Experiential Learning Styles
Most educational
psychologists acknowledge that experience is an important part of
learning. In the last half of the
1900’s, cognitive and humanistic research pointed more and more towards the
importance of experience, especially applied to the way that older students
(high school and college) learn.
Saljo (1979) found that
the more life experience a student has, the more likely they are to view
learning as an internal, experienced based process rather than as an external process.
The theory of experiential
learning did not gain prominence until the work of Mezirow, Freire, Kolb and
Gregorc in the 1980's. In the early
1980's, they stressed that the heart of all learning lies in the way we process
experience, in particular, our critical reflection of experience. They spoke of
learning as a cycle that begins with experience, continues with reflection and
later leads to action, which itself becomes a concrete experience for
reflection.
Experiential learning is
used to describe the sort of learning undertaken by students who are given a
chance to acquire and apply knowledge, skills, and feelings in an immediate and
relevant setting. Another type of experiential learning is education
that occurs as a direct participation in the events of life. Here learning is
not sponsored by some formal educational institution but by people themselves.
It is learning that is achieved through reflection upon everyday experience and
is the way that most of us do our learning.
These are four learning styles which can be classified as
experiential:
1. Concrete/Reflective/Abstract/Active
– David Kolb
2. Phenomenonography
- Entwistle
3. Student
Approaches to Learning & Studying – Biggs