Learning Styles

David Kolb's Experimental Learning Model and IL Instruction

Kolb's learning model emphasises learning from experience and building on experience to guide new learning. There are four parts in the learning method.

Concrete Experience: students are first introduced to concrete examples through actively interacting with material in order to provide context for more abstract concepts.

Example:
Giving students a scholarly journal and a popular magazine and having them identify the differences between the two. This uses concrete examples (the publications), allows users to interact with material (physically looking at the publications), and provides context for more abstract concepts (how to identify popular and scholarly publications and why it's important to use one over the other).


Reflective Observation: Students observe their experiences from different viewpoints, reflect on their experiences, and then interpret their experiences. The goal is to integrate observations into a theoretical explanation of experiences.

Abstract Conceptualization: Students build theories and/or solve problems by testing ideas developed during reflective observation.

Example:
By observing the difference between scholarly and popular publications, students must identify why it's important to use scholarly articles and when it's appropriate to use popular articles. Students will also draw on their own personal experience doing both academic and personal research and share their reflections with others in a group or class setting.

Active experimentation: Practical application of theories. Students use the theories they developed to real problems.

Example:
Looking for and identifying scholarly articles in a database and using those articles to write a research paper.