Your Learning Potential: Learning Styles
Your Learning Potential: Learning Styles
I like to invite my students to reflect about how they learned to study. Better yet, about how they were taught to study. In many cases, we can’t remember. That’s probably because it never really happened in a proper manner. We end up realizing that we just go about our studies in a very intuitive way.
But what if we knew what was the best way for each of us to learn? Wouldn’t it be great to know some tricks that can help us accelerate our learning skills? Guess what? They exist.
In the 1980s, American educationalists were trying to find out as much as they could about learning styles, to help classroom teachers to achieve the best possible results.
The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) formed a research “task force,” and proposed additional factors that might affect someone’s ability to learn. These included the way study was organized, levels of motivation, and even the time of day when learning took place.
They divided learning styles into three categories: Cognitive, Affective and Physiological.
- Cognitive: how we think, how we organize and retain information, and how we learn from our experiences.
- Affective: our attitudes and motivations, and how they impact our approach to learning.
- Physiological: a variety of factors based on our health, well-being, and the environment in which we learn.
The Index of Learning Styles™
Various related questionnaires and tests quickly came into use, aimed at helping people to identify their personal learning style. One of the most popular was based on The Index of Learning Styles™, https://learningstyles.webtools.ncsu.edu/ developed by Dr Richard Felder and Barbara Soloman in the late 1980s.
The questionnaire considered four dimensions: Sensory/Intuitive, Visual/Verbal, Active/Reflective, and Sequential/Global. The theory was that we’re all somewhere on a “continuum” for each of them. Neither extreme was said to be “good” or “bad.” Instead, we’d do best by drawing on both ends of the spectrum.
Written by Sonia Assumpção
