Learning Styles

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Learning Styles

I took the V.A.K. (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic) Learning Style Indicators self-assessment tool and got a visual total of nine, an auditory total of 19 and a kinaesthetic total of only two. This means my learning style is 9/30 or 30 per cent visual, 19/30 or 63 per cent auditory and 2/30 or about 7 per cent kinaesthetic.

These results surprised me very much, because as long as I have known about the different learning styles, I have always thought I was a visual learner. I thought the visual learning style was the commonest and also made the commonest sense, because I thought we learn most of what we know by reading and watching anyhow. As an example of this, I believed that blindness was a much more serious handicap for learning than deafness was. The amount we can learn by hearing and listening is much less than the amount we can learn by seeing and watching, in a society and natural world that are mainly visual.

But according to my results on the self-assessment tool, I am an auditory learner. I had never really studied my learning style in the past. I had just assumed it was visual, or mainly visual and slightly auditory. When I followed the everyday behavioural examples that determine one’s learning style, this was a more accurate technique – even if it ‘is a rough guide to individual learning styles only – it is not a scientifically validated instrument’. I had not thought of my behaviours as the strongest proof of my learning style.

Also, as I went through the self-assessment tool I was circling behavioural choices in all three learning styles. I saw I was not only a visual learner. I was sure I was going to be evenly divided between the visual and auditory styles, and perhaps I would even turn out to be a significant kinaesthetic learner. This was consistent with the guidelines of the self-assessment tool, which said it is not uncommon to favour two or three learning styles...