Whereas modern medicine owes much of its success to its reliance upon evidence-based treatments, most popular techniques of instruction have not been subjected to thorough empirical scrutiny. A particularly glaring and costly result of this, we argue, is the wide acceptance of the idea that instruction should be tailored to a student's so-called "learning style." For example, students might be divided into visual learners and verbal learners (on the basis of a learning style test given to each student) and then provided with instruction that emphasizes pictures or words, respectively. The visual-verbal distinction is only one simple example of the many proposed taxonomies; a recent review described 71 different schemes. Given this advocacy by academics and the ensuing heartfelt praise of educators, tailoring instruction to students' style is now a prevalent and profitable enterprise. However, as we and others have pointed out, a thoughtful review of the data provides no support for style-based instruction.