TRANSCRIPT: Discover Your Learning Style Preferences
Speaker: Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire
Learning Styles Preference = Learning Style Modality
[Host Saundra Yancy McGuire on left]
Text on screen:
[eye icon] Visual [Ear icon] Aural [book icon] Read/Write [hand icon] Kinesthetic How do you prefer to learn?
Hello. I'm Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire, and I am a retired chemistry professor and past director of the Center for Academic Success, the learning center at Louisiana State University. I retired about three years ago to really pursue my passion of helping students develop more efficient learning strategies and also helping faculty understand what those learning strategies are so that they could share them with their students. Now, a very important aspect of becoming an efficient learner is knowing how you best learn information, how you prefer to learn information, so that involves knowing whether you prefer to learn by looking at diagrams or pictures, or whether you prefer to listen to information in a lecture or on tape, or whether your preference is really to have written text, you want to read it in a textbook. Then there are other people who really like to learn in a hands-‐on environment when they're actually doing tasks.
So what we're going to talk about is what your preference is and how this impacts your learning. Now this preference is known as your learning style modality preference and it's called a modality preference because it deals with the senses: whether you like to look at things, whether you like to hear things, whether you like to move around and touch things, etc. but we often shorten it to just call it a learning style preference, so that's what I'll usually call it in this section, but sometimes I'll go back and forth. So when you hear me say learning modality preference or learning style preference, I'm talking about exactly the same thing.
How Do You Prefer To Learn
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Visual Aural Read/write Kinesthetic
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Knowing your learning style preference or preferences, because you probably have more than one preference, is really important because it can determine a number of different things. First of all, it may determine how you prefer to take in information: whether you prefer to see things in a visual format or hear in a verbal format, and I'll give you an example. Suppose you were in an unfamiliar city and you had to go from point A to point B, and someone was going to tell you how to get from point A to point B. Would you prefer that that person just hand you a map and show you the two points, and tell you, "Just use this and you'll get to where you need to go"? Or would you prefer that someone described the directions to you, verbally tell you the directions? Or would you prefer that someone actually take you from point A to point B so that you actually have experienced going from one point to the other? Your learning style modality preference will really determine which one of those three options you probably would prefer.
How Do You Prefer To Process?
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Developed by Neil Fleming VARK
Vark
Copyright Version 7.0 (2006) held by Niel D. Fleming, Christchurch, New Zealand and Charles C. Bonwell, Springfield, MO 65804 [Eye icon, ear icon, book icon hand icon]
Visual Aural Read/write Submit Kinesthetic VARK
It can also determine how you like to process information. When you hear information that you need to learn, do you like to visualize that information in diagrams or charts, do you like to listen to the explainer if you have to remember it later? Can you hear their voice in your head? It also can determine how motivated you are to study a particular topic or a subject because if you have a preference, a strong preference for diagrams, for charts and pictures, but you have a textbook that has none of those, then you might not be very motivated and so you might get very frustrated, so it can also determine your frustration level with different learning tasks if you have to do something that it's in a completely different modality than the one that you prefer.
Now there are several learning styles models, learning styles inventories, learning styles questionnaires that are available, but we're going to concentrate on using the questionnaire that was developed by Neil Fleming and he called it the VARK Questionnaire, V-‐A-‐R-‐K. Those letters stand for Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic. These are what are known as the four learning modalities. Now it's very important to understand that your preference doesn't imply that you can't learn information that's presented in any other modality than the one you prefer. It's just that you may be more efficient and you may enjoy your learning tasks more when the learning strategies that you use allow your brain to operate in its preferred style. Before we discuss the styles in detail, I'd like for you to take the VARK Questionnaire to determine your specific preferences.
Activity: VARK Questionnaire
What’s Your Preference
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Visual, Aural, Read/Write, Kinesthetic Learn all strategies
Now that you've taken the VARK Questionnaire, you have an idea of what your preferred style is, so we're going to discuss strategies that work well with each of the four modalities and it's very important that you not just concentrate on strategies that work well for your preferred modality, but that you work with the strategies that are for the other preferred modalities, because you may find yourself in a situation where you have to learn in a modality that is very different from the one that you preferred. For example, you may be in a history class that has a textbook that has no charts, no diagrams, no visuals, but you're a visual learner and so if you learn the strategies that read/write learners prefer, then you'll be able to operate very well in that setting where you've got to use read/write techniques. For each of the learning style modality preferences, we're going to discuss the learning strategies that can be used while you're studying outside of class and also strategies that you can use while you're taking exams.
We're going to start with the visual learning style preference.
