Understanding Adult Learning Styles: An Insight into Kolb's Experiential Theory

Individuals are differ in their learning style. It is depend on how people learn based on ability to comprehend and retain information. Adult have more life experience to build on and competing responsibilities. The unique about adult learner is adult generally are more resistant to new ideas, autonomous, self-directed, goal oriented and relevancy oriented. Learning styles will be influence by their genetic make-up, previous learning experiences, culture and the society they live in. There are many ways of looking at learning styles, one of the learning style is Kolb’s experiential learning style. Kolb’s (1984) identify four types of learning styles; convergent, divergent, assimilator and accommodator. Experiential learning style is the process

It is a transformational via intention and a process on how we do thing. Diverger is a reflective observation (RO) or reflector, learning by watching and examining to see concrete situation in a different points of view or perspective to understand something. They also interest in people broad cultural interests and prefer learn by watching or observe than to perform, they tend to collect information and use their strong imagination to solve a problems. Individual with diverger style able to perform in a better way in some situation that require ideas generation such as brainstorming. They are tend to be imaginative and emotional, interested in people and tend to be strong in arts. In application to teaching, student as a reflector learn by observe and thinking about what happen. They formulates theorist and define problem, they will reflecting and analyse the experience by asking what have they thought about this experience and what these result imply and its relation to their learning? How did I influence the outcome? By reflect and review, they criticise the performance recall the experience by assess behaviour and consequences. They prefer to work in groups, to receive personal feedback from other and to listen with an open mind. Doing activities such as self-analysis, questionnaires, personality questionnaires, observing activities and interview. The strength in this learning style,

Learning can be seen by learn something by actually doing it or take action on what have been planning and judging it in practical value by trying out what they have learn. Converger style is an individual who can solve problems or known as “the decision maker” because learner more to test the theory and solve problem with their experience to make a decisions by finding solutions to the questions and problem. Converger is strong in applying practical of ideas can focus on hypo-deductive reasoning on specific problems has narrow interest. Converger also learn by teach to themselves, initiated, and controlled, creative, resource and evaluator. Converger known as pragmatists, they might start using the programme but make frequent references to the help file. The skills in that converger learners possess are those that are technologist careers or important in specialist. They are more attracted to work in technical project rather than concern social issues or interpersonal relationship such as find method apply learning in case studies, problem solving and do discussion. In application to teaching, questions such as what impact does this newly achieved learning outcome now have on their future learning? They likes to experiments, finding solutions to problems with new ideas to simulate. They likes to have a go and try thing and see if they work by trying out and testing new skills and abilities in new