All students whether in grade school or college have individual learning styles. According to Susan Bastable, RN, EdD, the chair and professor of the Department of Nursing at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY, an effective learning style should be one that enables a student to learn more effectively. This doesn’t mean, however, that students can’t learn outside this learning system. It simply means that people naturally tend to learn better through a certain method. As such, there are no bad or good learning styles.

Prof. Bastable added that there are many determining factors to a student’s learning style, such as heredity, genetics, experience, and the situation that the student is in.

Identifying a child’s learning style means a lot because it can make or break a student’s ability to effectively grasp new information. On a larger scale, the proper assessment of learning styles can lead to either a successful career or winding up in a rut.

An effective learning style evaluation method is self-assessment. Many materials are available for this process, including the Solomon/Felder Index of Learning Styles, which looks at different dimensions of learning: perception (sensing vs. intuitive); processing (active vs. reflective); understanding (sequential vs. global); and input (visual vs. verbal).

This assessment method lets students work with all the activities so that they can identify what best works for them. Theoretically, when a student identifies him/herself with a learning style, they can achieve that “eureka!” moment, and then go for activities that can promote deep and long-term learning.