Learning Styles 1 – What is a learning style?

It should come as no surprise that different people learn in different ways. We are all different; we all have different preferences for food, sport and politics. This doesn’t mean that one way of doing things is necessarily better than another – you may work well early morning when I am still huddled over my coffee, whereas I may prefer to burn the midnight oil whilst you are fading!
Research shows that some approaches to learning tend to be more effective than others, and it would be foolish to ignore this knowledge (although that is precisely what a lot of educators and students tend to do!). But beyond that how do we differ? Psychologists study and measure all sorts of traits, a key one for academic performance being intelligence or IQ. There is a whole literature on this controversial subject, which I am not going to go into here. But whatever intelligence is or isn’t, it does seem to a correlation between it and academic success. But that isn’t the whole story, because even for people of the same IQ there are other traits which seem to effect not just how well they learn, but their preferred approaches.

There are a plethora of theories and measurement tools about different learning styles. Some have better experimental data than others and some have more coherent theories behind them. I’m not going to go into that here, because I want to focus on a pragmatic approach to helping people learn to learn.

The system and tool which I tend to use is the Learning Styles Profile (LSP), developed by Prof Chris Jackson from University of New South Wales. This is a synthesis of several earlier theories and tools, which has been validated by large studies looking at correlations of measured traits with each other and with external measurements of interest, such as academic and workplace performance.

In the Learning Styles Profile (LSP), five personality traits are recognised. One of these - Sensation Seeking – is seen as being a more biologically driven ‘basic drive’. The other four are channels for this drive which can lead to successful learning outcomes. None of the channels are better than others, all have places where they are useful, and all have downsides. In the next few blogs I will discuss each of these five elements of the LSP in detail. If you are interested in learning more about your own learning style, there is an online LSP test which you can take (http://www.cymeon.com/lss2.asp ). The results not only tell you your preferred style, but also take you through, in detail, what this means for you, and giving suggestions for improvement. I would recommend it.