Sunday, February 8, 2009

It is important for adult learners to understand how they learn to advance in their education? Can this be applied in training? How can this knowledge help trainers create an effective learning environment?

Everyone learns differently. It is important for adult learners to understand how they learn before they start to advance their education. During my teacher credential training we learned about the eight educational modalities:

Linguistic/Language: learns by listening, reading, verbalizing, enjoys discussion, likes word games, books, and records, and remembers verses, lyrics, and trivia.
Logical/Mathematical: thinks conceptually, uses clear reasoning, looks for abstract patterns and relationships, likes experimenting and testing things, likes classifying and categorizing.
Musical: thinks in tones, learns through rhythm and melody, enjoys playing musical instruments, remembers songs, and notices nonverbal sounds in the environment.
Spatial: likes mazes and jigsaw puzzles, likes to draw and design things, likes to build models, and likes films, slides, videos, diagrams, maps, and charts.
Bodily kinesthetic: processes knowledge through bodily sensations, communicates through gestures, moves or fidgets while sitting, learns by touching and manipulating, likes role playing, creative movement, and physical activity, enjoys fixing and building things.
Interpersonal: understands and cares about people, is the social child, has lots of friends, and learns from cooperative learning experiences, and likes group games.
Intrapersonal: enjoys working independently, likes to be alone, appears to be self-motivated, and needs quiet space and time.
Naturalist: investigates, experiments, questions, and finds out about elements of science, the phenomena of the natural world, weather patterns, growing things, animals, conditions that change characteristics (water changes from liquid to solid when frozen). (PBS, 2009)

This information can be used during training to assure that all types of learners have access to the training information. This empowers the learner to use techniques that work for them to internalize the training they are receiving. Trainers can use different training techniques to entice different types of learners through out the training process. Trainers that address all types of educational modalities and help their students to understand their learning modality find that students are more responsive to the training that is offered.


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