What kind of learner are you--a listener, a reader, or something else?

Suggested by this thread.

I’m sure most of us have sat through more than a few PowerPoint presentations. I, for one, find them endless, mind-numbing, and pointless, because I have extreme difficulty processing information unless I can read it. I can take notes fine, but information taken in that way only goes into RAM; to store it on my cerebrum’s hard drive, I have to read it (and then manipulate what I’ve read by rewriting it.) To me this is so natural that anything else seems weird, but I’m quite aware that many people simply hate to read and have to hear what they’re trying to learn.

So what about you lot, Dopers? How do you learn best?

I learn best by doing. So I’m a doer.

I am much much more able to learn how to do things if I have a go at doing them and persist.

Will is a massive factor. If I don’t have the underlying will to learnsomething I find it very difficult to learn it. This factor plagued me through University… I was very good at the things I was interested in (will power) but didn’t learn the things I wasn’t (no will power) has hard as I tried.

I thought about including that as a category, but I chose not to because, it seems to me, there is a difference between acquiring information and mastering a process, and the latter can only be accomplished with hands-on experience. We can talk about both, of course, but it was the former I meant to discuss.

I am much much more able to learn how to do things if I have a go at doing them and persist.

Will is a massive factor. If I don’t have the underlying will to learnsomething I find it very difficult to learn it. This factor plagued me through University… I was very good at the things I was interested in (will power) but didn’t learn the things I wasn’t (no will power) has hard as I tried.
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I thought about including that as a category, but

For the most part, I’m like the OP - I know things much more completely if I’ve written them down, than if I simply hear them. When I went through the Navy’s Nuclear Power School the whole course of instruction was set up based on this method of learning being the most effective for the most people: Instructors would have a set of notes that they had to write onto the board, the students then had to copy said notes into their notebooks, as a minimum. Additional notes were up to the student, but those were required.

This isn’t to say I can’t learn from hearing things, but for the most part if I want to be sure I have something, I need to write it down.
And, like the OP, I feel that practical knowledge (learn by doing) really is a separate sort of learning. There are any number of tasks that one can bring so-called book learning to, but which then require a hands-on approach before such skills can be considered mastered. But there are large bodies of knowledge where one needs to understand things that you just can’t get by doing. (Or the doing is too dangerous, or expensive, or otherwise not practical.)

I’m both a listener and a reader. I could get through most of my college classes with a decent grade by either showing up for lectures or reading the book - I didn’t need to do both.

Now that I don’t have to haul my ass out of bed for an 8:20 class, I prefer listening in a meeting to reading a document, but I’m still fine with either.

ETA: And it seems to me that needing to take notes to retain information actually makes you a doer.

I’m a reader and a doer, definitely not a listener. People always find it necessary to read the rules of a board game aloud to everyone present before we start a game we’ve never played. This means absolutely nothing to me. You might as well be talking gibberish than try to explain to me how to do something. Just give me the damn manual and let me try it for myself!

This reminds me of when people verbally describe how to get somewhere to me. They might as well be speaking chinese.

They lose me after the second left or right turn.
“At the end of this road turn left, then you follow round to the right then fleeb sporgl wemp flib spoog margflef eat spleeg forgle. And then you go up the road until you get to the big church and turn right, then left, then forg sporg meek boobs”

Listener, all the way. Question-asker, discusser, note-taker. I read mostly for nonessential, curiosity-based knowledge. When reading and retention are required, my comprehension tenses up somehow. My attention slackens and I miss a lot.

One of my professors in college was so devoted to the idea of history as a series of authoritative texts that he tested almost entirely to the books assigned. He was an excellent, thorough and interesting lecturer - you could get an excellent grasp of the subject matter from him, and this was a one-semester, 20th century survey course, for gosh sakes. But the volume of reading assigned was punishing, and if you tried to get by with just reading here-and-there, to illuminate this or that point, you would get punished another way, with Cs or worse. And I got Cs.

My prof really was less concerned that you got a solid grounding in that period of history than that you did 100 percent of the reading he told you to. What I read in that course, I read resentfully. It was years before I got back to some of those books and discovered what I’d been missing. But I felt very little regret, because I knew I would never have appreciated them under the circumstances.

