CILEx Law School

How do adults learn?
Find out and turn this to your advantage

CILEx Law School has drawn together some top tips about how adults learn, so that you can get on with your legal studies and make the most of your exams in January.

About the authors: This article was written by the CILEx Law School Teaching Team.

If you type: ‘How do adults learn?’ into any search engine, you will likely receive millions of results. That is a lot of potential good advice waiting to be digested, but where do you start? Before you dive down the infinite rabbit hole that is the internet, we have drawn together some top tips to share, so that you can simply get on with the learning.

Choosing to learn with CLS - as an adult - is a wonderful opportunity and proves that for, many there, is still life beyond the textbooks and lessons they were taught in school, college or university. However, not everyone learns in the same way, and each of us has our own style of learning. So, to make the most of this opportunity, it is essential to work out what type of learner you are because knowing this will make your learning much more effective.

What type of learner are you?

A popular place to start can be to identify the type of learner you are, and the characteristics often associated with that learning style. There are a lot of examples to choose from, but for this article we are going to focus on the VARK model, which stands for the following: Visual; Auditory; Reading/ Writing; and Kinaesthetic. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is a popular choice.

Visual learners As the name suggests, visual learners learn best when they focus on using tables, charts, images and video clips (such as topic recordings). They will have a tendency to create mind maps and flow charts when preparing for study exercises or planning their mock exam responses. If you are a visual learner, it is likely that you will be comfortable with following the headings in your course manuals, as this provides you with a visual and logical structure.

Auditory learners This type of learner uses their hearing to understand and retain information and can often absorb information from topic recordings and video-casts without using any written materials to guide them. Auditory learners often find it useful to read out loud from their course manual when revising, or by making their own recordings (using their smartphone) and then listening to them.

Reading/Writing learners If you have ever buried yourself in your course manual and found yourself making notepad after notepad of course notes, it is likely that you are a read/write learner. Although this is often considered to be an obvious and overlooked learning style, it is actually an incredibly important one, as the vast majority of us will have tried learning by reading or writing at some point in our lives.

Effective note-taking is an underrated skill, and one that takes practice; it is inextricably linked to the 3 levels of reading (which you will have come across in your CLS induction sessions) (see box on previous page). Kinaesthetic learners While this may be a word with which you are unfamiliar, the methodology will certainly be familiar.

Kinaesthetic learners tend to learn best by applying information in a practical manner, and prefer to dive headÿrst into their study exercises or self-test chapter questions and try to learn along the way. This might seem like an odd order for learning, but often this technique overlaps with the other learning styles and is supported with high-quality information sources, be they written, visual or auditory.

Top tips for Reading/Writing learners 

Skim read your course manual upon first reading. In this way, you will familiarise yourself with the key headings, charts and diagrams, and get a feel for the size of the chapter and topic ahead of you. Then you will want to rapid read the chapter again, this time taking a little longer to do so, that is to say, reading chunks of text or whole sentences, and honing in on certain elements of the text in order to retain a little more understanding of the key topics.

You will note that we have not mentioned having a pen, pencil or highlighter in your hand at this stage. This is because now you have a good awareness of the important elements of the chapter, you are ready for some academic reading. At this point, you will be equipped to make more effective notes that are based on your improved awareness of what is important in the chapter, and include only the relevant information that you will want to revisit later.

This learning style also works with the transcripts of topic recordings, study exercises and answer guides, past papers and Chief Examiners’ Reports, so there is a lot for you to get stuck into. 

Use whichever style works best for you

Ultimately, you may discover that you are a mix of one, two or all of the above learning styles, and that trying to settle on one does not work for you. You may also discover that you are something else entirely, and this is just fine: no particular learning style provides better results than any other, and different people use different learning methods depending on what works for them.

So, as long as you are using a learning method which works for you and is effective in helping you achieve your desired exam results, then really that is the only style that matters.