All entries for Sunday 16 January 2005

My Learning Style

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/cll/skills/personalacaddevelopment/learningstyles/

Aim of the Learning Styles activity

• To enable you to understand your own approach to learning better
• To adapt your learning strategy to be most effective during your time as a student at Warwick.

Result:

• I had a moderate preference for being an Activist


• I had a strong preference for being a Reflector


• I had a moderate preference for being a Theorist


• I had a strong preference for being a Pragmatist

My strongest preference was found to be: Reflector (76%)

This Learning Styles activity was devised by Warwick Skills

More Learning Styles Web links...

I thought the learning style questionairre was an excellent exercise that helped me to identify my preferred learning styles, but more importantly it highlighted the aspects that i need to work on in order to improve my learning experiences. As a third year student when I look back at this activity I feel that if I undertook this exercise in my first year the results would have revealed a different picture. Currently, the questionairre reveals that I have strong preferences for being a reflector and a pragmatist while moderate preferences are seen for theorist and activist with the latter taking a significantly lower value than the other three styles( Activ : 44, Reflect : 76, Theorist : 67, Pragmatist :67) However, I feel that as i came to university I would have had strong preferences to reflector and theorist while having extremely low value for activist and a moderate value for pragmatist.

When i first came to campus 2 1/2 years ago I was very laid back and was very used to taking back seats at discussions partly because I had a very shy personality as I felt my suggestions would be considered as laughing stock. Therefore, I used to observe a lot from behind the scenes and learn from others' experience and build my own mental representation and make sense of what really happened and how I could have contributed better in discussions. I had been doing this since my early teens and I was very cautious in my appraoch and very often I used to consider the big picture before making decisions, making me a slow decision maker.

My first year in university was absoultely awful. I felt that I just couldn't keep up with the hectic pace of university work as I battled to adapt myself to a culture shock and a challenging degree course. However, I felt that inherent weaknesses in my learning style were acting as a barrier to my progress. I felt that I got easily distracted from doing assignment ending bluffing a lot. I also felt that i wanted way too much information to write essays and was very overcautious. I also felt that the university pace was too much for my liking and therefore I just couldnt get myself round in the first year. I felt that I was resisting to accept reality.

However, since then I have realised it is important to take a more pragmatic view of life. I have tried to put theories into practice and very often i feel that I come out of lectures having new ideas that I would like to implement in practice. This has helped me to find better information from relevant sources minimising browsing time, getting things done on time.

Additionally, a lot of group based assignments have helped me to develop a more activist side to my learning. I feel that I have used my teamworking experiences dervied from actively being involved in sports to develop this mode of learning.However, I admit that I still dont take the upper hand or chair meetings with groups.

I feel that i have developed a better approach to learning since coming to university. However I feel that I need to develop a little bit more from the activist side and I believe by developing self-confidence I can progress in this mode of learning.

I feel that the questionairre has helped me to make sense of what my past appraoches were, its weaknesses and it has also given me a sound base to devise strategies to improve on weaker areas in the learning cycle.

: 16 Jan 2005 18:57 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem