15 Things Teachers Should Know About Their Students

A review of 37 studies across 18 countries found that 89.1 percent of teachers believe in learning styles. It's probably the most widely held idea in the profession. It's also the one piece of advice on lists like this one that doesn't survive testing.

That matters more than it sounds, because it's usually item number one. Sort your class into visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners, teach each one in their channel, and watch them thrive. Researchers have looked for that effect for decades and keep not finding it.

So this page starts by fixing that, then covers the fourteen things that do hold up. Where there's a number, it's cited. Where there's a classroom move, it's specific enough to use on Monday.

Important Things Teachers Should Know About Their Students

1. Learning Styles

The claim goes like this: every student has a preferred channel, and teaching them in it improves learning. Researchers call the second half of that the meshing hypothesis, and it's the part that fails.

The landmark review came from Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork, commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science.

They found one study offering partial support and several that flatly contradicted it, and concluded there was no adequate evidence base for using learning-styles assessments in general educational practice.

A later direct test in the Journal of Educational Psychology matched instruction to measured preferences and found no benefit either.

Now the part that gets lost. Nobody is saying visuals don't work. Pictures alongside words help learning, and they help almost everyone, which is exactly why sorting students into types is the wrong move.

Cognitive scientists call that dual coding, and it's a different claim: everyone gets the diagram, not just the visual learners.

What to change on Monday. Stop labelling students by channel and stop building parallel versions of a lesson.

Let the content pick the format instead, because a map is taught with a map and a rhythm is taught by hearing it. Then spend the time you saved on the strategies further down this page.

2. Background and Cultural Influences

Students read your examples through what they already know. A word problem about a mortgage, a passage that assumes a summer holiday abroad, a metaphor from a sport nobody plays locally: each one adds a comprehension step that has nothing to do with what you're assessing.

The cheapest fix is names. Learn to pronounce every name correctly in the first week and ask, rather than guessing or shortening. It costs one lesson and it signals more than any poster on the wall.

The second cheapest is your calendar. Know which observances fall inside your assessment window before you set the dates, not after a parent emails you.

3. Personal Interests and Hobbies

An interest inventory in week one is worth more than the same conversation in March, because you can use it all year. Three questions do most of the work:

• What do you do when nobody has assigned anything?

• What are you good at outside school?

• What would you happily explain to someone who didn't know it?

Use it as context, not as a reward. Rewriting a rates question around skateboarding is useful because it makes the quantity concrete. Promising twenty minutes of free time for finishing is a different thing, and it teaches that the work is the price of the fun.

4. Academic Strengths and Weaknesses

What a student already knows is the ground everything new gets built on. A gap in prior knowledge looks exactly like a gap in ability from the front of the room, and the two need opposite responses.

Diagnose before the unit, not after it. Five minutes of low-stakes questions on the prerequisites tells you who needs the bridge built before you start. The same five minutes at the end only tells you who fell off it.

When it's time to put this in writing, our guide to good comments for students' report cards has language that describes a specific strength without turning into filler.

5. Social and Emotional Needs

A student who is worried is a student with less working memory available for your lesson. That's not a soft observation, it's a capacity problem, and it shows up as blank stares in the exact students who could do the work last week.

Short and regular beats long and occasional. Two minutes of ordinary conversation with one student, repeated across a couple of weeks, changes the relationship more than a single long intervention. Pick the student you understand least, not the one who worries you most.

Small written gestures land too, especially before an assessment. If you want wording that isn't saccharine, we keep a set of good luck notes for students.

6. Preferred Communication Styles

This one is often the learning styles myth wearing a different coat, so be precise. It isn't that some students absorb information by talking. It's that participation formats have different costs for different students, and the cost is social, not cognitive.

Three formats, three different costs:

• Hands up. Reliably surfaces the same four students, lesson after lesson.

• Cold calling. Spreads participation, but raises the stakes for the student who needs them lowered.

• A written answer first. Thirty seconds of writing before any discussion gives everyone a rehearsed sentence, which flattens the gap between the confident and the quick.

Give every student at least one route that doesn't require speaking first, and you'll hear from students you'd written off as disengaged.

7. Goals and Aspirations

Asking what they want to be produces job titles copied from adults. Asking what they want their life to look like at twenty-five produces something you can teach toward.

The useful follow up is the entry requirement. Most students naming a career have no idea what it takes to get in, and the gap between the ambition and the prerequisites is where a teacher can do the most good. Finding out in year nine leaves room to fix it.

8. Home Environment and Support Systems

Every homework task quietly assumes resources: a quiet surface, a device, reliable internet, and an adult who can help when it stalls. Those assumptions hold for some of your class.

Design so the assumption isn't load-bearing. If the task can't be started in class, some students won't start it. If it needs a printer, some won't hand it in. Neither tells you anything about how much they understood.

Knowing who supports a student at home also tells you who to contact, and in what language, before you need to.

9. Learning Challenges and Special Needs

This is the item with the hardest numbers on the page. NCES reports that 7.5 million students, about 15 percent of all public school students, received services under IDEA, and specific learning disabilities were the largest category at 32 percent of them.

The detail that decides your week: 67 percent of students with disabilities spend 80 percent or more of the school day in general classes.

