There are as many learning strategies as there are learners. But our individual approaches are all built from combinations of common learning techniques and strategies. Understanding these learning methods, and how to use them effectively, could be key to improving your capacity to learn (or teach) efficiently and effectively.

What are Learning Strategies?

Learning strategies are different approaches to acquiring and understanding new information. They might be techniques for memorization, review, reinforcement, or elaboration, or they might be ways of presenting, noting, or analyzing information, or combinations thereof!

Here you will find 10 common types of learning strategies, followed by a deeper dive into the kinds of strategies that work best for specific groups like independent study, classroom learning, language learning, or nursing education.

How many Types of Learning Strategies are there?

As no two students are alike, the combination of learning strategies that work best for them will also differ. But they will still fall into several common categories, and draw on these categories and styles to build their own personal approach.

It is important also to distinguish between learning styles and learning strategies.

The idea of learning styles and categories of information that certain students process better than others, such as the VARK model (Visual, Auditory, Reading, Kinesthetic) was popularized in the 70s. Their value for education is still somewhat unclear, however.
Learning strategies, on the other hand, are specific actions, processes, or cognitive techniques that learners or teachers can do to learn/teach a specific set of materials, though they might be more or less effective for different types of learners.

10 Types of Learning Strategies

Starting with some of the most common and widespread cognitive learning strategies, this list aims to capture the diversity of techniques available, rather than their totality (you’d probably need a book for that!). More importantly, perhaps, we will go over some of the strengths and weaknesses of each so you can decide how and when to integrate it.

1) Classic Didactic Learning Strategies

Perhaps still the most commonly practiced method worldwide, every time a teacher lectures students to impart them with specific knowledge, they are adopting this traditional learning strategy. It focuses on the teacher, and the content to be learned, and its success is highly dependent on the teacher.

Its strength comes from the presentation of information by an authoritative figure, who has the experience and organization to understand and explain sometimes quite complicated material.

Its weaknesses, however, come from the rigid top-down structure, which can sometimes limit critical thinking or creative approaches to learning. To be effective it also requires students to take careful notes and review them, or risk everything that comes in one ear leaving by the other!

2) Active Learning Strategies

The exact opposite of the classical model where teachers talk, and students listen, active learning places students at the heart of the process. In this learning strategy, the teacher's job is to set up their students for doing their own learning by actively engaging with the subject matter and the resources required to understand it.

The strengths of active learning strategies lie in encouraging and fostering independence and self-driven learning. By making the student an agent of their own instruction, they are empowered to become proactive learners, which can develop lifelong learning skills.

Unfortunately, active learning is arguably harder to accomplish effectively, especially for teachers and depends upon the students themselves to succeed.

3) Mnemonic Learning Strategies

While all learners will at some point have to memorize key information, mnemonic learning strategies help by providing “shortcuts” for larger groups or chains of information. By focusing on specific subsets or clues, such as anagrams or keywords, larger volumes of information can be memorized at greater speeds.

Mnemonic learning strategies are highly effective at helping students memorize specific sequences of information, even at high volumes. Additionally, they are easy to implement and use for both teachers and students.

Unfortunately, Mnemonic learning techniques fall short when it comes to helping students figure out how to use, apply or analyze information, as they are really just a tool for memorization. Higher-order thinking skills can sometimes even be inhibited by an excessive focus on memorization.

4) Interleaving Learning Strategies

Effective teachers know that a strictly linear curriculum, that tackles one topic after another in strict and distinct order, will not be as effective as one built using interleaving techniques. These strategies rely on mixing new information with older lessons or alternating between topics, to keep students attentive, mentally flexible, and capable of better tackling and taking in new information.

Interleaving learning strategies prove particularly strong when tackling complex material in subjects that build upon themselves such as sciences and math. They also make for more effective independent review and studying.

They must however be implemented carefully to avoid slowing down the intake of new information. Additionally, in some subjects, such as history, using them can be difficult or even counterintuitive and confusing.

