Learning Styles

Learning style depicts the special way that a student applies to absorb, practice, understand and retain information. The main idea behind education styles is the fact that each and every student absorbs differently. For instance, when trying to grasp a concept on how to make a timer, some of the students can comprehend the whole process by keenly following the verbal instructions from the trainer; others will tend to manipulate the clock by themselves (Broughton, Sinatra & Reynolds, 2007). The kind of individualized learning style has gained a lot of recognition in both the education theory and the classroom management plans. Specific learning styles normally rely on cognitive, environmental and emotional factors together with some prior experience on the subject problem. Due to the differences among the students, the educators need to comprehend the dissimilarities that exist among the way students learn. By understanding the variances, the educators will know the kind of strategies to employ in the course of their daily curriculum activities, and assessments (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett & Norman, 2010).
Several factors are tied to the learning styles and how learning works for instance:
The students’ prior knowledge is capable of hindering or helping a learning process; students normally get into various courses with some knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes they gained from their previous courses and their day to day life. The previous knowledge gained by the students can influence the way the students filter and interpret their current learning.

If the prior knowledge of the students is quite robust and accurate, the student will have a strong basis to build new knowledge. But then if the prior information is just a supplement, inadequate for the job, inappropriately inactivated, or erroneous, it can harmfully shake new learning.
The ways learners shape knowledge define how they relate what they know in that students logically make links between different portions of the required knowledge. When the connections seem to form knowledge constructions that are accurate and significant, the students can easily save and apply their learned information successfully and professionally (Ambrose, et al. 2010). But then when the knowledge is linked in inaccurate and accidental ways, the students may fail to retrieve or relate the knowledge suitably.
The students’ inspiration also governs, points and withstands what the students carry out to learn. When students join a school, they may advance greater self-sufficiency about the way they can study and learn (Ausubel, 1960). Here motivation shows a major part when it comes to managing the direction, strength, perseverance and the value of learning conduct the student can employ. When the students gain confident values in their learning goal, they assume to effectively achieve desired learning results, and they recognize support from their environs, they will be driven to study.
In order to grow mastery, the students should obtain factor skills, exercise how to mix them and most importantly they should distinguish when to relate whatever they have grasped. The students are needed to not only learn the constituent skills and the awareness necessary to undertake composite tasks, but the students must also exercise joining and mixing the skills for them to advance greater sureness and automaticity (Butler, 1997). The students must also acquire the skills to determine when and how to relate the skills and understanding they gained. The teachers need to develop mindful consciousness of the basic features of mastery for them to assist the students to learn in a more effective way.
Goal-oriented practice joined with targeted response enhances the value of students’ learning. Learning and act normally results whenever students involve more on the practices that focus on specific goals, targets a certain level of task and is of sufficient quantity and frequency to reach the presentation criteria (Atkinson, 1957). Practice is evident only if it is joined with the response that normally interconnects some aspects of scholars’ performance in relation to confident target criteria and gives information that can aid students to advance in reaching the criteria.
Normally the recent level of student growth interacts with the communal, emotive and intellectual temperature of the way to affect the learning. Not only are the students’ intellectual beings but also social and emotional beings and they still developing the full range of intelligent, social, and emotive skills. As much as the teachers are not in the position to control the development process, they are capable of shaping the intellectual, emotional, physical and social aspects of the classroom environment in the most appropriate ways. The kind of environment that teachers create has great impact on the students. Any bad climate may harmfully impact learning and act of the students, but then a positive environment can simply energize the students in the course of their studies.
In order for the students to develop self-directed learning habit in them, they are supposed to monitor and regulate the way they approach studies. The learners can easily involve in diverse ways of metacognitive procedures for them to monitor and govern their learning, assessment of any task they have at hand, and assess their own powers and weaknesses, plan their own method by relating and monitoring numerous strategies and also reproduce on the extent to which their present method works (Astin, 1993 ). However, some students do not engage in these processes directly. Whenever the students develop the required skills necessary to engage the processes, they automatically gain intellectual habits to improve both their performance and effectiveness.
References
Ambrose, S.A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M.C. & Norman, M.K. (2010). How Learning works: 7 Research-Based principles for smart Teaching. San Fransico, Jossey-Bass.
Astin, A. W. (1993). What matters in college? Four critical years revisited. San
Atkinson, J. W. (1957). Motivational determinants of risk taking behavior Psychological Review, 64, 369 – 372.
Ausubel, D. P. (1960). The usage of advanced organizers in the learning of meaningful verbal materials. Journal of Educational Psychology, 51, 267 – 272.
Broughton, S. H., Sinatra, G. M., & Reynolds, R. E. (2007). The refutation text effect: Influence on learning and attention. Paper presented at Yearly Meetings of the U.S. Educational Researchers Association, Chicago, Illinois.
Butler, D. (1997). The roles of goal setting and self – monitoring in students self – regulated engagement of tasks. Paper presented at the yearly meetings of the U.S. Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL. Francisco: Jossey – Bass.