Learners' Strategies & Learning Styles

The activities and techniques you use to learn are called learning strategies. These strategies tend to fall into various groups, which are considered to represent a more abstract set of tendencies that we call learning styles. Learning styles are convenient shortcuts for talking about patterns of what an individual is likely to prefer as a learner. For example, some people like to follow a syllabus or textbook chapter by chapter when they learn. This approach is referred to as sequential style because people with this style like to follow a sequence of predictable or predetermined steps to get where they are going. The contrasting style is called random; people with a random learning style tend to prefer to follow whatever thread of learning seems relevant or interesting at the time. Their sequence is not predictable, often not even to them. So random and sequential are styles, or habitual, general approaches for which the observable behaviors are certain specific learning strategies,...