5) Dual Coding

Earlier we mentioned learning styles, and how some students learn better with different types of stimuli. Dual coding learning strategies offer synergies between them by presenting information in multiple mediums and formats. The most classic example is mixing visual with verbal or written cues. Including visual or other non-verbal learning materials helps add depth, context, and/or examples to lessons, improving comprehension and application.

Dual coding learning techniques are highly effective and efficient, and can and should be used at every level of education from primary to graduate schools.

Consistently using dual coding can add extra steps to the teacher’s preparation, and visual/video mediums can sometimes be distracting from complex lessons if not adequately adapted. But they should certainly not be neglected.

6) Active vs Passive Recall Strategies

Active versus Passive recall refers to how students engage with previously learned information to ensure retention or improve recollection speed. The passive recall involves reviewing sources of information and recognizing it, such as re-reading, going over notes, re-listening to lectures, etc. Active recall on the other hand pushes the brain to retrieve the information based on a prompt, such as flashcards, quizzes, or practice tests.

While many students rely on passive methods as they are easily accessible, active recall consistently shows a more effective impact on long-term comprehension and retention of information.

Active recall methods do usually require more preparation and/or interaction, while passive techniques are known for being particularly time-inefficient.

7) Collective Learning Strategies

While many learning strategies can be implemented alone, some require and focus on the effort of a group. Collective learning involves working together to achieve more than you could alone, relying on synergies that come from sharing tasks, comparative advantages, or differing perspectives. Anything from basic group study to Socratic or student-led seminars call on collective learning methods.

Such collective strategies are quite effective at improving the overall level of learning in a group and are especially well suited for subjective or complex topics where sharing both information and perspectives adds value.

Unfortunately, collective learning can also slow down the entire group, and if not handled with appropriate supervision, can be both inefficient and sometimes error-prone.

The modern college classroom is often flipped to put Students in charge of teaching a specific subject. — Collective learning is frequently employed in Colleges and Universities’ learning strategies.
Image by Todd Van Hoosear via Flickr

8) Spaced Repetition Strategies

An important consideration of any learning strategy is how to structure and organize the time you spend on any given topic. Spaced repetition strategies aim to minimize this time while maximizing long-term retention. They work by increasing the amount of time between practice/review after successful retrieval and decreasing it after unsuccessful review. It is commonly accomplished with flashcards (independent review) or questions on quizzes and tests (classroom or homework).

This method can drastically improve the efficiency of learning, by optimizing the amount of time spent on individual pieces of material. Similarly, the increasing intervals between reviews help make it a powerful tool for long-term learning, especially compared to other so-called “efficient” techniques like last-minute cramming.

These strategies do work best however with bite-sized pieces of information, if what you need is a whole tapestry of interconnected ideas, it is hard to separate them sufficiently to study them with individual intervals.

9) Student-Led Learning Strategies

Students are a powerful resource for teachers, and one effective learning strategy can be to give them the reigns. These techniques almost take the teacher out of the equation, assigning individual students the role of understanding and presenting new information or perspectives. While used most effectively at higher levels of education (high school and especially in college) such student-led strategies are particularly effective at developing a combination of research, critical thinking, presenting, and, of course, teaching skills.

Popular in seminar classes or individual research projects, student-led learning strategies demonstrate incredible effectiveness in establishing independent learning skills.

Just like active and collective learning strategies, however, they are dependent upon the students themselves and will not work as well with uncooperative or unmotivated classrooms.

10) Independent or Individual Learning Strategies

While most teachers will have little use for independent learning, it is nevertheless an important category of learning techniques. These strategies are for individuals learning outside the context of a classroom, maybe even without a textbook. They focus on helping learners organize their thinking, review information, and commit it to memory without the structure of formal educational institutions.

While they are often harder to master, many learners who do become adept at independent learning find that these strategies work better for them than any traditional didactic structures. They are also perfectly complementary to other learning strategies, and, in fact, should probably be taught simply to help students study, learn, or catch up outside the classroom.
Independent learning strategies are not without their own weaknesses, however. In addition to being entirely self-reliant for the learner, these strategies can result in an “echo-chamber” effect where the learner is not sufficiently exposed to other perspectives, theories, or criticism, and ends up with narrower, more rigid, or limited knowledge.

