Roval and Grooms explain that learning styles vary massively in people and they can be classified in many different ways. ("Learning Styles - The Future of Human Evolution", 2016). Learning styles are based on the person 's physical and intellectual preferences on how they best learn. A lot of research has been conducted in this field. Research has aimed to retrieve models to explain learning styles. Coffield et al has identified around 71 learning styles using models ("Learning Styles - The Future of Human Evolution", 2016) . Overall, learning styles and strategies are extremely important in developing a students educational development but it is important to consider critically the positives and negatives of them.
All students go through the process of learning. It is important to consider how this learning occurs. Learning occurs in various ways. The Behaviourists believe in conditioning. Conditioning comes in 2 different forms. These are classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is learning through association ("Classical Conditioning | Simply …show more content…
These are the preference of every individuals way of learning new knowledge ("the definition of learning style", 2016).. VAK learning style theory was proposed in the 1920’s by a group of psychologists. VAK stands for Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic. Students can be one style or they can be a mixture of styles. Visual preferred students usually learn best with pictures, diagrams, charts, posters, powerpoint presentations and many other visual based sources. University lectures usually consist of a lot of powerpoint presentations and this is particularly useful for students who prefer visual aids. Auditory preferred students learn best with sound based aids such as actively listening to lectures or voice recording key information for a exam and then listening to it. These students can easily learn information simply by listening to their lecturers and listening to podcasts and recordings. Kinaesthetic preferred students learn by actually being ‘hands on’ and physically doing the activities. For example, they learn from actually experiencing things by being able to touch and feel certain objects. In the SED, kinaesthetic students will enjoy laboratory practicals because they are actually carrying out a set of experiments. This sticks in their brains better and in exams they will remember and be able to answer specific questions on topics covered in practicals. Students can be one specific learning style or they can be a