Learning Styles
The Honey and Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire is the market leader. It has been used for over 20 years in every sort of organisation and educational institution. Literally thousands of people have benefited from completing this intriguing questionnaire and discovering whether they are inclined towards activist, reflector, theorist or pragmatist.
Learning styles preferences determine the things people learn and the ease with which they learn them. They exert a hidden, but powerful, influence on learning effectiveness.
'Hands-on' learners prefer to have a go and learn through trial and error. 'Tell me' learners prefer to be thoroughly briefed before proceeding. 'Convince me' learners want reassurance that the project makes sense. 'Show me' learners want a demonstration from an acknowledged expert.
Everyone, without exception, finds it helpful to know their preferred learning style. Armed with this information you will be in a far better position to do three really useful things:
- Become smarter at getting a better fit between learning opportunities and the way you learn best. This makes your learning easier, more effective and more enjoyable. It saves you tackling your learning on a hit-and-miss basis. Equipped with information about your learning preferences, you'll have many more hits and fewer misses.
- Expand the 'band width' of experiences from which you derive benefit. Becoming an all-round learner, increases your versatility and helps you learn from a wide variety of different experiences - some formal, some informal, some planned and some spontaneous.
- Improve your learning skills and processes. Increased awareness of how you learn, opens up the whole process to self-scrutiny and improvement. Learning to learn is your most important capability since it provides the gateway to everything else you want to develop.
The questionnaire will only take you ten minutes or so to complete online. You get your results within seconds of submitting your completed questionnaire and plenty of practical advice to help you become a more effective learner.
Which Learning Styles Questionnaire is best for you?
There are two versions of the Learning Styles Questionnaire. The 80-item is the original questionnaire and has 80 questions. The 40-item, which has 40 questions, was developed in 2000 as part of the Learning Series.
Advantages of the 80-item questionnaire
- Ideal for people who want a more comprehensive questionnaire (i.e. 20 items per style instead of 10)
- Better for a longer session where there is time to explore learning styles and the suggestions for
action in more depth - More appropriate for people who can relate to the business references
- More likely to appeal to traditionalists who want to use the original Honey & Mumford questionnaire.
Advantages of the 40-item questionnaire
- Ideal as an initial introduction for people who have not previously given much consideration to how they learn
- Useful if time is at a premium - the questionnaire takes less time to complete and score
- Helps people stay focused - there are fewer suggestions for action to choose between
- The wording is concise and better suited to a more diverse audience.
How it works
The user completes an online self-assessment questionnaire (a process that takes about 10-20 minutes, depending on the version) and receives an immediate diagnosis of his/her current learning style preferences. With these results, he/she also receives a tailor-made personal development plan. Built-in benchmarks enable the user to score him/herself against norms for different groups and he/she can compare his/her current results against previous results. Online links take the user to practical and digestible advice on implementing development suggestions and to related resources.