mainly a visual, auditory,
kinesthetic or tactile learner; whether you learn best by seeing, hearing, moving or
touching. (The ability to taste and smell can be important in some work-styles, such as
wine-tasting and perfume-blending, but these two senses are not major ones in most
learning styles.)
How you
organize and process information - whether predominantly left-brain or right-brain,
analytical or "global", using "global" in the sense that you are more
"a broad-brush" person than a systematic thinker.
What
conditions are necessary to help you take in and store information - emotional,
social, physical and environmental.
How you retrieve information
- which may be entirely different to the way you take it in and store it.
How you take in information
In the Dunns' research, they
discovered that:
Only 30 percent of students remember even 75 percent of what they hear during a
normal class period.
Forty percent retain three-quarters of what they read or see. These visual learners
are of two types: some process information in word-form, while others retain what they see
in diagram or picture-form.
Fifteen percent learn best tactually. They need to handle materials, to
write, draw and be involved with concrete experiences.
Another 15 percent are kinesthetic. They learn best by physically doing - by
participating in real experiences that generally have direct application to their lives.
According to the Dunns, we each usually have one dominant strength and also a
secondary one. And, in a classroom or seminar, if our main perceptual strength is not
matched with the teaching method, we may have difficulty learning, unless we can
compensate with our secondary perceptual strengths.
This has major implications for solving the high-school dropout problem. In
our experience, kinesthetic and tactile learners are the main candidates for failure in
traditional school classrooms. They need to move, to feel, to touch, to do - and
if the teaching method does not allow them to do this they feel left out, uninvolved,
bored.
Neuro linguistic programming specialist Michael Grinder says that of
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
