Conversation Starter: Learning Preferences

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BETSY BAREFOOT: We believe that it's very important that students be aware of learning styles, but also to be aware that one learning style is not necessarily better than the other. They all can be used effectively to learn.

VANESSA BAUTISTA: Well learning for me, I'm definitely more of a kinesthetic and visual leaner. In my math class, it's basically an online class and so all of the work we do is online. I have a book to help me teach it, but I need a teacher there explaining it on the board and writing out examples for me to understand it.

BETSY BAREFOOT: If you're a visual learner and you're forced to read, you can graph. You can use color. There are so many ways to adapt a visual learning style to the classroom, but we want students to know that it's OK to come in as a visual learner. To hate the lecture, but to be able to learn to adapt. To learn to tolerate it and to learn the material by using their own preferred style of learning.

JENNIFER ROCKWOOD: We have very different learning styles now of our students. And we're just finding that out. They're just starting to do research on what gaming and gaming philosophy. And what the response rate of students playing video games with their hands and their fingers and that touch sensitive ability to interact and react very quickly.

DAVE DILLON: Without question, the clickers are going to engage the generation of students that are used to this type of technology. I went and visited a fourth-grade classroom a couple weeks ago and they were using the clickers. And nearly every student in class was glued to the clicker.

DAPHNE L. RANKIN: We do ask our professors to look for different learning styles, but also to talk to the students because the students may not even realize that there is one way they learn better than the other. But they just know that they've always done better if they did it in a certain way.

INTERVIEWER: Splitters, like splitting wood. Splitters or lumpers. Ever heard about that?

LOUIS GONZALEZ: I don't think so.

INTERVIEWER: Well a splitter is somebody who tends to analyze information logically and break it down into small parts. They split it up. A lumper is someone who tends to watch for patterns or relationships in order to get the big picture.

LOUIS GONZALEZ: Uh-huh.

INTERVIEWER: What do you feel like? Do you feel like you're a splitter or a lumper.

LOUIS GONZALEZ: I'm for sure a lumper. Because in my art history class, we get like shown a bunch of art and we have to connect the art to the culture and then where it comes from. And so I always start by figuring out with each culture there's something the same in all those pictures. So I always do that. That's why I get good grades on exams in art history. I actually sit down and have all the pictures of the Inca, all the pictures of the Maya. And then look at all of them and try to find something similar.

BETSY BAREFOOT: Learning styles are just your preferred way to take in information and learn. And we want students to know that no matter what their preference is, they can use that preference to study any subject and to be successful even though the teaching style in a particular class does not necessarily match their learning style.