The Varieties of Learning Styles

An awareness of learning styles can be helpful in several ways. For the learner, it can mean discovering one's own strengths, and learning to structure one's working environment so as to maximize those strengths. It is hard for most of us to notice causal relationships between certain semiconscious actions, like finding just the right kind of music on the radio and our effectiveness as translators. We don't have the time or the energy, normally, to run tests on ourselves to determine just what effect a certain kind of noise or silence has on us while performing specific tasks, or whether (and when) we prefer to work in groups or alone, or whether we like to jump into a new situation feet first without thinking much about it or hang back to figure things out first. Studying intelligences and learning styles can help us to recognize our­selves, our semiconscious reactions and behaviors and preferences, and thus to structure our professional lives more effectively around them.

An awareness of learning styles may also help the learner expand his or her repertoire, however: having discovered that you tend to rush into new situations impulsively, using trial and error, for example, you might decide that it could be professionally useful to develop more analytical and reflective abilities as well, to increase your versatility in responding to novelty. Discovering that you tend to prefer kinesthetic input may encourage you to work on enhancing your receptiveness to visual and auditory input as well.

There are four general areas in which individual learning styles differ: context, input, processing, and response. Let us consider each in turn, bearing in mind that your overall learning style will not only be a combination of many of these preferences but will vary from task to task and from learning situation to learning situation. What follows is not a series of categorical straitjackets; it is a list of general tendencies that flow more or less freely through every one of us. You may even recognize yourself, in certain moods or while performing certain tasks, in each of the categories below.