Replying to LO26139 --
Hi, Steve. You always ask great questions. Our college did attempt to
examine this issue some years ago by administering the 4MAT (published by
Excel -- not the MS Excel), which measures learning styles -- the thought
being that instructors teach as they themselves learn. It was simple to
administer and the faculty were extremely interested in the outcomes --
especially when they physically separated into their learning style group
and saw who else was in the same group! There were some surprises. It
got our faculty to thinking about identifying their students' learning
styles and then examining the match, not that we would ever get so
sophisticated that we could (or would) match student learning styles to
those of the teacher. For one thing, students need to learn how to learn
in different ways from different teachers; realistically, they will never
be able to pick and choose instructors for a match in learning styles --
at least not in the foreseeable future. However, a number of instructors
consciously varied their classroom activities so that they would appeal to
all learning styles at some point or another. We never took it too far in
a formal way, though we did collect data on the types of learning styles
of our instructors, age, ethnicity, gender, to see if there were any
patterns. I can't recall now what came out of that study.
I have always wanted to pursue the learning styles inventory in a formal
way. I'm hiring an assessment coordinator, a faculty position, to work
with faculty on classroom-based assessment and this is one of the
initiatives I want him/her to take up. Frankly, it was such a stimulating
and thought-provoking exercise for faculty, that I would do it again just
to get them thinking. Harriett.
Harriett J. Robles
hjrobles@aol.com
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