Are Learning Styles Meaningless?

Learning styles are complex.  When I was in middle school (about 15 years ago).  I remember taking an assessment to try and determine my learning style.  At that time there were only 3 to choose from, auditory, visual, or kinesthetic.  Today there are 7, which can all be traced back to those 3 main categories. 

They say you are usually a combination of several.  So with all of that in mind I would hypothesize that I am mostly auditory/visual/solitary.  I took a few free online assessments because even though I had a pretty good idea what my style is I was curious to see if I was right!

First I took the VARK assessment.  According to this assessment I have a multimodial learning preference.  My scores for each category were all very close thus giving this result.

I also took a learning syles assessment that has more categories.  I also had similar results to the VARK assessment with high scores in verbal, visual, and solitary.

So I was right! Yay!

But what does this mean?  Who cares about learning styles?  

A recent article published by Pasher et al. (article) posits that learning styles do no matter at all. He acknowledges that people tend to have one or two ways that they prefer to be presented with information.  However, he says that this does not have any effect on education and learning in general.  Based on my learning style results I would tend to agree.  I was not high in any specific learning style, rather at similar scores in all categories thus, promoting the idea that learning style does not effect how I learn since I don't fit into a specific category.  I would also tend to agree based on what I see in my classroom.  Second graders have a difficult time telling you how they like to learn best.  Therefore I use a variety of strategies that cater to multiple learning styles throughout my lessons.  I find that presenting material in more than one format helps keeps students engaged throughout the lesson.  Also I've found that specific subjects tend to have certain strategies that fit different learning styles better.  For example, science and math are best taught using hands on experiences and manipulatives which would lend itself better to people with kinesthetic learning styles.

So what do you think? Are learning styles meaningless?