Learning profile
How do you learn best?
Everyone's brain learns differently, and most of us were never taught how ours works. Eight quick questions, and you get your learning personality: the way you actually take things in, remember them, and grow.
Eight questions about your brain. One profile that explains a lot.
Your route
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You have just seen a free read. If you want to go on and learn with Zavmo, here is how it would teach you, and who you would learn with.
The method
This is not a learning-styles test, and the difference is the whole point
The best-known claim in education is that people are visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners, and that teaching them in their channel improves how much they learn. The first half of that is a preference people really do report. The second half, the part that matters, is not supported by the evidence.
So these eight questions ask about something else. They read the conditions you learn under and the habits you already use: how much you want at once, how hard you want it pitched, how long you can hold a session, how much structure you need, where other people fit, and what makes an idea land. Those are real differences between people, they are well studied, and they change how a plan should be paced.
The eight questions, and the construct under each one
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How much at once 1 question
Whether you want a couple of ideas nailed at a time, an overview first, or the whole complex picture to wrestle with.
Working memory and cognitive load (Cowan, 2001; Sweller, 1988). Everyone’s capacity is limited. What differs is how much scaffolding you want built around that limit.
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Making it stick 1 question, worded in reverse
What you actually do when you need to remember something important.
Retrieval practice and distributed practice (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006; Cepeda and colleagues, 2008). This item is worded so that the answers the evidence favours are not the most flattering ones.
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Difficulty 1 question
How you like the difficulty pitched, honestly, rather than how you think you should answer.
Desirable difficulties (Soderstrom and Bjork, 2015). Conditions that slow you down during study often improve what you retain afterwards, which is why performance while learning is a poor guide to learning.
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Focus and rhythm 1 question
Whether learning happens for you in long stretches, short bursts, steady sessions with checkpoints, or whenever it grabs you.
Challenge and skill balance, and the absorbed states that follow from it (Engeser and Rheinberg, 2008).
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Structure 1 question
What you reach for first when a new thing lands: the map, the goal, a loose outline, or someone to check in with.
Self-regulated learning (Zimmerman, 2002) and the autonomy need in self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 2000).
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Learning with others 1 question, worded in reverse
Whether other people are how you think, or what breaks your focus.
Learning by teaching, and the effort effect that follows from expecting to teach (Fiorella and Mayer, 2013; Chase and colleagues, 2009).
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Pressure and motivation 1 question
What your best learning needs emotionally: stakes, safety, small wins, or the thing mattering to you.
Achievement emotions and their control-value antecedents (Pekrun, 2006; Immordino-Yang and Damasio, 2007).
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How it clicks 1 question
Whether an idea lands when you use it, see it, understand the theory under it, or link it to something you already know.
Concrete instance against abstract principle, and dual coding (Clark and Paivio, 1991). Note that dual coding is about combining words and images for everyone. It is not evidence that a person has a preferred channel.
The claim we are not making
Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork reviewed the learning-styles literature for Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Testing the claim properly needs a specific experimental design, one that can show an interaction between a person’s style and the method that teaches them best. They found almost no studies that used it, and among the few that did, several produced results that contradicted the claim outright. Their conclusion was that there is no adequate evidence base for putting learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.
Willingham, Hughes and Dobolyi reached the same place seven years later. Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal ran the matched design with adults and found no interaction between stated preference and the format that actually taught them best. Krätzig and Arbuthnott had already found that self-reported modality preference did not predict performance on the matching memory task.
That is a large amount of evidence pointing one way, and it is why there is no visual, auditory or kinaesthetic type anywhere in this questionnaire and no promise that we will teach to one.
What the evidence does support
Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham reviewed ten study techniques and rated each for utility. Two came out high: practice testing and distributed practice. Interleaved practice, self-explanation and elaborative interrogation came out moderate. Summarisation, highlighting, rereading, the keyword mnemonic and imagery for text came out low. The awkward part of that list is that highlighting and rereading are the two things most people actually do.
The individual findings hold up on their own. Roediger and Karpicke showed the testing effect: taking a test on material beats restudying it for long-term retention. Cepeda and colleagues mapped how the best gap between study sessions depends on how long you need to hold the material. Rohrer, Dedrick and Stershic showed interleaved practice beating blocked practice on later tests.
Here is the thing worth being clear about: those techniques work for everyone. They are not personal. What is personal is whether you will actually do them, and under what conditions, and that is what the eight questions read.
So what is the profile for
It shapes the pacing, not the evidence. If you need long uninterrupted stretches, a plan built from ten-minute fragments will fail you even though the fragments are individually well designed. If small early wins are what keep you going, front-loading the hardest unit is a bad idea for you specifically, even though difficulty helps in general.
