Learning Stlyes

Thanks to Kenneth's post 'Learning Styles Serendipity' for directing me towards this excellent critical review Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning. A critical analysis of a large spectrum of theories pertaining to learning styles is presented highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. An excellent read where I am sure there might be some styles lurking in there that were unknown.

How Research Was Implemented.

The study of the literature, in the previous posts, provided an insight into some of the negative aspects of assessment in education with suggested methods to enable assessment to deliver more positive and effective results. It was also clear that the end product, the main focus of the majority of assessments, does not always give a true reflection of what a child knows as the process and the teacher’s delivery method are also important criteria in assessment. The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of this perspective through the following research question:

How can teachers assess if their teaching does not cater for how children learn?

The research question posed three important criteria on the research: children’s perceptions of how they learn, styles of teaching and evaluation tools. How we learn not what we learn was one of the driving issues during the research to enable children to develop a better understanding of their own learning styles through participation and reflection on four different lessons that were delivered using four approaches derived from VARK : auditory, auditory and visual, visual and interactive. An electronic means of recording children’s evaluations rather than paper was selected using the social media tool ‘Blogger’ (www.blogger.com) as it enabled children time to reflect and respond to each lesson at home rather than be restricted to a few minutes at the end of the lesson to reflect on the lesson and also, to ensure the allocated teaching time is used mainly for teaching and learning. The Blogger software also enabled each group’s responses to be categorised per group and lesson using the tag system thus providing a quick and simple electronic retrieval system.

The participants were four classes of primary seven children (eighteen children per class) at an independent school where each class normally received the same forty minute ICT lesson each week over a four week period. Due to the nature of the research where group responses were required for comparable purposes each class were taught the same concept but with a different method of delivery as follows:

The four different lessons focused on teaching children how to create and use two social media tools: email and wikis. The first two lessons focused on email using the provider ‘Yahoo’ (www.yahoo.co.uk) which provides free email accounts. Although the children had personal email accounts at school the decision to use an external provider stemmed from:

· the need to educate children in how to create accounts with a social media tool;
· the need to use a social media tool safely due to the influx of children using Bebos, Myspace, MSN, FaceBook, etc…
· the need to have an account with a provider like Yahoo to enable children to use their account to participate with many of the other social media tools that would be used during term time, for example, Blogger, Voki and Wikis.

The second set of lessons used the school wiki area: http://juniorschool.wikispaces.com to develop basic skills of using a wiki and introduce children to the instant publishing and collaborative aspects of a wiki page.

After each lesson a brief discussion on what made the lesson successful or unsuccessful was discussed to ensure the children understood what they were evaluating: the delivery of the lesson not the outcome was the main focus. Each child then entered their evaluation after each lesson at the blog http://aifl.blogspot.com by selecting the comment link assigned to their group’s lesson.

Prior to commencing the four week block of lessons, a discussion with each class on how they thought they learned took place with each child entering their initial thoughts into their class’s area on the AiFL blog during class time. There were two reasons the children undertook this activity; one to find out if they were aware of how they learn and if this view would change at the end of the block of lessons, the other was to ensure that the children knew how to access the AiFL blog and locate their group’s section and create a comment.

Since the patterns of behaviours of the children and the influences that ICT have on them, rather than a statistical perspective, were more important to the research, a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach to the research was adopted through the following sub-questions:

What are children’s perceptions of how they learn?
What styles of teaching provides the best learning context?
What benefits/disadvantages occurred through using technology in the assessment process?

Learning Stlyes

We all have different methods of assimilating information which have been defined by various theorists over the years to develop a better understanding of how we should present information to others. One of the main theorists, Dr. Howard Gardner, developed the theory of Multiple Intelligence in 1983 (Wise 2002) that consisted of eight different modes to demonstrate how we assimilate information:

· Linguistic intelligence;
· Logical-mathematical intelligence;
· Spatial intelligence;
· Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence;
· Musical intelligence;
· Interpersonal Intelligence;
· Intrapersonal Intelligence;
· Naturalist Intelligence.

Kolb’s theory of learning breaks down the above list into four concise compartments where children learn as:

· Diverging (feelings and watching);
· Assimilating (watching and thinking);
· Converging (doing and thinking);
· Accommodating (doing and feeling).

Gardner’s and Kolb’s theories of learning have influenced researchers and educationalists seeking to define the most effective way to teach children. Although both theories are used widely, the most popular theory is the VAK (Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic) which was developed from the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Research. Some analysts add Read/write to make VARK which mirrors a large proportion of learning in schools where children read texts from books, screens or whiteboards which they copy, note take or write in their own words.

Each of the above theories highlights how we learn in different ways, for example, some people perform better by listening to information, whereas, others prefer using their visual skills by reading information. The traditional instructional style of teaching may not be meeting everyone’s learning styles resulting in children’s assessments being misinterpreted where the teacher views their failure as not knowing rather than not understanding. Assessment is therefore not just about end products and test results but more importantly about:

‘growing understandings of how we learn and how good teachers teach.’
(Smith I 2004: 10)