Find Out About Yourself

Dear Students,

Here in the Success Center for New Student Nurses, I will have some areas that will help you learn more about yourself, and how you learn.

HOW WE LEARN

First, it might help if you know whether you are Right or Left brain dominant. Take a look at the Learning Styles link. When you open this link on the left side of your screen there are short cuts to the different tasks.

1. Read the Introduction and the Hemisperic Dominance description.

2. Take the Hemisperic Dominance Test or Inventory to determine the balance of your brain's hemisperes. (The test and inventory are the same, just called two different names).

3. When you push "score", there will be a paragraph that tells you how many questions you answered for right or left brain dominance that will indicate whether you are right or left bran dominant.. There will also be a list of six words such as: Holistic, Random, Concrete, etc.

4. Read each of the 6 Information Processing Styles, and pay attention to which word describes your learning style or habit. For example: Linear vs Holistic. If you had the word "holistic" on your list, you would be prone to processing information as described for holistic in that list.

As you read, you will probably learn why you do things the way you do. Have fun!

Next, you may want to know if you are a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner.

1. Go to the VAK link. Read about visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning. There are many links from this site to explore, but first I would like for you to take the test.

2. Scroll down to VAK learning style indicators (free self-test questionnaire). Take a piece of paper and make 3 columns, label one column visual, one auditory and the last one kinesthetic. (Kinesthetic means actually doing or touching).

3. Answer all of the questions (don't put a lot of thought into your answers, put what comes to mind), and make a mark in the column that best fits your answer.

4. Total each column, and the one with the most marks indicates whether you are mainly a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner.

There you have it! I hope you will begin to understand how you learn. Everyone learns differently, and if you know and understand how you learn, it will help you to succeed in nursing school.

Let me know what you have found out about yourself. I am a right brain learner!

Marcia