What kind of a learner are you? What do you think about your own approach to learning? This short series of questions asks you to think about yourself as a learner and make some provisional judgments. As you answer the questions, remember that they are about learning, not about school. Your examples do not have to be from an academic setting, but they can be. In responding to all of these questions, the most important thing is to be honest, which you can safely do because this assignment is not graded and will only be used to try to design a learning plan that will fit you. The next most important thing is to be as specific as you can. Give real examples from your life, not generalizations.
1. Give an example of an experience in which you have learned a skill or a body of knowledge well. This example need not be in a school context, though it may be. Explain briefly the circumstances of this learning experience and what you think made the experience successful. . You might consider some of the following factors: your age, your prior experience, your attitudes, your expectation, the other people involved, the physical and social context of the experience, the rewards, the penalties or costs, the feedback you received, the relevance of the experience to other elements in your life. You need not consider all of these factors; they are offered merely to provoke your thinking.
2. Give an example of a difficult or unsuccessful learning experience. This example need not be in a school context, though it may be. Explain briefly the circumstances and what you think made the experience unsuccessful. You may consider the factors listed in question 1 above.
3. In what contexts do you learn best? What kinds of situations bring out your learning abilities most effectively?
4. In what contexts do you learn least well? What kinds of situations seem to impede your learning?
5. How do you learn most effectively? If you could design the method by which you learned a new subject, how would you do so?
6. What methods of learning pose barriers to or create difficulties for your learning?
7. How effective have your high school and college classes been at creating an effective learning environment for you? Why? Be specific?
8. If you could create a high school or college that would be the most effective possible environment for you to learn in, what would it be like?
--John Tagg
This page was last edited: 08/11/06