Learn Your Learning Style
January 9th, 2011
If you’re like me in a classroom setting you find yourself mentally distracted by the lecturer’s tie pattern or hair style more than concentrating on what is coming out of his mouth or being written on the whiteboard. That’s because I’m a “reflective” learner with a strong current of “sequential learning” thrown in rather than a pure visual or verbal learner. And if you didn’t know it yet, there are in fact many “types” of learners from eight identified by Richard Felder and Linda Silverman in their Index of Learning Styles to Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. These can range from sensory, intuitive, visual, verbal, active, reflective, sequential, and global in the first case to spatial, linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, and existential in the latter. Once I was fortunate enough to take an Index of Learning Stylse test and have it analyzed it was quickly apparent that I was a reflective and sequential learner and would struggle with any course material that was presented in a more traditional format like a pure lecture or pure reading. This made a lot of sense to me since it’s impossible for instructors to adapt their teaching styles to the wide array of learning styles, so it should be up to the student to take the information and process it in a manner that makes best use of their unique learning styles to make the equation work. If you find yourself struggling in learning settings, whether it is brick-and-mortar classrooms or online technology, you may want to check out some testing options available from your school or through local professional development resources so you can make changes to your study styles just as I did. The information not only helped me fly through school once I adapted my own personal tweaks on the material, but has served me well to this day.
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