Different Types of Learning Strategies

Having broken down the different types of learning strategies as well as their various strengths and weaknesses, it is important to consider their use, and examples, in different key contexts. There is a lot of variety both in the effectiveness and limitations of different learning strategies based on the stakeholder involved (student, teacher, etc) and context (independent, classroom, etc).

Thus in order to further explore the different types of Learning Strategies, it is crucial to examine which ones are most effective for students, for classrooms, for language acquisition, and in nursing education.

Types of Learning Strategies for Students

When working with students, it is important to find the learning strategies which work best, but also to teach using a diversity of learning strategies to help different kinds of students and broaden their learning potential.

1) Personalized or Differentiated Learning

A classic dilemma occurs for just about every teacher when faced with students with different capacities and mastery levels.

In differentiated learning strategies, teachers do their best to provide each student with the level of difficulty and attention required based on their level. In theory, these personalized techniques can optimize each student's learning speed to help the weaker ones catch up and avoid slowing down the more advanced ones.

2) Peer Teaching

Another set of tools students can benefit from, which also help each other, is Peer Teaching strategies.

Ranging from basic Think, Pair, Share activities to full-on student-led learning seminars, peer teaching techniques have the students take on to one degree or another the role of teacher. Teaching is one of the most effective ways of confirming long-term learning and benefits all the students involved.

3) Problem or Inquiry-Based Learning Strategies

Helping students understand material often starts with getting them to understand its importance.

Problem-based learning strategies put the “why” and “how” questions at the heart of student learning, using them as the starting points and driving force of your teaching. These techniques rely on presenting students with the core concerns and then having them work through or work out the answers for themselves and/or in small groups.

Types of Learning Strategies in the Classroom

While every teacher will need to find the balance of learning strategies which works for their classroom, varying their approach can be a potent tool for improving both learning and classroom experience.

1) Active vs Passive Classroom Time

Teachers first need to decide what percentage of their time will be devoted to active, vs passive, learning strategies.

While active learning strategies prove to be more effective at increasing engagement and higher-order thinking skills, they can be less efficient at communicating straightforward or required information, for which passive learning techniques are well adapted. Finding the right balance between them is key to improving both classroom learning and experience.

2) Formative and Summative Assessments

When it comes to establishing and cementing material, few tools are as important as assessments. Not all save the same purpose, however.

Summative assessments are what we classically think when talking about tests and quizzes, these are tasks designed to assess whether a student has mastered the subject at the end of the learning period. Formative assessments are tasks given along the way which tell the teacher (and the student) what they are understanding, where any difficulties lie, and what they need to focus on. Both are crucial to include for any classroom to succeed, though formative assessment strategies are more important in determining the final outcome.

An effective analogy for formative and summative learning strategies through the lens of cooking rather than the classroom. — The cooking analogy shows the importance of implementing formative assessments as well as summative ones into your classroom learning strategies.
Image by Technovore on Flickr

3) Flipped Classroom

Where the students do the learning is important, while traditionally they learn in class and practice at home, the flipped classroom is a type of learning strategy that inverses that.

In a flipped classroom, students are responsible for learning material outside the classroom, going over notes and resources provided by the teacher, so that they can focus on analyzing, practicing, and applying that knowledge during class time. This model is very popular in higher education but is making inroads in high schools.

Types of learning strategies in second language learning

Trying to learn a second, or third, language is another context in which adopting the right type of learning strategy is crucial.

1) Immersion Learning

By far the most effective, and least practical, type of learning strategy for acquiring a new language is full-scale immersion.

The more you can surround yourself, and expose your brain, to the new language the faster it will pick it up. Best of all if you cannot rely on previously learned languages. Unfortunately for obvious reasons such learning is difficult for most people to accomplish, but can be done to a lesser or greater degree within specialized learning environments like classes, camps or tutorial sessions.

