What is the best way to learn?

By Junyeop Yeo

- experiential learning

People are learning new information through different ways; textbooks or experience. It depends on people how they decide which one is the best. Their knowledge and how they remember it would change based on how people learn it. Some people may argue differently, but learning from experience is the best way to learn. 

There are different types of learners such as, visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Most people are visual learners. This means that they need to see something in order to learn it. Visual learners must see the information in order to gain knowledge. Textbooks do not allow people to learn visually. The easiest way for people to learn is to absorb information using their eyes. This helps people to quickly process information through wide peripherals. Auditory and kinesthetics are slower for humans to learn through since it is not common to use our ears and our movements. People learn later in their years that listening is not as effective as visual learning. Visual learning helps students to retain information more effectively than any other method. Experience allows people to learn through their five senses including visual learning. 

As students engage in hands-on tasks, they will find some approaches work better than others. They discard the methods that don’t work, but the act of trying something and then abandoning it becomes a valuable part of the learning process. Students learn not to fear mistakes, but to learn from them. This lesson can only be learned through them actually experiencing it. They cannot learn this from textbooks and words.  

Knowledge is more than just understanding facts and statistics. Basic education does not help students remember. Through common practices of early education, most facts are based on mathematics, history, and reading comprehension. Teachers can confirm a student’s academic level with testing. However, this is not effective for the majority and becomes a short term memory test rather than long term. Rather than through books, many people gain more through experience. Long term memory retention is a four dimensional space of learning. This helps children build experience in making choices and decisions. Long term memory helps them adapt to a real world situation before entering the workforce. This aggregates their knowledge, which can later help them apply what they learn later in their jobs.

How they engage real life situations will be determined by how they accept new information. Although it may seem like a small difference, when this continues to build up, there will be a huge gap after a long time. Learning through experience can be only done when they are young and their test scores, even their future depend on their way of learning. It is very important to explore new ways of learning and be accepting to try out new methods to further educate ourselves.