Will people remember the information they read in this article? The answer depends solely on how they choose to engage.

While "learning styles" claim that there's an innate best method for people to learn, research shows this isn't true. The key to retaining information isn't about whether someone reads, listens, or watches, it's about how deeply they engage. Knowledge retention is a superpower; harnessing it is possible once one understands tactics that actually work.

Learning styles do not help students learn. There is no scientific evidence to support that matching teaching content and student preference improves comprehension. Learning is much more complex, and simplifying the process can be harmful to students and educators.

Researchers at the University of Michigan demonstrated that over 90% of participants believed people learn better if taught in their learning style, though no scientific evidence supports the validity of this claim. All participants held at least a bachelor’s degree and half of them were educators. Over 50% of those who believed in learning styles also held "essentialist" beliefs that learning styles are predisposed at birth and biologically fixed. The majority of people in the essentialist category were educators of young children.

Learning styles don't just fail to help comprehension, they actively harm learners by creating biased expectations.

Even more worrying, studies show that describing students as "visual" versus "hands-on" learners influences perceptions of intelligence. Parents, teachers, and children perceived children described as visual learners as more intelligent than children described as hands-on learners. Categorizing children this way leads teachers and parents to create unfounded assumptions about their academic strengths. From a young age, children are taught their future success depends not on hard work or effort, but a falsity.

Learning styles don't just fail to help comprehension, they actively harm learners by creating biased expectations. Overcoming this is possible for anyone with the right learning techniques. Engagement is in the driver's seat. By combining context, intention, and learning goals, comprehension increases dramatically.

Reports have found participants comprehended text less well when reading-while-listening than when reading silently. Reading outperformed listening overall. However, the format of text matters less than you think. For undergraduate students, the relationship between leisure digital reading and text comprehension is positive. The same is true for print reading and text comprehension. Therefore reading digital or printed text won’t compensate for deeper cognitive engagement.

Readers who resist automatic thinking by highlighting and annotating invest more effort in tasks and are more likely to remember what they’ve read. Similarly, self-directed learners demonstrate significantly better information retention than passive learners. An online survey of podcast listeners examined differences of listening comprehension in groups of informal learning types. The self-directed learners in particular linked new information with prior knowledge better and evaluated sources more critically. Intentionality matters.

Comprehension depends more on engagement than style or format. Learning intentionally, critically, and connecting to prior knowledge provides the best likelihood of comprehension. The "best" format depends on your specific learning goal. Depth of cognitive processing matters more than modality in all cases. Learners must set intentions and goals before learning to prepare the brain, hone in efforts on one specific desired outcome, and then go deeper, ask questions, and discuss with others, regardless of format. Active engagement is the key to comprehension