Learning Styles

Learning Styles

You and a friend are in a class together. You both are learning the exact same information. When you discuss the information with your friend, you realize that your friend has learned more from the experience than you did. One reason this happens everyone processes and learns information in different ways. These ways are called learning styles. There are three major learning styles, Visual, Auditory and Tactile. The three styles describe how someone takes information and processes it. It can be very important to understand what learning style you are and what style the person, or people, you are teaching fall into. According to Felder & Spurlin, (2005) everyone learns differently, "some are partial to visual presentation of information such as pictures, diagrams, and flowcharts. Others get more out of verbal explanations. And some like to learn by trying things out and seeing and analyzing what happens". No matter which one you fall under, it is important to understand all three of them.

"Visual learners remember best what they see: pictures, diagrams, flow charts, time lines, films, demonstrations. If something is simply said to them they will probably forget it". (Fedler & Silverman, 1988) If you are a visual learner than you learn by using visual objects such as, graphs, charts, pictures, and seeing information. You can also read body language well and have a good perception of aesthetics. A great example of this would be someone sitting in a lecture. As the presenter is speaking there is also a PowerPoint presentation with flowcharts and pictures. The visual learner does not understand much of what the presenter is saying, but the pictures and charts are help the learner comprehend the topic. A couple tips you can use if you are a visual learner are to ask for pictures or to ask for a demonstration. (Conner, 2004) If you don't fall into this category, than one you might fall into is being an auditory learner.

According to Felder & Silverman (1988) "Auditory learners remember much of what they hear and more of what they hear and then say. They get a lot out of discussion, prefer verbal explanation to visual demonstration, and learn effectively by explaining things to others". In other words, you get more out of learning from hearing. Using the last example of someone presenting information through lecture, you will learn more from the words than the PowerPoint slides. Some tips to assist the auditory learner are to ask people to explain things out loud to you. Another tip is for you to read a book out loud as well. This way you are hearing the words, versus just seeing them on paper. Auditory and visual learners are very similar, the main difference is one learns by hearing words and one learns by seeing them. The third style is completely different.

Definition of a tactile or sometimes called kinesthetic, learner is someone