By Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
If you have been taking online classes for awhile, you’ve probably heard of multiple intelligences. You've probably also heard that finding your unique learning styles or preferences will help you do well in your online courses. But, what are "multiple intelligences"? How does one know if one has a learning style or preference?
The term, multiple intelligences, was termed in 1983 by Howard Gardner, who placed an eclectic framework of his own design around what learners and teachers have known forever – that some people learn differently than others and that the quickest path to academic success involves matching one’s abilities and preferences to the learning strategy that one might wish to employ. His work has focused on how best to measure individual differences and to develop activities and teaching guides that will help students harness their innate abilities. Gardner and others have developed have developed methods and approaches that they assure learners, teachers, and education providers that test performance, deep learning, and student satisfaction will improve.
Learning styles and learning preferences are in the same general area as multiple intelligences, which is to say that describing them involves an interdisciplinary mix of psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogy. Researchers in the fields have developed questionnaires, tests, inventories, and evaluations to help you determine your own learning style and preferences. They further recommend how you should study, and which types of delivery you should seek out.
To synthesize and summarize what many researchers have concluded, we can say that learning styles consist of the following elements:
1---Cognitive processing: The way you tend to receive, store, and retrieve information;
2---Patterns of learning: Your approach, your behaviors and the place / context where you tend to learn.
3---Adaptive responses: Adjustments one makes in order to accommodate less than ideal situations and contexts.
While the process seems straight-forward, finding out what your learning preferences are and getting them to work for you is not really as easy as it sounds. Serious doubts about the validity of self-diagnosed learning styles exist. Critics have suggested that self-reporting becomes an exercise in merely reinforcing one’s beliefs about oneself, and it does not really uncover anything new that could really help you fine-tune your study habits. Further, self-analysis does not reveal any undiscovered truth about your unique cognitive processes.
Nevertheless, the people who have developed learning styles inventories and tests can point to success. That, at any rate, is enough to make it worth taking a closer look, and seeing how some of the findings might be beneficial.
Complicating the situation is the fact that many enterprises have sought to commercialize the concept of learning styles and have developed an array of competing models, with questionnaires and even physical tests, designed to match preferences with delivery method or style.
Cynics have pointed out that any program that results in more attention to students usually results in improved student performance, whether due to increased time with the instructor, one-on-one mentoring, enhanced instructional materials, peer mentoring, and student collaboration.
Despite the critics, positive results have demonstrated that when learning styles and performance are identified and then mapped to learning activities and outcomes.
The key is to understand what learning styles are, and then to select an approach that makes sense to you, given your situation, and the kinds of courses you are taking.
Here are a few well-known approaches:
Myers and Briggs. Built around Jung’s personality theory, the Myers-Briggs inventory involves analyzing results to questions that will allow individuals to classify themselves and measure the degree to which their personalities include characteristics such as perceiving, judging, thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition. Individuals can use the information to help them understand themselves and their relationships with others in work teams, discussion groups, and interactions with the instructor. The approach is very popular in businesses. A question about how much one’s personality matters in learning has not been resolved.
Gardner. Connects learning with the senses, and explains how people tend to be visual learners, auditory, or kinaesthetic.
Kolb. The Learning Styles Inventory requires one to look at patterns of behavior and to see how one’s approach to learning tends to be active, reflective, abstract, or concrete. The questionnaire could be seen as begging the question of whether or not we really can know ourselves well enough and that self-reporting can be influenced by one’s previously held beliefs. Nevertheless, Kolb's model is very useful because it focuses on experiential learning.
VAK. An acronym for Vision, Auditory, and Kinaesthetic, VAK seeks to identify which of the three style is dominant. Once a learner knows which one is dominant, he / she can plan her study around it. Take the VAK survey here: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/vak.html
Honey and Mumford. Derived from Kolb's work, Peter Honey's method is used to find one’s approach to learning, and to see how it fits one’s patterns. The categories are active, reflective, theory, and pragmatic,
Entwistle. What makes Entwistle’s approach unique is the fact that the approach attempts to apply concepts to study skills and learning strategies. The goal is to look at “deep learning” as well as surface and strategic approaches.
Needless to say, the challenge is to implement the ideas that have been formed in the area of learning styles.
You are probably best served if you take a pragmatic approach to the challenge and ask yourself the following questions:
1---What are your study behaviors? What is the best time, place, and situation for you to study? What do you do and how do you remember?
2---How do you manage information in order to remember it?
3---How do you manage information you’ll be using to solve problems?
4---How do you know if you’ve actually learned something? Do you remember it? Do you apply the knowledge? Are you able to generalize from a specific case and apply as an analogue? Does the place you are in make a difference?
As you approach a course, it is good for you to make a checklist of the activities you’ll be doing in your course. Also, review the ways that you'll be assessed. Will you need to write papers? Will you be taking multiple-choice tests? Then, think about the courses where you felt in control, and successful as a student. What made you feel comfortable? When and where were your best experiences? Then, develop a study strategy that matches the ways you will obtain the material, the times and methods you'll use to study, your practice assessments and tests, and the conditions of assessment. Keep in mind that the more you can adapt your learning environment and your schedule to fit your preferred setting, the better.
[Listen to the companion podcast at:
http://community.elearners.com/blogs/inside_elearning/attachment/835.ashx 2.4 MB]
Watch Susan!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3252161352324082951&q=e-learning+learning&hl=en
Watch Susan on "xtreme" learning that incorporates learning styles:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8063795562472037046&q=e-learning+learning&hl=en