Learning Styles Essay

Submitted By jdsmall1995
Words: 836
Pages: 4

Learning Style Assessment
One major problem plaguing the American school system is the way students are taught. Students, taught the same way but having a different learning style, do not learn or retain the taught information if it is not presented in a way they can understand. After completing a learning style assessment, I have discovered that I am mainly a visual learner. The forty I scored in the visual learning greatly surpassed the twenty-eight I scored in the auditory learning section and the twenty-four I scored in the kinesthetic learning section. I find these results to be extremely accurate in most of the classes I have taken or are taking now. For example, in Mr. Alexander’s AP U.S history course, chapter questions were optionally assigned to be completed along with the nightly reading. I chose not to do the guided reading for the first few weeks and poor grades resulted. After realizing I needed to do something to improve my class grade, I started doing the chapter questions and taking notes on the material nightly. My quiz and class grades shot up almost instantly, proving that the visual technique of taking notes drastically helped me. The most difficult subject for me to learn in school is math. After taking many advance math courses, I found that nothing helps me quite like just practicing myself. My results for the math portion of the learning style assessment are somewhat correct, though not completely. Scoring a twenty-four in kinesthetic, an eighteen in visual, and a twenty-six in auditory, I was expecting my auditory score to be a lot lower than the others. I find that just sitting and listening to the instructor teach the lesson does not help me near as much a seeing the problem worked out step by step and having direct instructions on how to do the problem. An example of this took place last semester in my honors pre-calculus class. We had just finished our previous chapter and tested on it, and were starting a new one. On the first day of the new chapter, Mr. Crouch was absent and we had a substitute. This substitute was not very good at math and did not understand our high level material. She just passed out work sheets with problems on the new material, and expected us to just somehow learn it together. I could not figure out how to do it with just looking at it, but learned it quickly when Mr. Crouch returned and taught the lesson.
The results I find to be most accurate are the results concerning individual learning versus group learning. I scored a perfect forty for individual learning preference and a low eighteen for group learning. As a very independent person, I enjoy working by myself to ensure that the work produced is up to the high standards I set for myself. I like to control all variables and do things my way, so when another person or group of people is added to the mix, I often find that our styles and standards clash. Another factor contributing to my love for individual learning is my extreme shyness. Often when I have ideas that could be important or when I disagree with other’s ideas, I am too shy to speak up. This was the case in our