Kinesthetic Learning Style: Learning by Doing

What the kinesthetic style describes

People who identify with the kinesthetic style say they learn better by doing a task themselves than by watching someone else do it or reading about it. It is the K in the VARK model by Neil Fleming and Colleen Mills (1992).

The name blends two things that are worth separating. One is the preference: some people find learning with their hands more enjoyable and motivating. The other is procedural memory, a memory system we all have that can only be built through practice. The first is an individual trait; the second, a property of the human brain.

To see how this preference combines with the others in your case, there is a learning style quiz that measures it directly.

How it usually shows up

Learning to tie a knot from a diagram or a spoken description is rarely enough: you have to pick up the rope and try, several times, before it sticks. People who score high on this style tend to extend that experience to almost everything:

• They prefer to start practicing early, mistakes and all, rather than read every instruction first.
• They understand an abstract idea better once they see it applied to a concrete case.
• They choose short study sessions with tasks to do over long readings.

These are preferences, and they have practical value: choosing formats you enjoy helps sustain effort. What has not been shown is that a kinesthetic learner picks up theoretical content better than someone else when it is taught “in motion.” The review by Harold Pashler and colleagues (2008) looked for experiments demonstrating this advantage of matching style and method, and found none with the right design that confirmed it.

A kind of memory that is trained only by doing

Neuroscience distinguishes between declarative memory (facts that can be put into words, like a date or a formula) and procedural memory (skills carried out without thinking about them, like riding a bike or typing).

The classic experiment that separated the two comes from Neal Cohen and Larry Squire (1980). They asked patients with amnesia to learn to read mirror-reversed words. The patients acquired the skill at the same rate as people without amnesia and still had it three months later, even though they could not remember the specific words they had read. The authors summed it up as the difference between knowing how and knowing that.

Procedural memory relies on circuits in the motor cortex, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, and it consolidates through repetition, an example of how practice physically changes the brain. That is why someone can explain in full detail how to tie a knot and still fail to do it on the first try.

The consequence holds for every style: a motor skill cannot be learned from theory alone. A pianist who calls himself auditory and a surgeon who calls herself visual need the same physical practice as someone who calls themselves kinesthetic.

An old principle with the same idea

A saying popularly attributed to Confucius, though its most likely origin is a passage by the Confucian philosopher Xunzi (third century BCE), captures that intuition:

What I hear, I forget; what I see, I remember; what I do, I learn.

Attributed to Confucius

In David Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (1984), this idea corresponds to the “active experimentation” phase: trying out what has been learned in new situations. It is another way of looking at learning, focused on the process rather than the sensory channel, and you can explore it with our quiz on how you learn according to Kolb’s cycle.

How much practice matters

Psychologist Anders Ericsson and his colleagues (1993) studied violinists at a Berlin music academy and found that the best ones had accumulated far more hours of deliberate practice: exercises designed to improve specific weak points, with feedback, not simply repeating what already goes well.

Journalist Malcolm Gladwell popularized that work in Outliers (2008) with the 10,000-hour figure, a simplification that Ericsson himself later qualified.

The most accurate picture comes from the meta-analysis by Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald (2014). It pooled studies from the main domains and concluded that deliberate practice explains a sizable share of performance differences in games such as chess, in music and in sports, but a small share in education and almost none in professions. Practice matters a lot, especially for skills with stable rules, but it doesn’t explain everything.

An example of what does work

A vocational electrical student who describes himself as kinesthetic has to learn to assemble a distribution board and, on top of that, the regulations that govern it.

For the assembly, what matters most is repeated, corrected physical practice: here his preference and what the task demands line up. For the regulations, moving his hands adds no memory. What research supports for any student is spreading study across several sessions and testing yourself without looking at your notes; the review by John Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) gave those two techniques its highest rating.

His preference can shape the format (studying the regulations through real installation cases, for example), and that helps keep him interested. The kind of effort is what makes him remember.

This article summarizes research on learning for informational purposes; it does not replace guidance from a professional if there are attention or learning difficulties.

Sources

• Cohen, N. J., & Squire, L. R. (1980). Preserved learning and retention of pattern-analyzing skill in amnesia: Dissociation of knowing how and knowing that. Science, 210(4466), 207-210. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7414331
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
• Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363
• Fleming, N. D., & Mills, C. (1992). Not another inventory, rather a catalyst for reflection. To Improve the Academy, 11, 137-155.
• Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown and Company.
• Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice-Hall.
• Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608-1618. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810
• Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x