My Personal Learning Styles

Like most people, I can definitely say there have been times in my life when learning was a chore. I can remember looking at the clock on the wall watching the second hand tick away while feverishly tried to grasp the material before me. On the other hand, I can clearly recall times when I was eager to learn. I looked forward to the experience, almost counting the hours until my next opportunity to dive into the scheduled material.

As the years have passed from my early days of learning until now, I have realized there is a key word that defines my learning style: scheduled. I am a schedule person. From as far back as I can remember, I have always envied the organized person. The one who had a schedule for everything. The one who knew everything and knew where to go to get what they did not readily possess.

I have studied temperament types and learning styles in great detail, primarily trying to find new ways of understanding others and myself. At one point, I took the Strong Interest Inventory Test to try to find out my personal learning style. In an interpretive report following the testing, Allen Hammer and Judith Grutter explained:

Your score on the Learning Environment scale suggests that you are interested in applied or practical problems. You may be most interested in short-term training that can teach you practical skills that will help you prepare for a particular job. You probably learn best in settings where you can learn by experience, not through books or lectures (11).

The Skills For Professional Development textbook provided four distinct tests to help me define my learning style even further. Test 1: Peak and Valley Learning Times (University of Phoenix 74), confirmed to me that I learn best in the early morning hours. Early morning is definitely a peak learning time for me. I can frequently be found early in the morning with a book and a cup of coffee. I wake up and my brain seems to be already engaged. Saturday mornings afford me the greatest study and learning time. In Test 2: Top Down or Bottom Up Learning (76), I was refreshed to learn that it's okay to be a top down learner. Reverting back to my childhood desire to be organized, I actually thought the only way to learn was by systematic, step by step, one subject learning. I can see from the text that (as a grouper) I am able to take a broad view of material, find relationships, and draw parallels among different areas of study (78). What really tied it together were the results of Test 3: The Four Learning Quadrants (81). As a Style