Learning Styles in Architecture and Interior Design Education: A Critical Review of Instruments, Studio Assessment and the Matching Claim

Learning style inventories have been administered to architecture and interior design students since 2000, and their classifications are widely cited as grounds for tailoring studio instruction. This critical review asks what the instruments used in this literature were designed to do, whether the studies’ claims follow from what they measured, and what survives once the prescriptive claim, sometimes called the matching hypothesis, is set aside. It also traces how the discipline received the psychometric critique of learning styles. A Scopus search, supplemented by semantic retrieval and backward citation searching, identified twenty-six empirical studies published between 2000 and 2026 for close analysis, each read in full and charted on instrument, sample, outcome, reliability, accreditation context and the relation between claims and results. The studies use nine instruments, none of which are validated against one another in this population, and several share samples. In-sample reliability of the predictor is reported in six studies, with values as low as 0.27; reliability of the outcome is reported in four, never for a studio grade. Findings do not converge. A frequently cited study reported group means running in opposite directions across two programmes at one university, and its chi-square statistics do not reach significance. None of the twenty-six studies allocated students to matched or mismatched instruction, so the prescriptive claim behind the field’s recommendations remains untested in this corpus. The critique entered this literature in 2005, and eleven studies engaged with it, only one of which modified its instrument in response, before a 2026 study treated the question as open and accepted a null result. Descriptive use of the inventories remains defensible; prescriptive use does not. The review sets out four requirements for a study that could settle the question, with implications for studio teaching, assessment and accreditation.

architectural education; design studio; interior design education; learning styles; studio assessment

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