Understanding Yourself as a Learner
You don't have a learning style (because learning styles don't exist!), but you do have resources, skills, beliefs, and attitudes that shape how you choose to manage your learning. These elements are in turn shaped by your personality, interests, past experiences, the culture you grew up in, and how the human brain works among many other factors.
Having a better understanding of the assumptions you make about learning, the ways you approach your studies, and how your assumptions and approaches can help and/or hinder your success is a good first step toward choosing effective strategies and sticking with them.
Key Concepts
The videos below go over some concepts related to beliefs and assumptions about learning.
Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset
Video - John SpencerMyths of Online Learning
Video - uWaterlooUnlearning Learning Styles
Demystifying MedicineSelf-Assessments
If you're having trouble pinpointing your own habits, beliefs, and assumptions, you're not alone. Taking a self-assessment can help you identify key characteristics. No one assessment will cover everything, though, so click on each title to get a description and then mix and match based on what you want to focus on. No assessment is perfectly accurate, either, so consider the results as suggestions rather than diagnoses.
We covered self-directed learning in the previous section, so now you can see which of your current learning habits can help you be self-directed. The assessment is part of an OER (open educational resource) on online learning that Kwantlen Polytechnic University created, so feel free to check out other sections.
The idea that your mindset, or your beliefs about your abilities and intelligence, can impact your learning has become very popular since Carol Dweck's Mindset was published. The video above provides some background information on growth and fixed mindsets, and Mindset Works has some other resources too.
Penn State developed this assessment to help students identify the skills that will contribute to their success in online courses. It covers general learning skills as well as computer literacy and equipment.
This assessment asks about your learning preferences and then offers resources that can help you. Some of the questions are based on Kolb's Experiential Learning Model.
This quiz about commonly-believed myths about learning is based on a survey of over 3000 people in the US. Each question provides a correct answer and a link to supporting evidence. The article also has a summary of the survey results.