How Do You Learn?

Knowing your learning style, I feel, is an important thing you need to know about yourself. This theory is really for all of you had trouble in school or wherever because you couldn’t grasp certain concepts. There is a tendency to consider these students “bad” students, and though there a bajillion reasons as to why people have trouble with learning something new, it could just be that these students haven’t found the right way to study.

So let’s get into it shall we?

Fleming and Mills (1992) suggested four modalities that represented these styles. This is called the VARK Model of Student Learning. VARK is an acronym for the styles: Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing preference and Kinesthetic. It’s important like most things in life, this can also be multimodal. Don’t box yourself into one particular space okay?

1.Visual: By displaying information in maps, spider diagrams, charts, graphs, flow charts, labeled diagrams, and all the symbolic arrows, circles, hierarchies and other devices, people with this style represent concepts usually represented in words. This style does not, however, include still pictures or photographs of reality, movies, videos or PowerPoint. It does include designs, whitespace, patterns, shapes and the different formats that are used to highlight and convey information.

2.Auditory: Information that is“heard or spoken” is preferred. These learners learn best from lectures, group discussion, radio, using mobile phones, speaking, web-chat and talking things through.Talking out loud as well as talking to oneself are more examples. You may repeat things, or ask an obvious and previously answered question. There is this need to say the information yourself and thus learn through saying it.

3.Read/Writing: This is quite the common type of learner. These learners and teachers in fact prefer representation of information as words. This style focuses on text-based input and output – reading and writing all kinds of things, especially manuals, reports, essays and assignments. People who prefer this modality are often addicted to PowerPoint, the Internet, lists, diaries, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations words, words, words… Does this remind anyone else of Amy Santiago?

4.Kinesthetic: Methods based on reality and information is learned “either through concrete personal experiences, examples, practice or simulation”. It includes demonstrations, simulations, videos and movies, case studies, practice and applications. Things that can be grasped, held, tasted, or felt are basically what teachers these learners. Experience may be your teacher, your own background of experiences and the experiences of others are big sources of knowledge.

I am a mix of visual and reading. I need to read it in my head and while reading apply that to a graph or diagram. Knowing how the information I read about looks in reality through diagrams makes me more of a visual dominant learner.

I hope this helped you a little bit. Happy learning!