CPA Review Course for Visual Learners

The notion of learning styles has been around for a long time. The theory suggests that tailoring your study material to fit your preferred learning style will result in better outcomes. While there’s little scientific evidence to support this claim, many believe that the learning styles themselves are worth understanding because of the benefits they may offer. For example, visual learning, combined with other activities, has tremendous information-retention potential:

• 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual.
• Visual information is processed 60,000x faster than text.
• There’s a very strong association between long-term memory and images (even detailed images). ^[1]

These findings suggest that for exams covering large volumes of material over significant lengths of time, visual learning should play a substantial role. This makes visual learning a critical piece of any useful CPA Exam prep course, as it could help you to retain more information and grasp complicated topics.

What Are the Different CPA Exam Learning Styles?

According to the learning styles theory, the primary CPA learning styles would be visual (spatial), auditory (aural-musical), reading and writing (verbal/linguistic), and kinesthetic (physical). Each plays a crucial role in grasping complex ideas and should be addressed in any good CPA review course.

• Visual learners best understand content they can see. This might involve diagrams, color coding, or videos.
• Auditory learners benefit from hearing a lesson or speaking themselves. They might prefer to listen to an audiobook instead of watching a video.
• Reading and writing learners are similar to visual learners in that they excel by seeing physical words. “Old school” reading and writing formats are great for these learners.
• Finally, kinesthetic learners enjoy being physically engaged in a task. They might need a hands-on approach implemented into their study routine, such as using flashcards.

Advantage of Visual Learning Compared to Others

As mentioned previously, the primary benefit of visual learning when preparing for the CPA Exam is the brain’s capacity to recall long-term information gathered from illustrations. This is essential for the CPA Exam given that there is much overlap among the four sections of the CPA Exam and that many candidates require over a year to complete these sections. Candidates are given an 18-month window to pass all four sections of the CPA exam. At the end of the day, though, what’s most important is to learn the material in whatever way works best for you.

Here’s one such example from the UWorld Roger CPA Review where a simple image cleanly conveys a concept that would otherwise require a large paragraph: