by Edyta Tehrani

Created on: January 22, 2009

There are many different learning styles just as there are many different people. From the day a child is born, she uses all her senses to make sense of the world around her. Learning is a creative and very dynamic process of interacting with ones environment and very much depends on the kind of stimulus a person receives from it, especially during early childhood years. Every child in those early years of development experiments with various styles of learning.

Babies listen to the parents talking to them and try to copy the sounds they hear to learn language thus using auditory-verbal learning style. As they grow and are able to reach for objects and touch them, children employ tactical learning style. When they start to crawl and later walk to explore the space they are in, it is spacial-visual learning at work.

It is important that in those early years of exploration parents provide their children with enviorment and freedom to explore the world without hindering their development. In later years, however, children will start to favour one or two learning styles over the other and it usually stays that way until adulthood.

Knowing which learning style a person favours the most is critical to future success. The emergence of the Multiple Intelligences theory greatly advanced our understanding of different learning styles and their benefits. We now know that people who learn best using auditory-verbal learning style could be potentially great writers, orators, lawyers, and politicians because of their immense skills in understanding and using of language. Whereas spacial-visual learners could be potentially gifted architects and artists because of their strong abilities to notice visual patterns, details, and to organize them properly in a given space. While people strong in tactical learning style love hands on activities and they could be excellent mechanics, engineers, or sculptors.

In addition to these three categories of learning styles, there are other ways of learning based on personality traits. Whereas one person might be content to follow directions of teachers in class, another might have a strong need for more self-directed learning. The latter is true especially for gifted learners who have tremendous drive to learn faster and more than the average students. And because they study much on their own trough reading, listening, and experimenting with things that interest them the most outside of class;they might have already covered the material suited for their chronological peers and need to skip some grades.

The main benefit of different learning styles is the ability to meet educational needs of individuals, so that they could succeed not only in learning, but in life as a whole. Parents and educators with this understanding can spare children much frustration and help them find their place in a world from which people derive sense of satisfaction and self worth. It can help modern society to reform its educational system to accommodate diversity in learning styles, talents, and personalities thus ensuring that every student is given a chance to fulfill his potential.

Learn more about this author, Edyta Tehrani.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.