What type of learner are you?

[00101010]

Mostly visual. If there are no visual aids available I need to create my own in my mind's eye. I turn ideas and concepts into images.

[Kotoko]

I'm a combination of visual and tactile, but probably leaning more towards tactile. Then again, my field of work is very hands-on and the skills I need require practice (i.e. I've never seen anyone mastering IV starts just by reading or listening about it). Still, I remember reading about chest tubes and, despite the diagrams, I couldn't piece it all together until I saw, touched, and managed a chest tube myself. In school, though, I also did very well if there were diagrams and charts alongside the text and for a long time, I memorized things by memorizing the facts visually (i.e. I could picture what the page in my textbook looked like, and "read" the information from there).

[Moon Thief]

Visual and tactile.

[BonesTheHeretic]

Verbal. Which I know isn't an option. So... Verbal/auditory. I learn pretty well from hearing others talk, but I learn best by explaining something to others.

[AnyOtherName]

Auditory/tactile. (I'm a bit confused though, I looked them up and some sources are saying kinesthetic and tactile learning are the same, others are saying similar-but-different.)

I learn best by having something explained to me out loud, accompanied by step-by step writing on the board (for equations) or outlined notes (writing down crucial points or having them in a powerpoint presentation) work best for me. Despite being a leisure-reader I don't do as well with assigned text... probably because it's easier to become distracted compared to listening. And for anything that requires doing as opposed to remembering (calculations versus history or vocabulary) I absolutely have to go over as many example as possible to make sure I understood the explanation. Explaining the material to someone else also helps sometimes.

[Member33070]

Auditory for sure. I don't understand musical rhythm and tapping it out to play a song for example, but if I hear the song just once I will play the rhythm perfectly from then on. I remember a good 25% of a movie's quotes verbatim after seeing the movie just once, and remember things a lot better if there's a little phrase I can repeat in my head to remember it (like "from positive to negative" for current flow).

I am somewhat visual but not enough to be useful. I can't remember the information on a page, I just remember what the page it was on looked like. So when I take notes, I doodle something weird on every page and color it in. I remember that the page with autonomous equation definition is the one with the blue triangle and square doodle, for example, but never what the definition actually is.

Essentially I'm useless at math and science unless I can hear it and represent it in a layout form.

[Starscream]

Hands-on learner, so Tactile. I'd rather learn by doing than learn by watching someone else do it. Obviously you still have to listen when you're being thought hands-on.

[CrazyCatLover]

Visual and auditory.

[virescence]

Definitely auditory.

I remember one time in a Psychology class when we were studying memory, we did a short practical: our teacher read us a short story, and then we had to write out the story as closely as we could remember it. Then we swapped sheets and "marked" each other's work based on how many of 30 or so key sentences/phrases we'd managed to reproduce. The point being to demonstrate how bad the human memory actually was, because most people didn't do very well.

... except for me: I ended up writing for three times as long as anyone else and only missed a few of the phrases. Fortunately for my teacher, she managed to use the opportunity to explain how factors like your areas of interest influenced memory (I am/was very into reading/writing) and, though I don't think she mentioned it then, things like being an auditory learner helped too. I'd certainly never have managed it if I'd had to read it...