PGCHE Learning Styles
Several weeks ago we had a session on the issue of different learning styles.
I've been thinking about this on and off since then but while writing up my assignment today (when I kept seeing the term in literature search results) I determined that I would finally make a quick comment on the blog.
The issue of individual learning styles and how educators should perhaps cope with them is a valid question. But at the time I wondered how much use knowing about learning styles actually was? This is because we increasingly teach in large groups and so during any particular session we may be faced with individuals with different learning styles. So how do you deal with that? Stick to one learning style and you disadvantage all but one group equally, or do you try to rotate through a number of learning styles over the course of a session or module, and try to advantage/disadvantage everyone equally? Of course there may be spaces where we can create opportunities for people to employ their preferred learning style (assuming they themselves know what it is). Do we have a reliable test for learning styles?
Student self reporting of even fairly testable knowledge (can you reference; send an email, attach a file to an email, make a PowerPoint show etc) is notoriously unreliable so something as nebulous as learning styles would be tentative at best.
Even if there was a reliable test for learning styles, again where would that leave us in the age of large group teaching?
So far so negative but then I thought a little more about it and the use of technology to aid teaching. Assuming we cold identify people's preferred learning styles we could then do something really quite useful about it. Imagine being able to produce a set of information in one format, along with a selection of alternative questions, exercises or diagrams, designed to cater for different learning styles. This then gives you the ability to squirt the kernel of the information you are trying to convey, along with some appropriate formatting and accompanying materials into user specific outputs. For example, I produce materials on the advantages and disadvantages of computer mediated communication (CMC) in organisations, and Student A gets a document from the system that contains the core information plus lots of flow diagrams explaining how information now flows in various ways etc. Student B (different learning style) gets a document from the system that essentially contains the same information but this student doesn't get flow charts but a number of real world examples to illustrate the key points.
One probably couldn't accommodate every learning style this way but if you knew that certain styles dominated (possibly in certain groups - artists and engineers to use some stereotypes in a hopefully productive way) then you might be able to provide a much better learning experience for the majority of the students.
I’m sure that this isn't a difficult thing to solve from a technical point of view. Given the wide use of things like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for separating content from formatting on the web this is possibly a relatively simple problem for someone who is technically minded (not me I'm afraid).
I'm sure lots of work has been done on this somewhere, and as with many of the fascinating topics covered on the PGCHE course, I only regret that I like the time to follow them up.
I've been thinking about this on and off since then but while writing up my assignment today (when I kept seeing the term in literature search results) I determined that I would finally make a quick comment on the blog.
The issue of individual learning styles and how educators should perhaps cope with them is a valid question. But at the time I wondered how much use knowing about learning styles actually was? This is because we increasingly teach in large groups and so during any particular session we may be faced with individuals with different learning styles. So how do you deal with that? Stick to one learning style and you disadvantage all but one group equally, or do you try to rotate through a number of learning styles over the course of a session or module, and try to advantage/disadvantage everyone equally? Of course there may be spaces where we can create opportunities for people to employ their preferred learning style (assuming they themselves know what it is). Do we have a reliable test for learning styles?
Student self reporting of even fairly testable knowledge (can you reference; send an email, attach a file to an email, make a PowerPoint show etc) is notoriously unreliable so something as nebulous as learning styles would be tentative at best.
Even if there was a reliable test for learning styles, again where would that leave us in the age of large group teaching?
So far so negative but then I thought a little more about it and the use of technology to aid teaching. Assuming we cold identify people's preferred learning styles we could then do something really quite useful about it. Imagine being able to produce a set of information in one format, along with a selection of alternative questions, exercises or diagrams, designed to cater for different learning styles. This then gives you the ability to squirt the kernel of the information you are trying to convey, along with some appropriate formatting and accompanying materials into user specific outputs. For example, I produce materials on the advantages and disadvantages of computer mediated communication (CMC) in organisations, and Student A gets a document from the system that contains the core information plus lots of flow diagrams explaining how information now flows in various ways etc. Student B (different learning style) gets a document from the system that essentially contains the same information but this student doesn't get flow charts but a number of real world examples to illustrate the key points.
One probably couldn't accommodate every learning style this way but if you knew that certain styles dominated (possibly in certain groups - artists and engineers to use some stereotypes in a hopefully productive way) then you might be able to provide a much better learning experience for the majority of the students.
I’m sure that this isn't a difficult thing to solve from a technical point of view. Given the wide use of things like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for separating content from formatting on the web this is possibly a relatively simple problem for someone who is technically minded (not me I'm afraid).
I'm sure lots of work has been done on this somewhere, and as with many of the fascinating topics covered on the PGCHE course, I only regret that I like the time to follow them up.
posted by Phil at 6:40 AM
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