What Kind of Learner are You? 

Learning is not and should not be a passionless task — it should be fun and rewarding! We will all spend our entire lives learning, but it’s a shame that for some students, bad experiences can stain their perception of what they’re capable of. It’s so important to find for yourself what works best for you, and to be okay if your style of learning differs from others.

Learning Style Tests

Many of us have taken a learning style test before. One that I’m sure many of you are familiar with breaks down learning types into three categories – auditory, visual, and tactile (basically, whether you learn best through hearing, seeing, or doing).

Personally, I love tests like this that tell me about myself. I think we all, on some level, like being told who we are — what our strong and weak points are. But just like an exam doesn’t define who you are, an online personality test can never be as good a judge of what’s best for you as the people in your life and of course, yourself.

In fact, the learning style test is an oversimplified way of looking at learning. First of all, it’s likely that you wouldn’t score, for example, as a completely auditory learner with no visual or tactile. In the quiz that I took, I scored 55% tactile, 25% visual, and 20% auditory. Furthermore, taking this now gave me different results from when I took it five years ago.

Learning to Learn

The way we learn is multifaceted and evolving, and oftentimes, classifying our learning styles ends up restricting our learning potential rather than honing it. Learning to learn is a process in and of itself that takes patience, trial-and-error, and positive thinking.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” – Albert Einstein

Learning involves so much more than just absorbing and remembering information. For something to really stick with you, you have to be able to relate to it, to think about it on your own, and have it incorporate into your understanding of reality. That takes focus, time, good teaching, and good study habits.

And as far as study habits go, everyone has different ones. Personally, handwriting notes, flashcards or just my thoughts about something helps me to process information, think creatively, and for the information to stick with me (I even used to make my own mock tests as a study guide). But watching an educational video, reading, having a class discussion, listening to a teacher give a great lecture, sitting around the dinner table listening to my parents explain something, coming back to the information a few days later, or having a one-on-one session with a tutor have all been extremely helpful ways for me to learn.

So what can you take away from these learning style tests? Use them as a baseline to just start thinking about what you’ve seen work and not work for you while you try to learn. These tests typically ask you great questions about yourself, and I’ve found that those questions are much more important to get me to think about who I am and what my strengths and weaknesses are, more so than the results. Maybe hearing things once in class isn’t enough for something to sink in, and you need to seek out help after class or a tutor to work with you one-on-one. Maybe rereading the chapter in your science textbook doesn’t cut it for you, and you need to watch a video from an academic YouTube channel first so that when you return to the textbook, everything makes sense.  Learning is a never-ending journey, and part of the experience is learning about yourself.

K. Connerty
Boston Tutoring Services