The power of identifying your learning style

Understanding how you learn and applying that knowledge to your school, work, or life in general will help you pick up new skills and hone older ones with ease throughout your life. Below is a look at the dominant characteristics of each learning style, and a trick to make learning easier for each.

Also, you can benefit from a blend of learning styles. So there's no need to think that just one style fits you. In fact, depending on the context of a lesson or work experience, there may be more than one set of study tricks that work well for you.

If you learn best when you can see the material you're learning, you are a visual learner.

As a visual learner, colour-coding your notes and placing them on the page in a way that highlights the spatial relationship between elements can help you commit lessons to memory.

If these visuals help you organize and take in new information, don't be shy about creating your own visual aids with lots of colour and shape to engage the eye.

You might also benefit from videotaping lectures or watching online videos. Watching (or re-watching) these will allow you to observe the instructor's body language while you listen to gain extra insight into what's most important in the lesson or presentation.

Have you noticed that you learn best when engaged in hands-on activities? If the answer is yes, you're probably a kinesthetic learner.

As a kinesthetic learner, seize every chance you can to engage in hands-on learning activities.

You'll also want to give yourself frequent breaks, and get up and move around during class or meetings (if you can). These movement intervals will make it easier to focus while you sit.

You may also benefit from listening to recordings of lessons while you walk, cycle or engage in other physical activity.

Using your hands, whether you're writing notes, making drawings and charts to illustrate what you're learning, or even just doodling, can also help you internalize new material.

If you do best when you can simply hear your lessons, you're an auditory learner.

If you're an auditory learner, sit in on as many lectures as you can, and consider recording the lessons instead of, or in addition to, writing your notes.

Online video lectures are another very useful learning aid if you're an auditory learner. Making adjustments to the way you study can also be helpful.

Also, when you review the information in a textbook, you may find that it's easier to remember the subject matter when you read the text out loud.

Carefully consider how you best learn to figure out your learning style, and follow these tips to help maximize your learning.