Knowing My Learning Style Helps Me Learn

Understanding how you learn best, as well as other methods of learning, is important for any adult learner. This week I have been preparing for the next EMSBootCamp.com session by asking other educators for their tips and suggestions for EMT students to prepare for the start of EMT class.

One common themes that has emerged during those discussions is that students must understand how they learn since there are different types of learning styles. Since most EMT students are “adult learners” that are balancing school with work and family, understanding a preferred learning style could increase the effectiveness of studying and class performance. It can also make students aware of challenges that they may have with learning specific types of content. For example it is easy for me to learn and follow treatment algorithms (logical learning). It is more difficult for me to learn and perform physical skills associated with patient treatments.

To find an online tool learning style self assessment I asked my Twitter followers for their suggestions. I immediately received a suggestion from @Blueankle to check out http://www.learning-styles-online.com/. By answering 70 questions my learning style was rated on seven scales – see image below. If you know me it should not be a surprise that I rate high on the logical scale. Since I am low on the aural scale (my wife could have predicted this rating) I may need to pay special attention and seek out additional assistance for content that requires aural learning.

Learning Style Chart

As an educator how can you incorporate a learning style self-assessment into your course orientation? In an online education course completing a self-assessment could be a good initial lesson for each student to learn more about their preferred learning style and discuss with the instructor and other students how to be effective in their preferred learning style as well as their non-preferred learning styles.

Tags: Educator, Learning Style, Online Course, Twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Tools, Reviews, & Other Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Martha Says:
August 5th, 2009 at 7:52 am

Google Howard Gardner. He is the pioneer of the seven different styles of learning. He has also added an eighth, which is naturalist/environmental intelligence. I believe you would be strong on that scale as well, meaning that you quickly learn from examples through nature and your surrounding environment.

John W. McBryde Says:
August 6th, 2009 at 10:38 am

We give our students at the beginning of a class a learning styles survey so the EMT instructors can identify a student’s learning style and it gives the student an opportunity to know how he/she learns. For the instructor this survey helps tailor classes to cover different means of learning which helps the student grasp material better.