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Be an active learner. As an adult, you have a better grasp of your interests, skills, and abilities so that being an active learner keeps you charged-up about living and gives you a brighter outlook on your stage of life.

Being an active learner means be open to change and open to greater success in any field of endeavor. As an active learner, you are a good example to your children and to other adults around you. Whether being an active learner means being a lifelong learner or whether you are actually in school, here are some ways to improve your learning results:

1) Identify the learning objectives for whatever your learning goals is and then move forward in mastering what it is you have set out to learn. Use these objectives as benchmarks to measure and mark your learning progress.

2) If you don't already know how you learn best, make the effort to determine if you are a verbal learner, an auditory learner, or a tactile or kinesthetic learner. Think back on previous learning experiences. What methods worked best for you. Be the active learner and find ways to access the information or skills, appealing to your own learning style- even if the material isn't presented to you in ideal form initially.

3) Make index cards, record lectures, draw diagrams and graphic organizers to understand and coordinate the information you need to learn. If memory tricks, called mnemonics, work for you then create your own. Even if you have an ineffective teacher or professor, find out how you can access the learning and make important connections in spite of the poor teacher.

4) Preview readings before you actually read them and read actively by being involved with the text. Take notes, highlight, outline, paraphrase, etc. to process the information and put it into a form that is meaningful and useful to you. Reading informational text is a different kind of reading activity than reading a novel, so use techniques that translate even technical information into a form that you can digest and remember.

5)The active learner works at learning the vocabulary even if it is not assigned, knowing that it is critical to the understanding of the concepts. This active learner will be aware of the instructional objectives at the start of a topic or unit and will refer back to them to see if he or she mastered them.

6)Anticipate upcoming learning objectives. Make predictions, infer information, and ask yourself meaningful questions in a lecture or in your reading.

As an adult you have a huge advantage over a younger learner. You know yourself and you probably already have a bag of tricks that capitalize on your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. You know by now that it is not up to the teacher or professor to make sure you learn the instructional objectives. You know that you are the one at the wheel.

Learn more about this author, E.M.Robinson.
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