To become a self-directed learner, you first need to find out who you are as a learner:

• What is your approach to learning?
• What strategies should you take to help you learn?

Approaches to Learning

When you use a ‘surface’ approach, you see a learning task as requiring specific answers to questions, so you rote learn bits and pieces.

When you use a ‘deep’ approach, you want to understand, so you focus on themes and main ideas.

Your approach to learning depends on your learning preferences and the course you are studying. The Biggs’ Revised Study Process Questionnaire has a number of questions about your attitudes towards your studies and your usual way of studying.

Most likely, you will find that you use a deep approach when you study your favourite subjects and a surface approach when you study subjects that you dislike.

The Higher Education Academy provides a good comparison (see Table 1) of the characteristics and factors that encourage Deep and Surface Approaches to learning.

There is another instrument that you can use to find out about who you are as a learner. This is the Felder-Soloman model (please refer to the section below on “Styles of Learning“)

Styles of Learning

You may have heard of the VARK learning styles where learners are identified by whether they have a preference for:

• Visual learning (pictures, movies, diagrams)
• Auditory learning (music, discussion, lectures)
• Reading and writing (making lists, reading textbooks, taking notes)
• Kinesthetic learning (movement, experiments, hands-on activities)

Learners do not use a single style. You may have preferences about how you like to learn, but you can also learn through other ways (although it may mean more effort on your part).

Your preference for a particular learning style may sometimes can cause problems in learning when your professor use a particular approach to teach in the classroom. Your professor’s particular approach to teaching may not be entirely due to their teaching preference but can also be due to their previous learning experiences when they were students.

In SMU, we strongly encourage that you be flexible in all various learning styles (as are pros and cons in each of the learning styles depending on the topic and its context). SMU also encourages your professors to use a variety of materials and instructional methods to allow students to at least have their learning style preference partly addressed.

By being aware of the different types of learning styles, this will have the potential to help you, as a learner, develop a more sophisticated awareness of your areas of strengths and weaknesses.

In the Felder-Soloman model, learners’ preferred mode of processing information is profiled on four dimensions: Active-Reflective, Sensing-Intuitive, Visual-Verbal and Sequential-Global.