Learning styles

[martamatos]

How many learning styles do you think there are? What learning styles are these?

Apparently there are up to 8 (or even up to 71) learning styles. But according to this and this article there isn't much scientific evidence supporting it. Here I'll just stick to those learning styles that seem to be more common:

• reading/writing, people learn better by reading/writing new contents;
• visual, people learn better when using pictures, maps, videos, etc.
• kinesthetic, people learn better by doing the things they need to learn;
• auditory, people learn better by listening and discussing new contents.

Select a topic you have taught before. Prepare a description of how you would teach the topic for each of the learning styles

Taking git branches as a topic, I would teach it for each of the learning styles as follows:

• reading/writing, I'd get some good articles about git branches and the documentation and give them to the students to read, and probably also use slides in the class that they can refer to later;
• visual, I'd either use, for instance, this website to show what happens when we create a branch and make some commits, draw on a whiteboard, or use slides with drawings;
• kinesthetic, I could ask these students to draw the diagram with commits in different branches and/or do an exercise that involves creating branches and committing in different branches;
• auditory, I'd explain the concepts by talking in the class, and then ask the students to do some group exercises and discuss the exercises together.

However, in practice I would just mix and match these approaches by:

• giving students articles to read;
• explain the concepts verbally in class;
• using drawings/slides/etc to show what it looks like to have multiple git branches;
• ask the students to do some exercises either on their own or in a group;
• discuss the exercises with the students at the end.

What learning style do you think you yourself are? How would you teach the topic above to yourself?

According to the quiz, I'm a multimodal learning. But my best guess is that I just learn best in different ways for different things. For instance, if I'm learning history I prefer to read about it, but if I'm learning how to fix a bike I prefer to see how it's done (visual) and then try myself (kinesthetic).

[ArcoMul]

Cool insight on how every learning activity might have a different preferred learning style. I totally see that that works for me too.

I'm curious: in these learning styles, where do you think group discussions fit? And in your git example, how would you apply this? :-)