Learning Styles

After I completed the Felder and Solomon’s learning inventory I found out that I am very well balanced between being a reflective and active learner. I absolutely agree to that. I like doing lots of hands on as well get engaged in brainstorming sessions. Everybody gets thrilled when they have a new thing to play with. But when it comes to understand a concept I would rather sit down quietly and think through it. When I requested some of my friends and students to use the inventory I found some have a tendency to be on the active learner side whereas most tend to be reflective by nature when it comes to learning processes.

Also I found out I stand in the exact middle when it comes to being judged as a sensing or an intuitive learner though I must admit that I am more of the latter then former. Sometimes I do not like to memorize facts, I am horrible at general knowledge and I do not like plug and chug problems. And so when few of the graduate students that I know also opted for being an intuitive learner it was kind of unsurprising because graduate students usually have a tendency to think intuitively rather than going over the facts they have learnt in class. Undergraduates on the other hand depend heavily on fact based learning. As a graduate student myself I must say I do not really mind if I have to work something out from first principles in the exam rather than memorizing the final formula, probably which brings out the intuitive side of me and often other fellow graduate students.

In visual vs. verbal learning, I am definitely inclined towards being a visual learner considering that I always associate a name with a face, and I do not remember many things that I hear. However when it comes to music I can remember most songs that I have heard. Even then I would say that my visual learning capabilities are better and I would sincerely persist on the fact that we need to have a lot of visual learning techniques in class because almost everyone remembers a picture better than a thousand words that are used to describe it.

A different case exists for sequential vs. global learning. It usually depends mostly on the specific problem. However, if possible I like to get a clear notion of the broader philosophy before thinking of the details. So all in all, I think that the Felder and Soloman's learning inventory did a reasonably good job of determining my learning habits.

I think that as far as classroom teaching is concerned, learning habits of individual students can make a considerable impact on the teaching style. Particularly for large classes, teaching methods should only make sure that students with all kinds of learning patterns can benefit from the course and use their own particular learning method to their full advantage. That means as a teacher I should make sure that I am aware of the learning methods of my students.