Education and Training Prep Course

45 videos, 3 hours and 16 minutes

Course Content

Learning Styles

Video 14 of 45
4 min 1 sec
English
English
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Everybody has different learning styles and there are many ways in which people learn. Some lessons are simply taught by a teacher standing at the front of a class, other times you may have lessons where you would have a talk but also undertake some practical work. Other times you would need to undertake some research and then maybe bring that back to the group, or you may be asked to take part in something like this, an eLearning course.

When you are looking at learning styles you also need to consider the amount of information that is retained by student.

A clinical trial, looked at different learning styles and found the amount of information that students retained. The results showed that over a period of 3 days you retain about 10% of what you read but about 20% of what you hear in the form of a lesson, and about 30% of what you see in the form of a demonstration. Therefore if students see and hear you they retain about 50% of the lesson. If you can encourage students to talk as part of the lesson and get involved in the lesson with act their information retention can increase to up to 90 percent.

So to summarise this: if we read, hear, see and say, we can maximise the information that is retained by our learners.

Additional research undertaken by Fleming found that there were different learning styles for the ways in which people like to obtain information. The VARK system is broken down into visual learners, auditory learners, read and write learners and kinesthetic learners and what we will do now is have a look at these individual learning styles. There are lots of reports online, so you can best work out the way in which you personally prefer to learn. If you take a pen and paper now and write down the way that you think that you best learn. Do you prefer video, talking, reading, writing or doing, write this down now and then go and complete a questionnaire which will ask you a series of questions which will summarise and tell you what kind of learner you are. Everyone is unique and you may very well be surprised at the results.

You need to understand that amongst your learners you will have a number of different learning styles. Visual learners are people who like to see things, they could see, perhaps a video or as a demonstration, they want to see flip charts, handouts and diagrams, lots of pictures. Auditory learners are those who would rather hear something, but they can also sometimes be easily distracted, perhaps when they are talking to someone but actually listening to what others have to say. They may be the people who ask lots of questions and maybe don’t like noisy environments, but they’re the type of individuals who could remember all the words to a song, because this is the way they learn best.

The next groups are the readers and writers, these people are often those who enjoy doing research, reading books, using dictionaries, looking up words, making lists and notes, these are people who often have good spelling and good handwriting. You may notice these learners in your session as they are likely to make more notes. The last section is the kinesthetic learners, these are the people who like to do practical demonstrations, role play, working through worksheets, having discussions, practical activities and using their hands whilst they are working, and they also tend to be people who are more tactile towards others.

Once you have identified the learning styles of your group, then you need to make sure that you accommodate them all, so use a variety of different media, make sure you use PowerPoint for people who like to read, or flip charts and whiteboards. Get people to interact during the session with lots of group discussion and incorporate video where possible. Ensue you demonstrate things and include practical exercises. Use as many of these mediums as possible and you will have met the learning styles of all of your learners.