Visual Learner
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[eye icon] Visual
[picture icon, chemistry icon, pie chart icon, bar graph icon] Strategies for visual learners:
• Underline important information
• Highlight using different colors
• Summarize information with images
• Make concept maps or chapter maps
If you're a visual learner, you love to learn from pictures, symbols, charts, diagrams, graphs, mind maps, anything that will pictorially represent the information that you're trying to learn and so there are some great strategies for maximizing your study time. These include underlining important information that's in your notes or in the textbook and even highlighting information using different color highlighters. For example, you might use one color highlighter for the terms and then another color highlighter for a description of those terms, or you might decide to use one color for a specific concept, another color for a different concept so when you come back to study, your eyes are going to be drawn to that visual representation of color and it will assist you in your learning process.
You also might want to summarize information with images. For example, in that history course, you might draw just a little stick figure diagram of the persons who were associated with the certain aspect of history that you're studying and indicate what they might been involved with. Also making concept maps or chapter maps, just anything that you can look at that will satisfy your need to have a visual representation of information.
2 Types of Maps
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Visual
Now I'd like to take a minute to talk about two different types of maps that seem to work very well who students who have really any modality preference. These are chapter maps, and compare and contrast maps. First let's take a look at chapter maps.
Chapter Maps
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Visual
Condensing content in pictorial format
[Title box at top, with three boxes below that are labeled Subhead, with six boxes below labeled Secondary subhead, with six boxes below that labeled concept]
Chapter maps are very, very useful tools for condensing the content of an entire chapter in pictorial format. What a chapter map entails is on one sheet of paper indicating the title of the chapter at the top and then beneath the title of the chapter there are the subheadings, the primary subheadings, and then under that there are the secondary subheadings, and under secondary subheadings you can have lines coming away from those that talk about specific concepts in those secondary subheadings. What that does is it gives you a representation of the contents of an entire chapter. Now if it's a long chapter, you may have to use two sheets of paper and tape them together, but one sheet of paper you've got all of the different concepts in that chapter. You can use a table of contents to produce the chapter map, but it's just very helpful to condense all of that wording into a picture.
Compare & Contrast Maps
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Helpful for terms that are easily confused. Term 1 Term 2
Weak acids strong acids
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Another type of concept map that is very helpful, or mind map we might call it, is a compare and contrast map. Those are very, very helpful whenever there are terms that you have a tendency to get confused and so in a compare and contrast map, you will put the two terms and then you indicate how are these terms similar? Because they must be similar in some sense, or you wouldn't confuse them.
How are they similar? How are they different? As an example, I might talk about strong assets and weak assets. Well, they're both assets, but then there are characteristics of strong assets that are different from characteristics of weak assets. If you take the time to really reflect on that and put it together in a compare and contrast map, then that visual representation is going to help you keep those two straight.
Test-Taking Strategies
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Visual (in upper right corner) Recall pages in textbook or notes Draw diagrams
Draw concept maps
Now some great test taking strategies for visual learners include when you're in the test, actually recalling the pages in the textbook or the pages in your notes that you used to learn the information. In fact, I had one student who was in a philosophy class and we taught him this strategy. He did so well on the next test, and he came back and he was so excited. He said that it was so easy for him to visualize those pages that he actually felt like he was cheating on the exam, that he had access to the textbook that his classmates didn't have. If you're a visual learner, then it may not be difficult at all for you to do that, to try to visualize what you have seen on those pages.
Also, you can draw diagrams where appropriate. If it's an essay test and even though you're going to be explaining a concept, if you can put diagrams or figures within that, then it's going to make your essay much richer and your faculty member will appreciate that. Also, if you are writing an essay question, you can draw a concept map of what you're going to put in your essay, so you might have the central topic in the center and then coming out from the central topic, there may be the subtopics that you want to make sure that you include in your essay, so now you have a visual representation of how you're going to structure the essay and it's much easier for you to produce the essay after you've done that visual representation.
Aural Learner
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Aural
Strategies for aural learners:
• Participate in study groups
• Summarize your notes then read them aloud
• Tape your notes and listen to them
• Explain the information to others [icon of person writing on a board]
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Now, if you've learned from the VARK Questionnaire that you're an aural learner, that means that you learn very well from hearing things. You learn from discussions, you love stories, you learn very well when guest speakers come to class and talk about their personal experiences. You love chats. You love any situation where you get the information that you can hear and that tends to stick with you, and so there are some strategies that aural learners can use that will maximize your study time. One of the best ways is to participate in study groups because in study groups you can verbalize your understanding of concepts and you can hear what other students are saying about how they understood topics, and because you've got all this rich information coming in, in an aural format, that is very, very helpful.
You can summarize your notes and then read them out loud. You can paraphrase them and read them out loud. You can tape your notes and listen to them. Anything that allows you to hear information is going to help you process that information and recall it later on. Also, you could explain information to others so that you're actually hearing yourself discuss the information and that's going to be very helpful also. I'll give you one example that I learned about just recently. I talked with a student and indicated that if he pretended that he was teaching the information or if he actually taught it to someone, this would be very helpful. He was a big fan of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie and he had a Baby Groot tree in his room. He started teaching the information to Baby Groot and he passed the licensure exam that he was studying for with way more points than he needed, and so he sent me an email and he said he passed it with flying colors, and he was pretty sure that if Baby Groot had taken that test, Baby Groot would have passed it also.
