The impact of personal learning styles in nursing education
Everyone has a unique and individual learning style, but all sensory learning styles fit into three main categories: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Knowing one's sensory learning style can help nursing students find alternate ways to study and learn and, when shared with nursing educators, can help them teach to the strengths of each student.
Sensory learning styles
According to the article, What's YOUR learning style?, we depend on our senses to "process the information around us. Most people tend to use one of their senses more than the others," states the author and offers this test for finding out one's learning style.
Kolb Learning Styles Inventory
Besides favoring one sense over the other, learning styles are also often described using the Kolb Learning Styles Inventory:
Concrete Experience (CE): being involved in a new experience.
Reflective Observation (RO): watching others or developing observations about one's own experience.
Abstract Conceptualization (AC): creating theories to explain observations.
Active Experimentation (AE): using theories to solve problems and make decisions.
Concrete learners and nursing
In nursing education and in education in general, understanding students' learning styles and helping them find ways to use their personal learning style to their own benefit is a goal of nursing educators.
For example, an article on PubMed.gov states that "The learning style of 192 Registered General Nursing … students was determined using the Kolb Learning Styles Inventory." The article stated that the majority of nursing students (53.7%) had a concrete learning style while 46.3% were labeled "reflective."
The impact of this study underlined a fact that most nursing educators already knew, "concrete learners tend to choose people-oriented professions," like nursing.
Participation and experiential learning
The study also showed that nursing students had a variety of learning styles that needed to be addressed by educators. "The findings have reinforced the need for using a variety of delivery styles with students, with an emphasis on participation and experiential learning." Using a variety of styles is "essential given the distribution of learning styles found with the students." Nurse educators were asked to examine their own thoughts and assumptions about learning styles to better educate their nursing students by varying styles for the greatest educational impact.
Learning styles and nursing specialties
Another study using the Kolb Learning Styles Inventory examined the connection between learning styles and nursing students' career paths. Although no connection was found between learning styles and students' preference for a specific nursing specialty, "Students with concrete learning styles were more influenced by person-oriented factors in career choices than those with abstract learning styles."
Technology over tradition
In the article Exploring student response systems in nursing education, the author concludes that "the didactic lecture format … limits the ability of students to participate and respond to the evidence presented." Lecturing, the article continues, does not help to address students' individual learning styles and it only favors those students who are solid, auditory learners. Today computers are being used in conjunction with traditional lectures as computer programs are developed to facilitate and enhance every student's learning style.
Flexibility
As the article Personal 'learning style' key to educational success states in its title, knowing one's learning style and teaching to this style is the ideal way to reach educational success. But, as Susan Bastable, RN, EdD, chair and professor in the department of nursing at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., states, "No matter what their preferred learning style, nurses need to continually challenge themselves."
"Flexibility is key here," Bastable continues. Nurses shouldn't "get so into one mode that they almost block themselves, saying ‘I can't learn this way.'"