The six archetypes are a way of describing a blend of the eight readings. They are not types and nobody is only one of them. The strengths, watch-outs and study advice attached to each one are written from the constructs listed above, so what you get back is a description of conditions and a set of techniques the research supports, rather than a channel.
What this is not
- This is not a validated psychometric instrument. It has no published reliability coefficient, it has not been normed against any population, and it is indicative rather than diagnostic. It is a short questionnaire built on constructs that are themselves well evidenced.
- Eight questions is one item per dimension. A single item cannot be checked against itself, so there is no internal consistency to compute here.
- Two items are worded in reverse so that agreeing all the way down the list does not produce a clean profile. That helps a little. Eight items is still too few to correct for a habit of agreeing.
- The six archetypes are descriptive language, not categories anyone has validated. Treat the blend, not the label.
- Nothing here is a diagnosis of anything, and it is not a measure of ability.
References
Every reference below was checked against the publisher record for its identifier before it was written here, and every one links out so you can read it yourself. Where a paper is used as a frame rather than as data, the note under it says so.
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(2008). Learning styles: concepts and evidence . Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105 to 119.
The reason this page is not a learning-styles test. The review found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern that would be needed to validate teaching to a style, and concluded there is no adequate evidence base for adopting learning-styles assessment in general educational practice.
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(2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories . Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266 to 271.
The later review reaching the same conclusion, cited so the position does not rest on a single paper.
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(2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: effects on comprehension . Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(1), 64 to 78.
A direct test of the matching claim in adults, using the design the Pashler review said was required. No interaction was found.
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(2006). Perceptual learning style and learning proficiency: a test of the hypothesis . Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(1), 238 to 246.
Self-reported modality preference did not predict performance on the matching memory task.
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(2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques . Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4 to 58.
The utility ratings quoted above. Practice testing and distributed practice were rated high utility; elaborative interrogation, self-explanation and interleaved practice moderate; summarisation, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for text and rereading low.
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(2006). Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention . Psychological Science, 17(3), 249 to 255.
The testing effect, which is what the "making it stick" question is scored against.
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(2008). Spacing effects in learning: a temporal ridgeline of optimal retention . Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095 to 1102.
How the best gap between study sessions depends on how long the material needs to be retained. Behind the spacing half of the same question.
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(2015). Interleaved practice improves mathematics learning . Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(3), 900 to 908.
Interleaving beating blocked practice on delayed tests. One of the techniques the resulting plan uses.
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(2015). Learning versus performance: an integrative review . Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176 to 199.
Desirable difficulties, and the distinction between performance during study and learning that lasts. Behind the difficulty question.
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(2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity . Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87 to 114.
The working-memory capacity limit behind the "how much at once" question.
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(1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: effects on learning . Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257 to 285.
Cognitive load theory, the other half of the same question.
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(2007). On the division of short-term and working memory: an examination of simple and complex span and their relation to higher order abilities . Psychological Bulletin, 133(6), 1038 to 1066.
Why working-memory capacity is not the same thing as a preference, and why we treat it as a constraint to design around rather than a type to sort people into.
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(2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: human needs and the self-determination of behavior . Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227 to 268.
Self-determination theory, and specifically the autonomy need: the question about how much you need to decide how the work gets done is asking about this construct.
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(2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: an overview . Theory Into Practice, 41(2), 64 to 70.
Self-regulated learning, behind the structure question.
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(2013). The relative benefits of learning by teaching and teaching expectancy . Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38(4), 281 to 288.
Learning by teaching, behind the "learning with others" question.
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(2009). Teachable agents and the protégé effect: increasing the effort towards learning . Journal of Science Education and Technology, 18(4), 334 to 352.
The effort effect of learning on someone else’s behalf. The second half of the same question.
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(2006). The control-value theory of achievement emotions: assumptions, corollaries, and implications for educational research and practice . Educational Psychology Review, 18(4), 315 to 341.
Achievement emotions, behind the pressure and motivation question.
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(2007). We feel, therefore we learn: the relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education . Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), 3 to 10.
Why emotional conditions are treated as part of the learning design rather than a soft extra.
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(2008). Flow, performance and moderators of challenge-skill balance . Motivation and Emotion, 32(3), 158 to 172.
Challenge and skill balance, behind the focus and rhythm question.
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(1991). Dual coding theory and education . Educational Psychology Review, 3(3), 149 to 210.
Behind the "how it clicks" question. Cited for what it actually says, which is that words and images together help everyone, and not as support for a preferred channel.
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