Is Your Child Visual, Auditory or Kinaesthetic?

People not only learn at different rates, but also in different ways. Some students want their teacher or lecturers to write everything on the board. Others prefer to listen. Some like to sit in small groups and discuss a question; others like to listen to a lecture, translating it into pictures or doodles in their notebook. Such individual learning preferences are known as learning styles.

Learning styles are generally divided into three categories: (1.) visual learners, who need to see it to know it, (2.) auditory learners, who need to hear it to know it and (3.) tactile/kinaesthetic learners, who prefer a hands-on approach.

It goes without saying that a visual learner profits most by learning from books, because his memory retains the printed words, sentences and paragraphs. He may remember without much effort that the paragraph about the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini was printed on an upper left-hand page of his history book. If he goes to a cinema, he will remember actions and incidents that he saw on the screen, while the spoken word becomes hazy and fades away.

In contrast, the auditory learner profits more by lectures than books, since his memory retains what he picks up through the ears. He may be able to repeat a conversation almost verbatim and at the same time have difficulty describing what the person with whom he conducted this conversation looked like. If he attends a cinema, the sound of words and music will stay with him, while the actions are very soon forgotten. Among the people who are preponderantly auditory, musicians are foremost, especially those who are able to repeat a composition which they have heard but whose score they have never seen.

Tactile/kinaesthetic learners learn best by a hands-on approach. Tactile refers to touch and kinesthetic to movement, two learning modalities that are closely related. Kinaesthetic learners often do well as performers: athletes, actors, or dancers.

Although there is some value in adjusting to a preferred learning style, we should not overlook that a child must be prepared for the real world and real time.

“In the real world, and real time, learning styles theory is often an academic luxury,” writes James Atherton in an article entitled Learning styles don’t matter. Therefore it is essential to teach a child a versatile learning approach from a young age, which means that he will be able to use multiple senses when learning. We must not improve only his strengths, but also his weaknesses.

There is no doubt that a person’s weaker senses can be improved. A blind person, being deprived of sight, usually develops all the other senses to a remarkable degree. To learn to read Braille, for instance, his tactile sense must be developed to a remarkable degree. This fact is important because it shows without the help of complicated tests that every sense can be developed and improved.

By learning to use all his senses, the learner’s ear will eventually come to the aid of his eye, and his hand to the aid of his ear, thereby opening three channels to his mind instead of only one.

Edublox is multisensory and addresses the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic skills of a learner — all at once.