they learn. There's ample evidence to suggest that people like some better than others (and, obviously, if they learn all by themselves, they'll skip the ones that they don't like, or practice the ones that they like more than the ones that they don't like). What these studies convincingly contradict is the idea that adjusting teaching styles to match these preferences produces better outcomes.
First, you'd think that, if adjusting learning styles actually made people more interested, or if it made the whole experience feel more inclusive, and make people more drawn to it, the outcomes would be better, because that's how motivation works. The fact that there is no improvement in outcome suggests that that's just not happening.
Second, though, one might convincingly object that, well, maybe it's like that if you're only measuring short-term results, but maybe in the long run it improves results, because it makes school less unfriendly, for example. But there are several studies (e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022027021014189... ) which show that it actually leads to worse results because adjusting teaching style for everything is very unproductive from a pedagogical standpoint.
The studies I'm aware of devote little time on speculating whythat's the case, but in my experience, while teaching something in a manner that does't match a person's preference can be daunting or uninteresting, teaching something in a manner that matches a person's preference but not the topic itself (e.g. it's pretty hard to teach electric motor theory without a lot of pictures) makes it even more uninteresting and dreadful.
Edit: to be clear, what these studies contradict isn't that people have preferences regarding how they learn. There's ample evidence to suggest that people like some better than others (and, obviously, if they learn all by themselves, they'll skip the ones that they don't like, or practice the ones that they like more than the ones that they don't like). What these studies convincingly contradict is the idea that adjusting teaching styles to match these preferences produces better outcomes.