Counseling Education

How To Determine Your Individual Learning Style

It is no secret that different people learn best in different ways. However, do you know which way is right for you? Taking the time to discover this important bit of information about yourself can dramatically improve your performance over the course of your educational career. Get the most out of your learning efforts by using these pointers for how to determine your individual learning style:

Familiarize yourself with the different learning styles. When trying to identify your individual learning style, it helps to understand what the available options are, so that you can perform a sort of self-assessment to guide you through your decision making process. Most of us have an intuition about what works best for us (and/or what we like the most), even if we're not familiar with specific terminology. Learning styles include visual (by sight, as with math and computer programming), auditory (by hearing, as with language and music), kinesthetic (by physical movement, as with dance or sports), and tactile (by feel, as with labs and art projects). As you can probably guess, each of these learning styles spills into a variety of subjects and disciplines, and in multitudinous ways.

Take a quiz. A quick online search for learning style quizzes will return a number of self-administered tests that you can use to identify your learning style rather easily. It is advisable that you try out more than one quiz, as different testing protocols may result in different results, and you must expect that there may be no one right, or exact, answer. Yes, it is possible that you regularly make the best use out of a variety of learning styles.

Reflect on past experiences. Is there a particular subject you did especially well on, or specific lessons that just seemed to stick with you right away? If so, you can examine the circumstances surrounding those prime learning occasions to identify what it is about them that made learning so fun and easy. For example, did you enjoy science because of the hands-on aspect of lab time, or were you especially partial to language arts because you loved the flow of rhyming words? This information says a lot about your learning style.

When all is said and done, it is most important that you keep in mind the fact that all individuals are unique, and that it is highly likely you would best benefit from the application of a variety of learning methods, to cater to your naturally multifaceted way of absorbing and acclimating to new information. Use these tips to find which learning styles might suit you best, and then work to integrate them into your learning regimen.

About the Author: Robbie Syrett is a tutor who enjoys helping his clients identify their best learning style. He encourages you to read more about both learning styles and educational opportunities so you can make the most of your education.

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