Honey and Mumford

Taken from How to be an e-tutor by Dr Richard Mobbs.

Learning styles were developed by Peter Honey and Alan Mumford, based upon the work of Kolb, and they identified four distinct learning styles or preferences: Activist, Theorist; Pragmatist and Reflector. These are the learning approaches that individuals naturally prefer and they recommend that in order to maximise one's own personal learning each learner ought to:

• Understand their learning style
• Seek out opportunities to learn using that style

To understand your particular learning style Honey and Mumford have developed a Learning Style Questionnaire [see further reading] and with this information you will be in a far better position to do three really useful things [quoting P. Honey]:

1. "Become smarter at getting a better fit between learning opportunities and the way you learn best. This makes your learning easier, more effective and more enjoyable. It saves you tackling your learning on a hit-and-miss basis. Equipped with information about your learning preferences, you'll have many more hits and fewer misses."
2. "Expand the 'band width' of experiences from which you derive benefit. Becoming an all-round learner, increases your versatility and helps you learn from a wide variety of different experiences - some formal, some informal, some planned and some spontaneous."
3. "Improve your learning skills and processes. Increased awareness of how you learn, opens up the whole process to self-scrutiny and improvement. Learning to learn is your most important capability since it provides the gateway to everything else you want to develop."

Note: However, to be an effective learner you should also develop the ability to learn in other styles too.

Characteristics

The characteristics of the four learning styles are summarised in the following table.

Original definitions

Honey and Mumford's original definitions are as follows