Educators, environmentalists, and psychologists generally agree on the need to incorporate opportunities for movement by students into the classroom, but an extensive review of the literature did not reveal any studies concerned primarily with the relationships among students' mobility, their learning style preferences, and their academic achievement. To investigate these relationships, an initial screening with the Learning Style Inventory of R. Dunn and others (1979) of 417 seventh-graders in a classroom in New York State resulted in identification of 217 students with a preference for mobility while learning and 89 with a preference for passivity. The remaining 111 students did not believe that they were affected by mobility needs. Twenty students at each end of the mobility spectrum participated in the study. Word-pair recognition tasks were developed for the passive and mobile environments, and all students were taught in both conditions using a 2 X 2 repeated measures design. "Active" and "passive" students performed equally well in the passive environment, but those with a preference for mobility had the highest scores of all groups when they were permitted movement while learning. The implications for instruction and the possibility that educators have often misinterpreted student mobility needs are considered. There are 50 references. (SLD)