The Importance of Knowing Your Learning Style by Adaobi Nwachuku

Adaobi Nwachuku is a Project Management Apprentice at Barnet Council and is writing for the Community Blogging Team.

In the course of my educational journey, I have sat many exams. From primary school exams to my Masters’ degree finals, I have sat enough exams not to remember specifics, just the cold dread of the blank sheet of paper on my desk in a silent room while others scribbled away around me asking for more sheets of paper. This is except for one exam. Granted this was one of the exams I had to take to qualify for my master’s degree, so one of the more recent and monumental ones, but well remembered because this time, I was the one scribbling away and asking for the extra sheets of paper whilst others sat around me gazing at their blank/ nearly blank exam sheets. I was one of the highest scorers for that module. 

Now, this is of note because this was not the norm for me. My scores in assessments were usually average or lower than average. Not because I had no academic ability, I was able. My memory of every parent’s evening was always… ‘your daughter is very bright/ intelligent, … but she is absent/ away with the fairies/ will not apply herself…. I cannot tell you how frustrating this was for my parents, who (before I was born) had planned out a degree in Oxbridge and a career in law for me. Alas, they watched this life planned for me slip away with every dismal exam result.

I was absent, but not because I was away with the fairies, but because no matter how hard I tried, I just could not translate the words coming out of any teacher/ lecturer/ professor’s lips into anything resembling the knowledge I so desperately needed to get through life. Reading under pressure was not always better either and unfortunately, this has not changed in my working life. I do not do well with meetings, seminars ….in fact, any setting that I have to sit and listen to someone talk. It is guaranteed that I leave those sessions completely drained from straining to understand and participate and coming away with no extra knowledge or insight of whatever it was that I sat through for the hour, couple of hours or days spent in those sessions. As you can imagine, this is a huge hurdle for someone who manages projects.

The foundation of my educational journey was a teacher standing in front of a class with a chalkboard and talking at pupils/ students a for hours or days, we were then supposed to take notes, understand these notes and use the same notes for revision to score brilliantly in exams. Which would have been a great tool if I could concentrate enough to decipher what was being taught and transpose it into useful notes. 

Please do not get me wrong, I am not saying anything is wrong with this mode of learning, my contemporaries managed this just fine, judging by the scores they took home to their parents. Just that for me, something happened in the time it took for the words to leave the teacher’s lips and be received by my ears! Good words magically became gobbledygook. I stumbled on through my educational life, thinking this was it for me. Where others sat in class assimilating knowledge, displaying their knowledge with questions, discussions and banter with the lecturer, I sat mute, because they might as well be speaking Latin, a language I have no conversational knowledge of. 

I am sure you would like to know how I manged to get through, GCSE’s, A’ Level’s a university degree and a master’s degree? That is a lot of teaching, lectures, seminars, group meetings. Well, I was born into a family where attaining a bachelor’s degree was just the beginning of your educational journey, so there was never any doubt that I had to find a way to overcome my learning obstacles. Unfortunately, due to my inability to gain knowledge through the only way I thought was possible, and the only way available to me at the time (The foundation of my education was in Owerri, Imo State Nigeria), I thought I was doomed. No talk of different learning styles that I knew of. As a result, I thought learning was an exceptionally difficult mountain that I had to climb. I would put off studying because I had become scared of learning. However, I knew I had to pass exams to progress, so I would put off looking at any book (remember I did not have notes) until a week or so before exams, then I would try and cram in a term or a year’s learning in that time. Surprisingly, I would actually pass exams with that bit of cramming, albeit without flying colours. Definitely without flying colours. As I took exams and progressed on my educational journey, I came across other ways of learning, and started developing strategies to get through exams and enjoy learning. 

Since concentration and listening in class were challenging for me, I sought other ways. The internet was an amazing source. I passed my exam on the central and peripheral nervous system by watching cartoon-like illustrations on YouTube. This was also how I aced my exam about the brain and its function. I learned that if I did a little reading and research before my lectures, I was not as lost during lectures. I also learnt to revise with diagrams, breaking down theories into five petal diagrams with stems which was easy for me to remember in exams. This has been adapted to my work life. I try to do some research before meetings or seminars and prepare some questions. During the meeting, I listen out for answers to my questions, and it helps me join the dots.

Learning would have been more enjoyable if I knew about learning styles much earlier. Even though there is some debate about this, educational experts and theorists posit that there are various learning styles. The most referenced one is the VARK Model, Visual, Auditory, Reading/ Writing and Kinaesthetic. The idea is that visual learners learn better when presented with visual information, and auditory learners do better when information is presented aurally, reading and writing learners like text-heavy material, and kinaesthetic learners learn by doing. The idea is that everyone is a complicated combination of all four, but most people display a dominant modality more than the others. I for one am definitely not an aural learner. 

Back to the exam I was talking about earlier. How did I pass and pass so well? I completely missed the lectures for that module either by being absent minded in class or being physically absent. Apparently, in one of those classes, ‘we’ were told what was likely to appear in the exams, and since I was ‘absent,’ I just revised everything intensely.

Now I am not advocating missing lectures, I am just illustrating that if I had known much earlier that I learnt best by reading up in my own time, looking at practical examples and revising in an array of different ways, instead of sitting in a class and listening to a person speak, my educational journey would have been very different indeed.   

If you'd like to write an article to be posted on the Multiverse Community Hub, please fill out this form and a member of the team will be in touch.