The accommodation isn't happening down the corridor with a specialist. It's happening in your room, in your lesson, delivered by you.

So read the plan before the term starts rather than after the first failed assessment, and ask the case manager which two accommodations matter most. A plan you implement partly and consistently beats one you read in October.

10. Motivational Triggers

Students are not uniformly motivated by the same thing, and the honest version of this is narrower than the usual advice.

What differs is mostly what they're trying to avoid: looking stupid, disappointing someone, or losing a grade they've protected all year.

Comment on the work, not the person. "This paragraph makes the argument in one sentence" gives a student something to repeat. "You're so smart" gives them something to protect, which makes the next hard task riskier to attempt.

11. Previous Academic Experiences

A student's history in your subject predicts how they'll open your lesson. The one who has failed maths for three years isn't lazy at the start of a problem, they're bracing.

Ask about the subject, not about school. "When did maths stop making sense?" gets a specific answer, often a specific topic and a specific year, and that's a repairable gap. "Do you like maths?" gets you a shrug.

12. Peer Relationships and Social Dynamics

Group work is the place classroom social structure turns into grades. The same four students carry the same tasks, and the quiet ones learn that contributing is optional.

Assign roles, don't assign groups and hope. When each seat has a job that produces something visible, the free-rider problem shrinks without you having to police it. Rotate the roles so the same student isn't always the scribe.

And know which two students cannot be put together this term. That information usually exists in the staffroom before it exists in your seating plan.

13. Favorite Subjects and Areas of Interest

This one is different from hobbies. It's about the subject next door: the student who is indifferent in your class and switches on in art, or history, or the workshop.

Borrow the neighbouring subject rather than competing with it. A statistics lesson built on a dataset from the geography unit they're already doing carries two advantages: the context is already loaded, and the student sees the subjects as one thing rather than seven.

Ask your colleagues what they're covering this half term. It takes one conversation and it's the cheapest source of relevant material you have.

14. Challenges Outside the Classroom

Roughly 20 percent of US public school students were chronically absent in the most recent full year of data.

Chronic absence means missing 10 percent or more of the school year, which is about eighteen days, and that's one in five of the students in front of you.

Most of it isn't truancy. Attendance Works sorts the root causes into four, and only one of them is a choice:

• Barriers. Things that physically stop a student getting there: transport, asthma and other health problems, food insecurity, no safe route to school.

• Aversion. Something at school the student or the family is avoiding, such as bullying or discipline that felt unfair.

• Disengagement. No connection to the place, and nothing there the student feels part of.

• Misconceptions. A family that believes a day here and there doesn't add up. It does.

Detention doesn't touch a bus route or an inhaler, so the first question is which of the four you're looking at.

The practical consequence is about sequencing. If a fifth of your class will miss a fifth of the lessons, anything taught once and never revisited will be missed by someone, permanently.

15. Preferred Learning Environment

Like item six, this is close to the myth, so keep it concrete. The differences that hold up are about conditions, not channels: noise level, lighting, where a student sits relative to the board and the door, and how predictable the routine is.

Predictability is the one teachers underrate. A lesson that opens the same way every time removes a small decision from every student and a large one from the anxious ones. It costs nothing and it's the closest thing to a free win in this list.

What the Evidence Supports Instead

If you're taking learning styles out of your planning, this is what goes in the space. These six come from cognitive science and they work across subjects and ages, which is the opposite of the styles claim. The Learning Scientists publish free classroom materials for each one.

Note where dual coding sits. It's the reason the learning styles idea felt right for so long. Visuals genuinely help, so teachers who used them saw results and concluded the channel was the point. The visuals were the point, for everybody.

Bottom Line

Knowing your students is the foundation of the job, and most of this list is what experienced teachers do without naming it: notice the gaps, ask about the history, design around the home situation, watch the group dynamics.

The one thing worth unlearning is the first one. Sorting a class into visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners has been tested for decades and the effect isn't there. The time it costs is real, and it comes out of the practice that does work.

Everything else on this page survives contact with the evidence. Start with prior knowledge, because it's the one that changes the most lessons.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are learning styles completely useless?

Students do have preferences, and asking about them is harmless. What fails is the next step: matching instruction to those preferences doesn't improve learning. Preferences are real, the teaching benefit isn't.

If I stop matching styles, what do I put in that time?

Retrieval practice first. Three ungraded questions on last week's material at the start of a lesson is the cheapest change with the best evidence behind it, and it takes less planning than building parallel versions of a lesson ever did.

How do I find out what a student already knows?

A five minute low-stakes check on the prerequisites, before the unit rather than after. It doesn't need marking. You're looking for who needs a bridge built, not for a grade.

What should I read before the term starts?

The IEP or 504 plans for your class. Two thirds of students with disabilities spend most of the day in general classes, so those accommodations are yours to deliver, and reading them in October is too late.

How much absence is a problem?

Missing 10 percent of the year, about eighteen days, is the standard definition of chronic absence, and about one in five US public school students hit it. Most of the causes are barriers rather than defiance, so start by asking what's in the way.

Is any of this different for older students?

The evidence on how people learn holds across ages. What changes is who fixes the problem: with older students you can hand them the strategy directly and let them run their own retrieval practice, instead of building it into every lesson yourself.