Visual Learners

Visual learners learn best through what they see.

If you’re a Visual Leaner, you will probably learn at your best when you use visual ways to represent what you are studying. Your preference will be when information is represented in diagrams or graphs.

Luckily for Visual Learners (and Read & Write Learners) traditional teaching methods at high school school often cater to visual learning, so make sure you take advantage of all of the videos, diagrams and charts that your teachers use.

Are you a Visual Learner?

  • Love pictures and diagrams

  • Are good at reading maps and charts

  • Create strong pictures in their minds when they read

  • Like bright colours and fashions

  • May have to think for a bit to process a speech or lecture

Study tips for Visual Learners

  • Copy down all the diagrams you can

    At school, if your teacher draws a diagram on the whiteboard — copy it down. Ask them to label it properly. When the opportunity presents itself, ask your teacher to draw their own version of a diagram for you. The more diagrams you can get your hands on the better.

  • Use visual-heavy resources

    Make the most of textbooks / workbooks / online resources that use lots of diagrams and visuals. Supplementing the words on the page with diagrams will help you understand, process AND retain the information you need to know.

  • Watch videos

    Videos are great resources for Visual Learners. Obviously YouTube has a video on everything, but hunt around for specialist learning sites too like Khan Academy, which has thousands of free lessons that will suit Visual Learners. Even Bill Gates has said the Founder of Khan Academy is his favourite teacher!

  • Use colour & highlighters

    Highlighters make things bright and colourful which makes the important bits of study notes stand out and memorable! Visual Learners will benefit from making their own highlighting system, like colour coding study notes. Highlighting certain types of information in a particular colour can really help establish links between connected topics or concepts and help you to recall that information when you’re in the exam.

  • Use flash cards

    Flash cards will be particularly effective for Visual Learners if they include diagrams. For example, What is this part of a cell called, what does it do? What does a graph that looks like this mean? Who is this, when was she born and what did she do?

  • Replace words with symbols or initials

    This simple tip can help speed up the process of making study notes. It also gets Visual Learners to associate symbols with concepts, rather than words, which increases the strength of association.