A school in St Louis dedicated to immersion types of language learning strategies. — Immersion is such a popular type of language learning strategy that whole schools are devoted to it.
Image by LittleT889 via Wikimedia commons

2) Tandem Learning

A more limited type of second language learning strategy is tandem learning. in this model, two learners get together, each to teach the other their own language, and learn the others from them.

This kind of learning provides a personalized and informal context for knowledge acquisition, meaning it can easily be adapted to the interests and needs of the learners. Speaking and interacting with a native speaker is also helpful for mastering tricky aspects like pronunciation, informal language, and other details that might be hard to get across in a formal classroom setting. While such classes used to be inaccessible for most students, the advent of internet sites to put language learners in touch with each other has done a lot to bring them to widespread and effective use.

3) Creating Associations

When trying to learn or memorize new words in a foreign language, making strong associations is often key to success.

Making associations is a tried and tested learning strategy, that relies on intermediate connections between the word you are trying to learn and its sounds or meaning. The key is to think of an image, sound, or scenario that links the new word and its meaning in your mind. This helps cement the word into the long-term memory part of your brain and gives your thought process an intermediate step to retrieve it, increasing retrieval success.

Types of Learning Strategy in Nursing Education

Some subjects, like Nursing, require a unique balance of people skills, specialized knowledge, and broad scopes of long-term retention. While the strategies below are designed specifically for nursing, they can easily be applied to other, similar, learning contexts.

1) Bulk memorization

Unfortunately, nursing requires its students to retain more information than even most medical students (who invariably end up specializing). From drug uses to procedures and passing through symptoms and signs for recognizing pathologies, nursing students have tons of information to retain and often employ learning strategies designed to memorize large volumes of information.

Flashcards, when used and implemented with spaced repetition, are a particularly popular tool as they combine the strengths of both active recall and time-optimized study, proving particularly effective at long-term retention.

However, such strategies can only cover a portion of nursing students’ requirements and must be used alongside other types of learning techniques.

2) Case-Based Learning (CBL)

In order to master the art of putting their knowledge into practice in the real world, or at least, in real-world scenarios, nursing students often turn to case-based learning strategies. These techniques involve applying real-world cases, their details, and their outcomes, to the principles and information the nursing students are having to learn.

By using real-world scenarios, case-based learning strategies help prepare nursing students for the unpredictable, complicated, and interconnected nature of their future careers. At the same time, by using real-world details, these techniques are more engaging and better at fostering empathy than abstract and theoretical cases. Both factors help make CBL strategies highly effective and in high demand among nursing students.

A group of nursing students studies using Case Based Learning strategies with the help of video recreation. — Real-world cases or recreations are often key types of learning strategies for nursing students.
Image by Concordia College via Wikimedia Commons

3) Role Play

Many nursing teachers and students take CBL one step further, by placing the nursing students directly within the roles of the people from the cases, real or otherwise. While this takes more time and energy than simply reviewing or going over real-world case details, it adds a dimension that many nursing students struggle to otherwise learn: people skills.

Nursing is a profession that is entirely dependent on contact with patients, often with complications of pain, loss, or any number of physical or mental symptoms. Role play helps nursing students prepare for complex realities, develop empathy with both professionals and patients they interact with, and apply the theoretical knowledge they have been struggling to master to murky, complex, yet essential real-world situations.

What Type of Learning Strategy will Work Best for You?

Whether you are a teacher getting ready for a new course, a student facing upcoming exams, or a professional trying to pick up the knowledge they need to exceed, the right type of learning strategy can make all the difference. Unfortunately, it is all but impossible to know for certain which will work best ahead of time.

Hopefully, this guide will have helped you identify some promising cognitive learning strategies you might not have tried yet, some ways to adapt your current approach to take advantage of other learning strategies, or better understood why some things you try in or out of the classroom, work better than others.

The secret to long-term learning success is to try different approaches, combine multiple learning strategies to compensate for weaknesses (and take advantage of their strengths), and adapt your techniques to your needs and context. Oh, and to arm yourself with the long-term learning tool that will help you put into place your own personal learning strategy.