After completing the Discovery Wheel and the Learning Style Inventory assignments which are presented by the text book Becoming a Master Student (Ellis, 2006, pp. 78-82), I discovered that I should trust my instinct now more than ever. I’ve always felt most confident when I had a chance to implement my knowledge and understanding in a lab or a real life setting. I learned that facts, figures, and examples are important parts in the way I learn. Breaking something down into smaller units and examining these units individually is something I enjoy doing, but that is not my preferred learning style.
My preferred learning style is the “How”. In order for me to learn or memorize new skills, ...view middle of the document...
Being in the Information Technology field, I have to try something over and over to become good at it. In this field, it’s seldom that a person will learn a new skill and be able to use it for the first time without making any mistakes and even if he or she does get it done without any mistakes it won’t be as good as it would have been if it was being implemented for the second or third time by that person. Reading, listening, or even watching is just not good enough. Most of the concepts and techniques we learn -at least in my experience- are built upon other concepts and techniques. For example, you won’t be able to master the skill of division if you don’t master the art of multiplying and subtracting first, therefore, since a given skill is based on one or more other skills, hands-on experience becomes a must in order for a person to be able to implement that new skill as one cohesive operation.
I remember when I was enrolled in an intermediate trigonometry class back in college. One chapter that I struggled with was called “Graphs of Trigonometric Functions”. We learned in that class how to graph a given equation using the concepts of sine, cosine, time, and angles. I just couldn’t see the purpose...