Test-Taking Strategies
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Listen to your inner voice
• Self-‐talk
Recall what the professor said
• Hear the professor’s voice Talk out answers in your head
• Hear your inner voice
Now there are several strategies that aural learners can use while you're actually in a testing situation and one of the most effective ones is to listen to your inner voice to recall information. All of us are constantly talking to ourselves. Psychologists call it self-‐talk. Most of us, though, are not really aware of it. We don't really pay attention to it, but if you're an aural learner, you can train yourself to pay attention to when you're thinking, "Oh, I remember when Professor Smith said this in class." If you listen to that inner voice, then you'll be able to recall information and do much better on a test than if you were not aware that you even had your inner voice.
You can also just recall exactly what the professor said. Most times, aural learners can recall the particular discussion that that the professor had in class. They can hear the professor's voice in their head if you are really concentrating on that and that's going to help out. Also, you can talk out the answers under your breath. Of course not saying them out loud, but just pretend that you are explaining the information, so you're hearing your inner voice doing that explanation and you'll find that that's going to put you in touch with a lot of information that you might not have remembered had you not used that strategy.
Read/Write Learner
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Read/Write (in upper right corner)
• Reading text
• Lists
• Notes
• Any text
Strategies for read/write learners:
• Write notes in your own words
• Read, paraphrase, write
• Identify key words and associate with details
• Write out answers
• Writing helps you Remember
If you're read/write learner, you learn best from reading any kind of text. Writing, it could be lists, it could be notes, it could be text online, on websites or in a textbook, just any format that's in print, whether it's on paper or online. Now read/write learners can maximize their study time by writing out the notes in your own words. Many times I've heard students say, "Well, the professor said I should rewrite my notes." Well, I don't recommend that you just verbatimly rewrite your notes because you can do that in a very passive fashion, but instead what you should do is read the notes and then paraphrase them in your own words, and then write them out. Just the very act of reading them, paraphrasing, and writing them out will be very, very effective.
You can also identify keywords and associate those keywords with detailed information, and you're much more effective doing this than visual learners or read/write learners because for some reason your brain is pretty much trained on the text. You can write out answers to review questions or during the practice tests, when you're going over those, make sure that you write out all of the answers to the questions. Many times students use review questions or tests. They will just look at the question and they'll say, "Oh, yeah. I know now to answer that," but if you're a read/write learner, it's going to help very much if you take the time to write out those answers because that's going to help you remember the information much, much better.
Test-Taking Strategies
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Read/Write (in upper right corner) Recall pages in textbook or notes Essays: Write thesis statement, outline
During tests, read/write learners can actually recall pages from texts and really see the wording on the page, and pretty much reproduce that wording almost verbatim, and so if you find that you are at a loss for what to write down, just try to recall what was in the text or what was in your notes. As a read/write learner, you can do that pretty well. Also, read/write learners for essays, it's very important that you concentrate on writing out your thesis statement and then outline the essay because read/write learners love lists, they learn outlines. If you start with that outline that's in that written text format, you're going to be able to have your thoughts come much more freely and produce the answers or the essay that will be a much better representation of what you've learned than if you don't use that particular strategy.
Kinesthetic Learner
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Kinesthetic
Real-world experiences
• Field trips
• Labs Movement
Connect real-‐world experience to the learning objective [icon of chain links]
Real-world Experience Information
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Kinesthetic learners really learn from real world experiences, things like field trips, laboratories, and also kinesthetic learners will learn many time more effective if there's some movement that's associated with the learning task, and so if you're a kinesthetic learner, you can study efficiently by summarizing information, but including a real world example of how that information might play out. For example, if you're in a psychology class, and you're learning about positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, you might think of a time in your life where you had experienced positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, so you're connecting that real world experience to the information that you're learning.
Sometimes kinesthetic learners find that it's important to actually move around when they're studying. There are some students who find that studying on a treadmill is very helpful or if they have the lecturers recorded on their iPod. They study while they're walking around campus, but if there's any kind of movement that's associated with it for kinesthetic learners, sometimes it's very, very helpful.
Also, using sticky notes. You can get now huge sticky notes. If you put different bits of information on those sticky notes and then place them in different parts of your room so that you're moving around, looking at different bits of information in different parts of your room, that strategy works well with a lot of kinesthetic learners.
