Peter Honey and Alan Mumford (1982) developed a learning theory that they based upon the work of Kolb. This theory used Kolb’s learning cycle (1975), which has four stages to learning: Having an experience, reviewing the experience, concluding from the experience and planning the next step. From this, they identified four learning styles or preferences to learning: Activist, Reflector, Theorist, and Pragmatist.
Each one of these learning styles comes with its own strengths and weaknesses of character, what type of learner people are and what preferences they have when it comes to learning After completing my personal Swot analysis and identified my strengths and weaknesses in relation to learning, I took a learning styles questionnaire, based on honey and Mumford’s learning theory. The questionnaire involved picking out statements that related to my personality, this produced a Graph of where I sat within the four stages. It showed that I had equal elements of an Activist and a Pragmatist both showing as 34.8%, 15.2% was equal in both a Theorist and Reflector. The strengths from Honey and Mumford’s Activist are Happy to give things a try, enjoys new situations, Pragmatists are practical and realistic, gets straight to the point and keen to try things out. The strengths from my Swot ; enthusiastic, enjoy new experiences, flexible, open minded, embraces change, ‘needs to do it now’ and likes to be hands on and practical fit into the traits of the Activist and Pragmatist.
I learn by doing and trying things for myself, if I make mistakes along the way, I try and change to ensure these mistakes wouldn’t happen again. I am always keen to try new ideas to keep things fresh and new. This flexibility and open mindedness means that I am adaptable to change.
Weaknesses of an Activist: goes into action without sufficient preparation, tendency to take the obvious action without considering the alternatives. Pragmatists weaknesses: not overly interested in theory or basic concepts and impatient with small talk, the weaknesses I identified from my Swot that I: jump in at the deep end, takes risks, fail to prepare before diving in, becomes bored easily, doesn’t enjoy theory prefers to get straight to practical. These can and have been a barrier to learning, as without using the correct tools to help you plan and prepare ahead could leave you with much to do and not enough time to do it in, you could also miss an important instruction as you failed to prep accordingly.
(480)Throughout life and in everything we do, we all have strengths and weaknesses that contribute to our success or failure; Understanding and being able to analyse the factors of your learning skills could affect the outcome of the task at hand. There are many learning theories that relate to your traits within your character, these can help you identify your different thought processes, to suit
