Enhancing Learning Styles and Strategies for Academic Success

1. Learning Styles Jenny ZimmermanAssistant DirectorAcademic Resource CenterMercer Universityhttp://faculty.mercer.edu

2. Awareness • Differences – recognize multiple pathways for learning • Tell-tale Traits – name your style and your professor’s • Questionnaires –explore own style • Profiles – identify prevalent styles in academia • Comfort Zones – break out of self-limiting roles • New Competencies – cultivate early success • Untapped Potential – change habits

3. Differences You and your fellow students may learn and/or present what you know via “competing” channels or methods • Visual, auditory, read/write, kinesthetic • Active vs reflective • Sensing vs intuitive • Inductive vs deductive • Global vs sequential

4. Tell-tale Traits • Fidgeting - Kinesthetic • Copious note taking – Read/write • Blank lecture notes – Auditory • Non-stop monologue – Kinesthetic • Question and answer – Auditory • Doodling with colored pens – Visual • Tabbed textbook – Read/write • Successful in lab – Kinesthetic or inductive • Sudden flashes of understanding – Global

5. Questionnaires • VARK • Solomon and FelderIndex of Learning Styles • Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Survey • Keirsey Temperment Sorter

6. Profile Model Academic (Professor) Teaching or presentation style: • Read/write • Passive • Intuitive (abstract) • Deductive • Sequential

7. Profile Developing Academic (Student) Learning style: • Kinesthetic • Active • Sensing • Inductive • Needing an over-arching goal or reason for learning (global motivation in place of or together with global understanding)

8. New Competencies • You may never have had the opportunity to excel in college using “natural” learning style • Start building toward success by focusing on strategies that dovetail with learning style • Correlate learning styles with teaching and testing styles and consider how this might affect class performance

9. Untapped Potential • Subject mastery almost always enhanced when learner exercises multiple channels and/or learning methods • Efficiency/comprehension trade-offs involved in choosing to adapt content to individual learning style versus developing new learning styles – e.g. audio taping lectures versus learning how to write and review lecture notes