Learner Centred Learning/Learning Styles and Preferences

Learning Styles
Learning styles often refers to the student’s preference for the way in which they like to learn. There are a variety of tools available to help identify learning preferences. Although they may have a preference students will often utilise a variety of learning styles to enable their learning. From a teaching perspective it is useful to be aware to students learning styles and make an effort to cater to a variety of these through using mixed teaching methods thus if teaching large numbers of students there is a greater opportunity to appeal to a wider range of learning styles. If working with smaller numbers of students there is more opportunity to design teaching methods to better suit the needs of the smaller group.

Neil Fleming has developed one tool to explore learning styles that considers the styles in terms of modes of learning; visual, aural, kinaesthetic and reader/writer. The VARK website contains questionnaires that help explore what a learners particular learning style might be along with explanations to help understand the questionnaire results and potential usefulness of those results.