What is your preferred personal learning style?
Students learn in different ways and this is known as their personal learning style. Some students prefer to look at and read new material (visual learners), some find it easier to listen (auditory learners), and some like to interact with, touch or move around when learning (kinesthetic or tactile learners).
When you know your preferred personal learning style you can take certain steps to adjust the material you need to learn.
If you are an auditory learner for example, listening to the mp3 chapters the book Amazing Grades may help you master the material more quickly.
IMPORTANT: School, with all its written tests, caters to highly visual learners. These students excel at test-taking because they turn what they read and hear into pictures in their mind, then recall those images faster during a test. Brain research supports this rapid image recall. Knowing that visual learners have an advantage at school, you can get the same advantage by adding some visual learning strategies to your preferred personal learning style. When you read, stop every little while and make images of what you just read. Add color and motion, then, during your tests, look up, see the images and turn those images back into words.
To find out your personal learning style take the free Personal Learning Styles Quiz.
There is an app that lets you email the results to your teacher and friends or place your results on social media sites to compare how you learn best with your friends and then talk about what that means in school or even in relationships. (Yes, your personal learning style affects your relationships too).
Put School in Perspective.
When you put school learning and grades in perspective, you realize that school can only measure specific types of success. Your grades alone do not determine who you really are because your intelligence and talents cannot be simply reduced to letters on a report card. That said, school is a place to develop certain habits that society believes will represent the type of person you are and can become. Your good grades indicate that you know how to organize your time, work together on a team, make tough decisions when needed, communicate well, relate parts to the whole, read, write, think, and a host of other “Bloom’s Taxonomy” skills. The habits it takes to produce good grades predict, in most people’s minds, whether you are prepared to enter the workforce or higher education equipped with positive and important skills that will serve you, and others, for a lifetime.
When you know your personal learning style you can begin to understand how you learn best. Building a strong foundation for learning begins with understanding your own personal learning style.
Learning is not about being smart – it’s about strategy.
She is a college professor, reading and learning specialist and founder of HowToLearn.com, a website online since 1996 with nearly 2 million visitors a year. She invites you to take the free Learning Styles Quiz to find out how you learn best.
Wyman is known as America's Most Trusted Learning Expert and is a frequent media guest. She specializes in helping students identify how they learn best by understanding their own personal learning style.