Learning Styles
Your learning style (Felder,
1993) is defined in part by the answers to four questions:
-
How do you prefer to process information:
- actively – through engagement in physical activity or discussion, or
- reflectively – through introspection?
-
What type of information do you preferentially perceive:
- sensory – sights, sounds, physical sensations, or
- intuitive – memories, ideas, insights?
-
How is sensory information most effectively perceived:
- visual – pictures, diagrams, graphs, demonstrations, or
- verbal – sounds, written and spoken words and formulas?
-
How do you progress toward understanding:
- sequentially – in a logical progression of small incremental steps, or
- globally – in large jumps, holistically?
The learning style dimensions of this model (Felder and Soloman's ILS model)
are continua and not either/or categories. Your preference on a given scale
may be strong, moderate, or almost nonexistent. It may change with time, and
may vary from one subject or learning environment to another.
If you are interested in learning styles, you may enjoy looking at some of the
material listed at Richard Felder's webpages
(
www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ ).
The following plots show the distribution of learning style preferences for
Astr110 students (the large, black histogram), for a class of graduate student
astronomers (green squares), and for Professor Vogt
(blue square). Do you see any differences between the
different groups of people?
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| [NMSU, N. Vogt] |