What are the benefits to taking an in-person class? Do I need a live class?  To answer these questions, you need to discover your own personal learning style.  There are 4 of them and knowing your dominant learning style will help you choose between a live or self-paced class.   

Visual

The visual learner responds to and retains more information from visual aids like charts, diagrams, and all of the corresponding circles and arrows.  Surprisingly, a dominant visual learner doesn’t benefit as much from videos or photographs, just the charts and diagrams as from charts and diagrams connecting the ideas.   

auditory

The auditory learner must hear the information in order to retain it best. This may be in the form of lectures and group discussion of the topics being studied.  An auditory learner may also prefer to speak through a topic first before sorting it out in their head. 

Read and Write

The reading and writing learner retains information best when they are reading the material and/or writing it down as they hear it in a lecture. Seeing the words on a page helps them to best retain what they’re studying and this person will often be the quietest in class. 

Kinesthetic

This learner will best retain information when the subject matter is placed into a reality environment like hands-on learning, videos, demonstrations, practice, and experience. Real life application means the most to this learning style and provides the best retention of information.

Multiple styles

All of us respond to multiple styles of teaching, but most have one dominant style.  My personal style usually falls (depending on the assessment I take) as an even split between auditory and kinesthetic.  This means I do well when someone tells me the information and I can apply it to a real-life situation.

How Do I know Which is MY Style?

Thanks to the internet, many of us are being conditioned for the read and write and kinesthetic learning processes because that’s what’s most readily available.  But, a little looking is all it takes to find podcasts with millions of subscribers around the globe all catering to the auditory learner.  If you prefer listening to a podcast over watching a YouTube video, you may be an auditory learner. 

A better way to determine how you best learn and retain information is to take an assessment.  It’s usually a 15 to 20 question quiz and only takes a few minutes to complete. You want to avoid the social media quizzes as they’re just algorithms designed to randomize the results enough to be accurate sometimes (think: who is your celebrity back yard landscape designer?).  Here are a couple of websites we found some which have legitimate and mostly accurate assessments for learning styles:

https://vark-learn.com/the-vark-questionnaire/

http://www.educationplanner.org/students/self-assessments/learning-styles-quiz.shtml

Closing

HI-TEC thinks like a school AND a business.  We have live classes and a fully self-paced curriculum to suit the many learning styles of our students.  We address every learning style in every class we teach – online or in person!  Like we’ve mentioned so many times, we want to be a part of your success and that means teaching you everything we know about passing the exam and starting your career.  It’s how we give you the high ground advantage.  We’re better because we focus on the core competencies you need to get started and mix up the videos, photos, diagrams, and lectures. We’ve worked for the biggest schools in the country.  We know what students need to be successful, and how to best provide everyone with the knowledge and skills required to make home inspections a lifelong career. We don’t make sales pitches in class, and we teach the whole marketing process in every class so you can get licensed, get marketing, and start recouping your investment right away.

Give us a call at 877.51.HI.TEC and let one of our admissions experts help you get the answers you need!