When it comes to learning, everyone is different, but there are several key learning styles.
Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory known as the seven learning styles is an expanded form of Fleming’s model, and is listed as follows:
Visual (Spatial)
As the name suggests, visual students are those that learn best when they have an image, video clip or cue to help them process the information they may also need to map out or write out their thoughts in order to fully process what they are thinking.
Visual students typically have a good spatial sense and sense of direction. They can easily visualise objects, plans, and outcomes like colouring, drawing, and doodling. They also have good colour balance.
Aural (Auditory-Musical)
Aural learning is used to classify those who respond primarily to sound and find that certain music evokes strong emotions. They often listen to music in the background while learning and have a good sense of pitch or rhythm and tend to use clever rhymes to remember something. They respond best to the likes of binaural beats (which is an illusion created by the brain when you listen to two tones with slightly different frequencies at the same time).
Most musicians are aural students and this learning style is not typically addressed in schools because it can be hard to teach outside of a music class.
Verbal (Linguistic)
Verbal students learn best both under verbal instruction and writing. They can gravitate towards public speaking roles, writing, journalism, and debating. They typically enjoy reading and writing, they like tongue twisters and rhymes and have a large vocabulary.
Reading definitions of a word aloud or writing them down a few times, are ways for verbal students to process information.
Physical (Kinaesthetic)
Physical students are animated and always need to be moving. They learn best by going through the motions of what they are learning.
Physical students appreciate the physical world around them, such as textures, and they typically enjoy sports and exercise which can help them problem solve, along with outdoor activities and working with their hands. These types of students tend to use and pick up on body language and enjoy making models or doing jigsaw puzzles.
Logical (Mathematical)
Most logical thinkers end up being engineers, mathematicians, or pursuing the sciences because they are individuals who want to understand the reason behind something. They do this by compartmentalising information to better understand it and perform complex calculations, or create procedures for future use, after coming up with a solution to a problem.
They tend to enjoy games like chess and brainteasers.
Social (Interpersonal)
Social students are natural group workers and are individuals that seem to be involved in every extracurricular activity. For adults, they are individuals that like to be engaged with others, work on teams, and ask their peers for feedback in order to learn.
Social students prefer to socialise after work or class, they enjoy playing group sports, bouncing ideas off of others, they listen well and are often trusted by others for their advice.
Solitary (Intrapersonal)
Solitary students are individuals who think independently and simply prefer to learn on their own and keep to themselves.
In most situations, this is a learning style for socially introverted people, but it is not exclusive. These individuals tend to be concerned with goals and outcomes, they can spend time on self-analysis, they prefer to relax or travel away from crowds, and tend to journal, write, and record personal thoughts and events as a way to improve themselves.
A cognitive learning style is impulsivity (compared to reflectivity, detailed below). As the name implies, an impulsive cognitive style is one in which a person reacts quickly, but as a result makes comparatively more errors.
A reflective style is the opposite, the person reacts slower and therefore makes fewer errors. The reflective style would seem better suited to many academic demands of school.
Research has found that this is indeed the case for academic skills that clearly benefit from reflection, such as mathematical problem solving or certain reading tasks (Evans, 2004).
In mandatory education a set of learning styles should always be adopted to cater for the needs of the different children being educated, but this doesn’t always happen, and sometimes it is not possible depending on the class structure and the students.
Everyone learns differently and education for children clearly differs greatly from adult learning as when we become adults, we have the experiences and the wisdom by that point to understand our strengths and weaknesses and know what type of learning is better for us. That does not necessarily mean we choose correctly but as adults we have more flexibility. For example, in mandatory education if a student thrives in an independent learning environment, then a classroom with other children may prove to be a challenge.