Maybe they're born with it, or maybe it's experience: Toward a deeper understanding of the learning style myth

Two studies sampling educators and non-educators

US adults, educators and non-educators

Measures the CONTENT of learning-style beliefs rather than any child outcome, using psychological essentialism as the frame. Included because it explains why the myth is unusually resistant to correction: for many believers it is not a pedagogical heuristic but a claim about a child's fixed nature.

Two distinct believer groups exist: essentialists, who take learning styles to be innate, unchanging, discrete and wired into the brain, and non-essentialists. Educators and non-educators did not differ. The only significant predictor among educators was the age of the population they teach - those working with YOUNGER children were more likely to hold the essentialist interpretation.

Not applicable to a causal claim, but directly relevant to this archive's premise: the essentialist version of the myth is a folk-hereditarian claim about children that the actual behavioural genetics does not support. Heritable variation in general ability is real; discrete innate modality types are not.