Our Study Style is the Result of Our Personality

From our childhood, all that we learn and do largely depends on our personality. And whatever we learn during our childhood has a major effect on our future life i.e. education, career, relationships, and personal life. Our happiness or misery is decided by the path we select and how efficiently we walk on it. Further, our success or failure on our selected path is the result of personality and our speed and approach to learning.

Of course, the environment we are in and people around us play a significant role in shaping our personality when we are growing. But everybody is born with a unique personality and hence we have our own style and capacity of learning things. And this is reflected in the way we study.

Based on several long-term studies on students, researchers have classified different learning styles or approaches. In the following paragraphs, we have discussed each learning approach along with the characteristics that decide a student’s learning style. After reading this article, you will be able to identify your learning style. Knowing it, you will also be able to update your efforts and ways to bring better results in whatever you study or do. Read on.

Attitude towards learning

Anthony Grasha and Sheryl Riechmann have created a learning style scale in 1974 in order to determine the approach to learning and attitude of students. Based on that scale, there are six types of learning styles.

Avoidant learning

People with this type of approach try to delay or avoid difficult and stressful tasks and situations. The main reason for this type of behavior is their internal fears, i.e. fear of low or negative results, failure, criticism, and rejection.

Participative learning

This learning style represents the active involvement of students in study and other activities. Instead of avoiding any task or activity just because it’s hard, they try to get involved and match themselves with other participants. It shows their readiness and willingness to learn new things without fearing failure or negative results as long as there are other people actively taking part as a team in the same activity.

Competitive learning

People with this type of learning style are seen as proactive. They find it easy to learn and understand whatever comes in their way, be it study or the career. They also carefully watch their competition and keep comparing their results with those of others in the same field or organization. This prompts them to perform even better every time they find others going ahead of them.

Collaborative

On the contrary to the competitive learning style, this style represents people with collaborative nature. They like to be a good part of the team and collaborate with others for a broader purpose. They are concerned about the group results rather than their own individual results. This type of people makes great organizations that do great in the market.

Dependent

This type of learners needs help from teachers or mentors. They often feel stress and frustration and can’t initiate things with any good strategy without the support from others.

Independent

Unlike dependent learners, people with this type of learning style can handle their tasks and assignments independently. They do well individually as well as in group without the need for involvement of teachers.

Learning approaches

Apart from different learning styles as described in the previous section, there are three main approaches people take in study and learning depending on their personality.

Strategic learning

People having this learning style are mostly result oriented. They don’t care about things that are philosophically right or wrong. Such people don’t waste time and are very concerned about how things are taking place and how they are evaluated being extrinsically motivated. Strategic learners also take care about their performance and work hard to get expected results. This prompts them to have a strategic approach to studying and learning things in their life and career.

Deep learning

People with intrinsic motivation take this approach to learn. They are open to learning new things and have new experiencing. This behavior leads them to explore things beyond what they are supposed to. Additionally, they tend to spend more than appropriate time to learn things deeply when they are interested. This is one of the biggest setbacks of this type of learning approach. The student with this learning approach also tends to switch topic often following their internal voice and interest. Due to this, they find it hard to focus on anything for a long time. These characteristics sometimes keeps them from progressing and getting desired results regardless of the fact that they can have deep knowledge on topics they are interested in.

Surface learning

Surface learning refers to the approach in which people jump from one subject or topic once they are done with basic learning to another topic subject. Moreover, they don’t have any interest in learning anything in detail. More often, they are likely to look for additional help. If you are among them, try essay writing service reviews.

This type of attitude is mostly reflected by people who are moody and sensible towards things. They also have pessimistic nature, and this makes them more feared of failure. They work to avoid failure instead of gaining deep knowledge, experiencing new things and achieving success.

We hope this article will help you understand your personality, attitude and learning approach that will help you direct your efforts for greater results and better future.

Wish you all the best!

Author bio

Stephanie Ward is an academic writer and editor, expert at writing guides for students.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.