Critical Skills for Life
Critical skills are for life
1. Skills leading to success
During either university study or professional work, personal successes depend significantly on effective learning skills since learning is the essential process for a person to acquire new knowledge and capabilities (Reynolds et al. 2002). The related key skills could be roughly catalogued into three main aspects, i.e. intellectual skills, inter-personal skills and others. Both students and professional employees are expected to have sufficient skills for their roles, however, different people are strong in different learning ways. These various learning ways were defined academically as Learning Style by Dunn and Dunn (Dunn & Dunn 1978) from the U.S.. Also there are other people reported learning style as how students learn in the education rather than what the students have learned (Hunt 1979), while some scholars thought it to be the method which students used during their solving academic problems (Malcom et al. 1981). Dunn & Dunn in the 1970s divided the types of study into four major categories of totally 24 elements (Dunn & Dunn 1978), i.e. environmental factors, emotional factors, social factors and physiological factors. Besides, later in 1980s based on the above four categories they increased the fifth category including three psychological factors. Among those subcategories, the physiological VAK (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic) learning style is quite a famous one (Dunn & Dunn 1986). The three types of learners possess different sensitivity to different external excitation. Even there was report indicated a connection with modalities and learning styles
(University of Pennsylvania 2009), the research has been unable to prove that using one single learning style provides the best means for learning a subject. Contrarily, it could probably be learning process is more like a preference but not a style. Although other four subcategories of Dunn & Dunn’s theory are not so popular as VAK, they
1. Skills leading to success
During either university study or professional work, personal successes depend significantly on effective learning skills since learning is the essential process for a person to acquire new knowledge and capabilities (Reynolds et al. 2002). The related key skills could be roughly catalogued into three main aspects, i.e. intellectual skills, inter-personal skills and others. Both students and professional employees are expected to have sufficient skills for their roles, however, different people are strong in different learning ways. These various learning ways were defined academically as Learning Style by Dunn and Dunn (Dunn & Dunn 1978) from the U.S.. Also there are other people reported learning style as how students learn in the education rather than what the students have learned (Hunt 1979), while some scholars thought it to be the method which students used during their solving academic problems (Malcom et al. 1981). Dunn & Dunn in the 1970s divided the types of study into four major categories of totally 24 elements (Dunn & Dunn 1978), i.e. environmental factors, emotional factors, social factors and physiological factors. Besides, later in 1980s based on the above four categories they increased the fifth category including three psychological factors. Among those subcategories, the physiological VAK (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic) learning style is quite a famous one (Dunn & Dunn 1986). The three types of learners possess different sensitivity to different external excitation. Even there was report indicated a connection with modalities and learning styles
(University of Pennsylvania 2009), the research has been unable to prove that using one single learning style provides the best means for learning a subject. Contrarily, it could probably be learning process is more like a preference but not a style. Although other four subcategories of Dunn & Dunn’s theory are not so popular as VAK, they