KVA Learning Styles

There have been many theories proposed to explain how people learn, but few surpass the popularity of what is commonly referred to as the KVA styles.  KVA stands for the three modalities that people use to access and make sense of external information, namely, kinesthetic-tactile, visual and auditory.  The general idea is that people are better able to understand new information when it is conveyed through one’s preferred modality.   Proponents of this idea believe that the learner is able to maximize learning when information is conveyed using the appropriate modalities. 

Kinesthetic or tactile learners like to learn by first-hand experience.  They like to manipulate, touch, move, and feel the reality of what they are learning.  We can see this in very young children who like playing with water.  They like to see what water can do and the limits of the medium.  These learners like to explore their environments, run experiments, and engage in hands-on activities. 

Visual learners think in pictures.  They like images and manipulating these pictures in their minds.  In the typical classroom, visual aids often capture the attention of these students.  When helping these learners, they often have an easier time understanding complex information that are visually represented in time lines, diagrams, charts, pictures, and the like.  They can also be engaged in imagining how a particular scene could look like to them. 

The typical classroom often caters to auditory learning.  This is the usual classroom where a teacher talks about the lesson and illustrates using verbal explanations.  They also remember and make sense of information better when they repeat the words and talk aloud to themselves. 

The KVA learning styles approach also presumes that we prefer to use one of the three modalities over the other two.  As such, our preferences can easily be summarized by rearranging the three letters.  For example, someone who is first auditory and then visual would have the AVK style; another person who is more kinesthetic-tactile before visual and auditory will have the KAV style, and so forth.  You may want to take a look at a free material I found that includes an informal assessment and explanation of one’s KVA learning style (see http://epc.ucsc.edu/UserFiles/File/Peer%20Mentor%20-%20Learning%20Styles.pdf). 

Learning about our own learning styles can be helpful, as this guides us to maximize our learning by engaging in activities and methods that allow us to use the modalities through which we learn best.  Although this has its most direct application to those who are in the teaching profession and parents who tutor their children, we can also use this knowledge to get our message across to others more effectively by exploring ways of delivery using all three modalities.