Knowing Your Learning Style

Knowing your learning style is probably the most important things in college in my opinion. With limited amount of time that no amount of time management can completely help, knowing the most effective way you learn in crucial to success in college. I’m pretty set in my Reading/Writing style and my roommate for the past two years struggles to understand it.

To study, I make notecards. I do it to chunk up the information and break it down and to rewrite it together to study it. People with R/W are usually told to write and rewrite notes and I’ve never had the patience to do that directly from page to page and I get frustrated with repeat material. My roommate on the other hand is very tactile and does a lot of different things depending on the course. She’s always been trying to tell me to do what she does to study because she doesn’t understand my system because to her it looks like a lot of wasted time making these cards especially since I only go through the cards two or three times before the test. Not to mention the waste of paper. But my method works for me and she’s come to accept it, even sitting watching me make them for four hours while watching movies with me even though she really wanted to say something about it.

Next year when working with the students, I think that having this background understanding of learning styles is really important especially if problems with studying comes up. We can’t automatically dismiss their ideas of effective studying but we need to look at their styles to try and find either a better fit or adjust their current efforts but never automatically tell them our methods are the best.