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Learning Types

About Learning

The day-to-day work of Learning Design centres around learning, but it’s often in an indirect way. We help create and build resources for learning, assessments of learning, instructions and activities that promote learning – but at the end of the day, the act of learning is not in our control.

It’s individual students who do the learning. Each of us learns in our own way. Schema Theory helps to explain this by proposing that our brains function as a map of connections based on our personal experiences and exposure to input. So, we all develop our own schema, linking information with our perceptions, physicality, locations, relationships, sights, smells and sounds.

As we move through this work we are creating our schema, taking new information in and connecting to what we already know. We also take information in and don’t connect it to anything and it becomes forgotten. Learning therefore is the ability to take new information and connect it into our existing schema. Learning is making connections between things. In order to learn, we have to form a connection. Learning is about how we form new connections.

How do we connect new concepts, skills, information, and knowledge to what we already know?

Well that’s what the Learning Types propose – seven ways we can engage with new cognitive, affective and operative information and skill to form connections with our schema. This idea of an individual’s schema being unique helps explain why we all learn differently. We may all watch the same video or read the same book, but we connect very different ideas and take away quite different experiences because our schema, and what it can connect to is unique. Remember – you’ve been building your schema since your first day on the planet!

The seven learning types describe the different ways people build those connections. They draw on Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework for learning, reframed around a single question: what is the learner actually doing?

These learning types shouldn’t feel foreign or new – you’ve engaged with all of them throughout your life. You’ve learnt by watching a film or reading a book. By going out and researching. By hearing someone explain their circumstances and journey. You’ve tried something (and probably failed too), but learnt from your mistakes. Someone might have given you some advice and ways you can improve that changed your experience completely. You’ve made things with words and music and objects around the house and through that act of creation learnt something about yourself or your world. You’ve watched and adopted the actions of others you admire, whether they knew or not – you’ve changed based on what they did.

None of these types is better than another. Most learning experiences combine several in sequence, giving learners more ways to connect what’s being taught to what they already know. In fact one of the keys to working with these types of learning is that they are best used in combination to form learning sequences or lessons, rather than on their own. In this way they describe distinct blocks of time and activity within a lesson rather than the lesson in its entirety. The goal then becomes to allow learners to engage with concepts and topics in different ways. This improves their ability to learn by increasing the opportunities to connect new information with their schema.

One of the easiest diagnostic to find issues with lessons is to look at the lack of variety of learning types across the experience. These lessons often only appeal to a single way of learning, which limits the learners’ ability to find connections with their schema.