Do either of these scenarios sound familiar to you?

(1) Your college class is a lecture format, and the professor rarely writes anything on the board beyond maybe a word or two. You struggle to know what is important enough to take  notes on, and are often at a loss at the end of class to know what just happened.

(2) Your college class meets once a week for an hour and a half, and between times you are expected to read the text book plus the weekly additional readings  in preparation for discussion in the class. You have tried to cover all the material, but can't remember what you have read, are not even sure of what is most important in the printed material. Once a week you try to make sense of what you were assigned to read, but don't feel secure enough to participate in class discussion.

These are both cases of where the material being presented for learning does not match the learners preferred learning modality, or learning "style." 

This page is where you can find information and tools that will help you learn about how you learn. Knowing what kind of learner you are involves looking at how you best process information (in and out), strategies to take advantage of your strengths and to bolster your weaker areas, and how to make the most of the time you have for studying.

Below you will find a hard copy and an interactive digital Learning Modality Preference Inventory to help  you understand how you process information, and how to take advantage of those strengths while discovering some strategies for overcoming your weaker areas.

You will also find an inventory to help you better understand and utilize your own personal Multiple Intelligence profile. Multiple Intelligence describes eight areas of "intelligence" that all people have, to varying degrees. We can use our own  unique profiles to better understand how we learn and make meaning of the world.                                                                             

The VARK Questionnaire

This brief questionnaire will give you the opportunity to discover (or validate) which ways you process information most easily. Knowing this can help you begin to develop strategies to compensate for times when information is being provided in a way that is more difficult for  you to understand and retain. A longer survey is also available below.

The Learning Modality Preference Inventory 

The following assessment tool is a bit more involved and may provide you with additional insight.

Strategies for Learning Modalities

The following chart will give you some ideas for techniques and strategies you can use to make the most of your learning modality preferences and ways to help you work with the areas in which you are not as strong. 

Other ways of looking at learning

Multiple Intelligences is the theory that we all have many ways of learning, some of which are stronger and more enduring than others in each of us, but all of which are available to everyone. First developed by Dr. Howard Gardner and applied to learning in children, we know that these abilities not only last into adulthood but ebb and flow as we need them. To find out more about how you interpret,  process, and interact in the world, the following surveys (one of many available online and one developed in-house) has been provided. There are no right or wrong answers!!!

Some less well known attributes and challenges to learning

While people today more often reach college knowing they have additional learning challenges and/or assets, and may have accommodations for some of those issues, there are others that are not as well known and may not impact learning, but will impact perception. Among these are Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome and synesthesia. Neither of these is a disease but, rather, is a physiological manifestation of the way a person's brain and neural network is "wired." 

Scotopic Sensitivity was first defined by Dr. Helen Irlen a psychologist who saw a trend in many of her patients who were intelligent but had extreme difficulty with reading and spelling. Through her research and observations she determined that the light in which the person was reading was interfering with the way the signals to the brain that occur when reading. While not always the same for each person, the print on the page might seem to swirl, move, and even disappear from the page itself. Working with the theory that the light waves were disrupting the way the brain saw and made sense of the printed page, Dr. Irlen theorized that "calming" the light with the use of transparent colored overlays and eyeglass filters might help accommodate and adjust the signals, which it did. You can find out more about this syndrome at www.irlen.com, and for students who wonder if they might have it, a pre-screening checklist is provided below. Those who can access campus can contact the Study Center at 255-1264 to arrange for an initial, no cost, screening to see if there is a color that can be of help.

Another neurological situation that can affect the way a person perceived the world is called Synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway gets entwined with another. For example, a person may experience letters as having sounds or colors. Much more information is available on this at your library or online, and a link is provided here to a self-test with the strong caution that this is not  a scientific assessment nor is it provided by UMM or the UMS. 

Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome/Irlen Self-Test

Do you or someone you know have difficulty reading?  Take the following test:

                                                                                                               Yes                 No

Do you skip words or lines when reading?                    ___             ___

Do you reread lines?                                                                    ___             ___

Do you lose your place?                                                            ___             ___

Are you easily distracted when reading?                       ___             ___

Do you need to take breaks often?                                    ___             ___

Do you find it harder to read the longer you read?  ___             ___

Do you get headaches when you read?                           ___             ___

Do your eyes get red and watery?                                      ___             ___

Does reading make you tired?                                               ___             ___

Do you blink or squint?                                                              ___             ___

Do you prefer to read in dim light?                                     ___             ___

Do you read close to the page?                                             ___             ___

Do you use your finger or other marker?                        ___             ___

Do you get restless, active, or fidgety when reading?___             ___

If you answered Yes to three or more of these questions, then you might be experiencing the effects of a perception problem called Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome, which can interfere with your reading efficiency.  Now there is a simple methods that can help people overcome this problem, quickly and easily.  Arrange for a more complete screening.  Call 255-1264, UMM's Study Center office.