Nursing Learning Styles

This essay will discuss why understanding learning styles is useful to student nurses. In addition, I will discuss my own dominate learning styles, paying attention to my strengths and weaknesses, also identifying areas where it is necessary for me to improve my weaker learning style, and how I can build on this for the future development.
Within nursing there are lots of different study and learning methods available to us. A persons learning styles or main process of learning is crucial to their development and knowledge base. Currently there are various learning styles each one differ in terms of a person’s approach to learning. However I feel that these learning styles are essential to making learning more effective.
“Learning styles is
We do not usually choose the type of activities that best suits us because we are unaware that some methods suit us and some do not (Jasper, 2003). According to Jasper (2003) ‘‘Most of the learning that we are aware takes place in a formal learning situation where teaching and learning methods are not chosen by us but are imposed by other such as teachers, mentors and lecturers’’ (p.44).
Having an understanding of learning styles will be useful to student nurses as it allows them to be successful in their nursing degree, as well as their clinical placement. Student nurses will also be able to focus on areas that needs improving by identifying their strengths and weakness, in areas so that they can get more out of their education pathway and to be able to deliver a high standard of care to their patients. ''The individual learning has both strengths and weaknesses depending on what is to be learnt and how'' (Heffler, 2001).
According to Honey and Mumford learning styles (2006), we are all the product of our own learning, including everything we know, everything we do, everything we believe and everything we have learnt. “No-one learns completely in just one style, we all tend to fall under the one descriptor and borrow characteristics from the others” (Kolb,
The activities that allow a theorist to benefit from the learning process for me as a student nurse are situations where there is a chance to understand the concept, ideas, events, situations and outcomes. For example, being a theorist allows me to learn best by participating in classroom activities and having effective communication skills enables me to seek for information by asking questions from others participating students. “Conversely, the difficulty here is in the case where there are activities without background information or apparent purpose which will impair my learning and where I feel myself out of tune with other participants, for example when with lots of activist or people of lower intellectual competence” (Honey & Mumford, 1986).
Evaluating my learning style as an activist has indicated a low moderate. This is one of my weakest learning styles, improving my ability will enable me to experience new skills by working as an individual. I will have to develop the aspect of my weaker style to be able to support my learning on this nursing degree and also in my career as a nurse by being able to learn from new experiences and reflecting on it, It also will prepared me to take risk by going outside my comfort zone when experimenting with new or unfamiliar