Improving Academic Success with Right-Brain Learning Methods

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Understanding whether your teens are right-brain or left-brain learners can help improve their academic success during those crucial years when grades count toward college.

Knowing your teens’ learning style is helpful to parents, teachers, tutors and, most importantly, your teens themselves. As a parent, you can then seek out learning methods that align with their learning style. And if your teens struggle to learn, this knowledge can ultimately improve self-esteem as they realize that low grades and a dislike of school may have more to do with a one-way-fits-all teaching method rather than with how smart they are.

Right-Brain vs. Left-Brain

Being right-brain or left-brain dominant refers to the phone number data hemispheres of the brain that process information differently. The hemispheres control the different modes of thinking, and individuals tend to use one side of the brain over the other.

In 1981, Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his research in the late 1950’s and 1960’s showing that the brain is divided into two major hemispheres. He identified that parts of the brain had different capabilities and were associated with their own style of thinking.

Characteristics of Left-Brain Learners

Left-brain learners best absorb material by listening to lectures in which the material is logical and has a set of defining rules. A typical left-brain learner takes neat notes and keeps a well-organized binder. Timed tests are not overly challenging.

Generally, left-brained thinkers read directions carefully and thoroughly. They follow sequential reasoning, seeking definitive final answers and closure.

Left-brain learners excel at the following:

Logic
Analytical sequence processing
Numbers
Black & white distinctions
Structured thinking
Verbal language skills
Short-term memory
Details
Auditory input
Skilled movement
Naming
Categorization
Objective thinking
Characteristics of Right-Brain Learners

Right-brain thinkers often have common characteristics. For example, they’ll scan directions, rather than listen to or thoroughly read directions. Visualizing a picture can help them remember facts.

Right-brain learners tend to be day dreamers who lose track of time. They are visual students who thrive on hands-on learning. Sitting, listening and taking notes can be a struggle.

Right-brain learners excel at the following:

Big picture thinking
Visual input
Leaps in thinking
Concepts
Differentiation through color
Humor
Unstructured thinking
Awareness of options
Pictures (storing information as a unit rather than as parts)
Music
Metaphors
Intuitive thinking
Creativity
Rhythm
Holistic thinking
Synthesizing
Subjective thinking
The right hemisphere of the brain is associated with creativity. Right-brained thinkers process information in a nonlinear, non-verbal manner, looking at the whole picture and at the relationships of the parts to the whole. Overall, right-brain thinkers are more comfortable with paradoxes and ambiguity than left-brain thinkers.