By Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
To gain insight into your personality, learning styles, and approaches to knowledge acquisition, it is very useful to take a look at the work that researchers have done in finding out how people learn. In general, they have found that people tend to have different preferences. Although people learn in many different ways, their approaches tend to be determined by attributes in three distinct areas: perception, information processing, and personality.
Think of it as the "Three P's" — Perception, processing, and personality.
The following researchers have investigated learning preferences and styles. They have also developed questionnaires and inventories:
Built around Jung's personality theory, the Myers-Briggs inventory involves analyzing results to questions that will allow individuals to classify themselves and measure the degree to which their personalities include characteristics such as perceiving, judging, thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition. Individuals can use the information to help them understand themselves and their relationships with others in work teams, discussion groups, and interactions with the instructor. The approach is very popular in businesses. A question about how much one's personality matters in learning has not been resolved.
Visual — Auditory — Kinaesthetic (VAK)
Take the VAK Survey.
Which works best for you? Seeing? Hearing? Hands-on? Basically a modality-based model, the VAK focuses on the three main sensory receivers: Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic (movement) to find out which learning style dominates. Modalities are a channel by which human expression can take place and is composed of a combination of perception and memory.
Kolb
Take the Kolb Survey
The Learning Styles Inventory requires one to look at patterns of behavior and to see how one's approach to learning tends to be active, reflective, abstract, or concrete. For Kolb, perceiving and processing are important elements. He tries to find where the learner is on a "thinking — feeling" continuum. He then looks at a "doing — watching" continuum. The result is a matrix that allows the learner to have a good sense of where and how he or she falls within a matrix of learning styles.
- Concrete experience (feeling): Learning from specific experiences and relating to people. Sensitive to other's feelings.
- Reflective observation (watching): Observing before making a judgement by viewing the environment from different perspectives. Looks for the meaning of things.
- Abstract conceptualization (thinking): Logical analysis of ideas and acting on intellectual understanding of a situation.
- Active experimentation (doing): Ability to get things done by influencing people and events through action. Includes risk-taking.
Honey and Mumford
Take the Honey and Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire
These researchers seek to find one's approach to learning, and to see how it fits one's patterns. The categories of learning styles are active, reflective, theory, and pragmatic. Learners who are active focus on "doing," those who are reflective focus on "reviewing," ones who value theory like to "conclude," and the pragmatic learners focus on "planning."
In addition to blended sensory-based learning styles, Gardner looks at the ways that people process information, and that they pull from multiple strengths and that as a result we use more than one kind of intelligence when we learn. Our society tends to privilege primarily two kinds of intelligence: verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical. Gardner's theory proposes that "there are at least eight other kinds of intelligence that are equally important. They are 'languages' that most people speak, and that cut through cultural, educational, and ability differences."
Entwistle
Take Entwhistle's "ASSIST' inventory"
What makes Entwistle's approach unique is the fact that the approach attempts to apply concepts to study skills and learning strategies. The goal is to look at "deep learning" as well as surface and strategic approaches.