Test-Strategies
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Remember the real-‐world experience Stretch
Quietly tap Visualize
Now sometimes kinesthetic learners find taking tests a bit more challenging than learners in the other modality preferences, but there are some things that kinesthetic learners can do. For example, you might concentrate on remembering the examples that were presented with information in class, the real life examples that you can picture and call back to your memory. Even though you can't get up and move around, obviously, when you're in the test, sometimes you can just stretch a little bit or just move. Some learners find that even tapping their toe in their shoe is enough of a movement to get their brain operating in the form that it recalls additional information. Also, you may visualize a field trip or if it's a lab course, visualize yourself doing the actual experiment so that you will be able to remember information that you might not remember otherwise.
Multimodal Learners
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Visual Aural Read/Write Kinesthetic Neil Fleming
Multimodal Learners
Type I Learners: Preference depends on context Kinesthetic
Lab Course
Visual
Art History
Type 2 Learners: Prefers to use several modalities Read/Write
Visual Kinesthetic
Multimodal = Very Effective [trophy icon]
Strategies = Success
Now up to this point we've talked about learning strategies that can be used while you're studying and while you're taking tests if your primary modality preference is visual, aural, read/write, or kinesthetic, but remember we said that you might have different preferences depending on the course that you're taking. For example, in a lab course, you may certainly prefer to use strategies that are effective for kinesthetic learners, but for an art history course you might prefer strategies for visual learners. Now Fleming refers to individuals who use more than one style or modality as multimodal learners and he identified two types of multimodal learners, VART multimodal learners. The Type One learners are the learners who switch modes depending on the context. For example, the person who would use kinesthetic in a lab course and visual in a an art history course, but the Type Two multimodal learners are those learners who find that they want to use two, three or even four of the modalities for every single learning task.
For example, you might have someone who is a Type Two multimodal learner. If they're trying to learn something in chemistry, they might want to read the text very carefully, but then they also want to look at the diagrams. Then they also might want to imagine that they are the actual molecules and the reactants in the products, so they're giving it that real world experience. It turns out that students who are multimodal learners are pretty much very effective because they're very thorough learners. It usually takes them, though, more time to learn a subject because they're trying to make sure that they touch on all the different modes, but they're usually more confident that they have mastered the information because they've studied it in so many different modes. That's the other reason that I said it's very important for you to really learn the strategies for each of the different modes, because you too may find that using more than one mode, even though you have a primary preference for one, is going to result in learning that is much deeper and will give you more confidence that you have mastered the information.
Activity
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[eye icon] [Ear icon] [book icon] [hand icon] Text on screen:
Visual Aural Read/Write Kinesthetic Clasp your hands
Which thumb is on top? [icon of two hands with thumbs up]
Switch thumbs
Awkward, strange, uncomfortable What can you do? How can you adjust?
[icon of brain in circle with three lines connected to smaller circles coming out from the top of the circle] You have a preferred style, but now you have strategies for success.
I hope that you've learned something in this session about your learning style modality preference, but more importantly, I hope that you've learned valuable strategies to use while you're studying and also to use while you're taking tests, because these strategies will be very useful no matter what your preferred modality is. I really hope that you'll use this information to make yourself a more efficient learner who can succeed at any learning task. Right now I'd like to do a little exercise with you that will demonstrate the possible impact of learning your preferred modality, but also the modality for different areas also.
What I'd like for you to do right now is just take your hands and just clasp them together. Just clasp them. Now I'd like you to look down and notice which thumb is on top. If your right thumb is on top, take notice. If your left thumb is on top, take notice. Now when I do this exercise with groups of individuals, typically about 50% of the group will find that their right thumb is on top. About 50% find that their left thumb is on top. Now what I'd like for you to do is leave your fingers where they are, but then just put the other thumb on top. How does that feel? I bet it feels very, very awkward. Now one of the things that you could do to make it feel a little bit less awkward is to change the positions of your fingers.
Now put your fingers and lace them a different way. I think you're going to find that it's still not the way you would prefer to clasp your hands, but if you had to clasp your hands putting the opposite thumb on top than you normally do, then changing the position of your fingers will make that a little bit more comfortable. I think that that's a great analogy for learning styles, that you have a preferred style, but if you have to be in an environment that you've got to use a different modality, then now we have strategies that we can implement that will make that learning go much more efficiently.
Activity & Conclusion
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Preferred modality:
• Strategy 1
• Strategy 2
• Strategy 3 Commit!
Now that we know a lot about preferred learning style modalities, I have one final activity that I'd like for you to do. I'd like for you to think about what your preferred modality was and I'd like for you to write down three strategies that you will start to implement, and if you can implement these immediately, it is going to be very helpful. If you can commit to yourself that you're going to use these strategies for at least the next three weeks, then it's much more likely that these will become a habit and you'll be able to use these strategies to become much more effective, and I'm confident that when you work with your brain the way it prefers to learn, you're not only going to be a much more efficient learner, but you'll have much more fun with your learning tasks.