Working with Your Preferred Learning Style

7. What is the goal of learning about my learning?

Regardless of your own preferred approach to learning, your goal is to be the best student you can be: enthusiastic, efficient, engaged, and balanced in other areas of your life. Challenging sometimes, but not impossible!

Each of us have a preferred ways of learning, but all of us are capable of learning in many ways. Given the variety of experiences you will have at university, it is useful to develop a variety of strategies, so you can adapt to different situations.

Characteristics of Effective Learners

• understand your learning style: how do you approach and make meaning of material.
• recognize your uniqueness
• identify your strengths: try to match your style with course delivery methods or content
• predict gaps or challenges in your learning experience e.g. someone who prefers to learn by watching will be challenged in a seminar requiring quick discussion
• anticipate discomfort in some stages of the learning process, due to misfit with your preferred learning style
• apply extra care or effort to develop skills in non-preferred dimensions
• seek others with a different learning style, to develop new skills
• Develop excellent thinking skills:
  • organize knowledge and facts
  • become automatic (accurate and fast) with basic skills, facts
  • look for patterns in a new task
  • recognize connections, to achieve a deep understanding
  • experiment with different learning strategies, and learn when to apply them
  • be self-aware, about when you do or do not understand 
  • seek to understand

 

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