Revision is the key to scoring highly in exams and doing well at school. It’s more about quality than it is quantity though as spending hours going over topics will only help your child if their choice of revision method works for them. Consider learning styles and how they learn best.
What Are Learning Styles?
If you’re not familiar with learning styles, it’s the idea that we all have preferred ways of learning and taking on new information. There are three common types – the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic learning styles. If you’re a parent, we recommend looking into which your child has as this will allow you to find the most effective means for them to study. Below is some information from an independent school in Surrey on each and how you can identify which category they fall under.
The Visual Learning Style
If your child enjoys learning through the means of annotation, graphs and visuals that support their learning, it is likely that they are a visual learner. Artistic forms of learning such as mind maps can help, as well as tools to make notes stand out.
The Auditory Learning Style
As the name suggests, individuals with this learning style learn best through instructions that are given to them and reading things out loud. What can also help is adjusting tone slightly to emphasise particular points, repetition and asking questions about what has been discussed. Videos and other recordings can be helpful for this reason as they can be replayed as many times as necessary.
The Kinaesthetic Learning Style
Enthusiastic is a great way to describe kinaesthetic learners. Those with this particular learning style need stimulating learning activities such as the opportunity to experiment, field trips where they can go out and explore and short breaks to stay energised and focused. Although this may seem tricky to accomplish, there are a multitude of learning opportunities you can utilise around you and fun games that you can create. Making things such as models as a part of their learning can also help, such as a model heart or volcano.
What Else You Can Do
Other things you can do include speaking to their teacher to see whether accommodations can be made to make learning easier, such as sitting closer to the front so that they can see the board and hear their teacher clearly.
How to Identify Which Your Child Has
You can work out which learning style your child has by working through a series of different tasks and seeing how your child responds. One thing to note is that children can be a combination of two different learning styles, so if you’re having a difficult time trying to pinpoint which your child has, this may be the case. In this case completing a VARK quiz can be helpful.
While these are the three main learning styles, there are many more that have since been recognised that may explain how your child learns better. Lean into what your child prefers to learn and see how you can help them further.