Depends what I’m learning. I read well and retain well. In college I often didn’t read the text and just listened in class (taking no notes.) But when learning programming concepts, I need to actually do the stuff, so neither reading nor listening work.

In college I was a reader and note taker. I went to class and even took notes, but with few exceptions (e.g. math based courses) that was more useful in keeping me abreast of where we were in the syllabus than learning the material.

Transition to med-school: I find that I need to make equal use of reading, lecture, and writing study guides. With the volume of information we cover in a day, it really does help to access the material in several different mediums, if for no other reason than to prevent burn out from sitting in the library reading the same note-set over and over. Typically, I pre-skim the lecturer’s notes for the next day’s classes to give me some idea of what they will talk about; go to lecture and take notes sparingly just to keep me engaged (we get a transcript of every lecture afterwards, so it makes no sense to take lengthy notes); immediately after lectures for the day are over I thoroughly read and highlight the note-set; the next day I take notes on the note-set. It kind of functions as a reverberating loop. I don’t expect to remember anything from the lecture except basic mechanisms and what the prof spent more time on/got more excited talking about, which helps me read more actively, and make more effective study guides.

About PowerPoint: I think that when used properly, they are extremely effective as prompts to guide a speaker’s thoughts. Most people are not good public speakers, and it helps for them to have a visible pre-planned format to follow. We’ve had a few old timers who basically came to class and just started talking. No PowerPoint, no overhead projections. Unsurprisingly, their lectures tended to ramble in various directions with sentences that ran on for pages.

I learn by doing. The best training I ever had was not by watching someone, but by having them stand behind me and say, “okay, click here, enter the information there, you can pull up a drop down box by hitting this button” etc. The hand-eye co-ordination got the information into my head faster. I’ve adopted it when I cross-train people by sitting with them and telling them what to do with the computer software, instead of having them watch me do it, which is boring.

I am very visual. Graphs, color-coding, diagrams, photos, video, PowerPoints…all of them are what help me click it all together. When I’m reading, I’m still mentally creating visuals to assist my comprehension. Notes are often color-coded, and I use an outline format because of the visual organization.

I think this is why classes like economics just drove me insane with the formulas and whatnot; there really isn’t a visual component, and it was extremely difficult to understand the concepts.

I am almost exclusively an auditory thinker. I even “hear” what I read; I have no thoughts about the Dopers whose nicks I remember look like but a fairly clear notion of they sound like.

But I love to read. What I hate are visual representations – maps, charts, graphs, timelines, you name it, I can’t grasp it. I once took a test of visual/spatial skills which involved visualizing a 4x4 cube and then following instructions – start at the bottom left, go up one and back two and so on – and I ended up somewhere outside of the cube. Coulda been Cleveland, I don’t remember. Then they had you do it with a drawing of the cube in front of you and, well, I think I got the lowest score ever achieved on that test.

Deleting duplicate post

This is the funniest thing I have ever read. And I know exactly what you are talking about. I usually nod and pretend I understood, but deep down I know I’m screwed.

Funny - I’ m like that too. Listener though I am, if I need to memorize exact instructions, my limit is one or two steps. After that it’s all fleegle bloop and blah blah.

And have you ever noticed how uncomfortable the giver gets when you pull out a pen and paper and start writing their instructions down? It’s just not something normal people do!

I am very much a visual person. Whether it’s reading something, looking at a diagram or watching how something is done, that’s usually the easiest way for me to learn. I remember things that I’ve seen better than things that I’ve heard, and will often picture a phrase in a book when recalling some fact.

Unless the subject bores me to death in which case I’m not paying enough attention to remember it regardless os the method used to attempt shoving it into my brain.

Visual, in as much as I think in words so unless the description is really specific I need to see what it is you’re talking about. You can tell me how to do something three times and I still might not be able to picture what you mean, but if you show me once I’ll get it.

Partly depends on the subject matter.

I lean cocepts really easily and it doesn’t matter how they’re presented. I did equally as well reading the text book or listening to the Prof. Taking notes aids, but I would almost never read the notes afterwards. It was writing down the notes which helped.

For memorizing material, it’s got to be learned visually. Three directions makes everything turned to mush.

I find reading and listening are about equal – but only lodge something into my short-term memory when it comes to learning how to do something new. It’s the actual doing that cements the steps into my long-term memory.