Learning Styles

I recently got my login information for the Blackboard Learning System at NSC and have been playing around with the different links that I found there. One of the links is the Index of Learn Styles Questionnaire. I thought it would be interesting to take the quiz and see what the results say about me.

Results for: AW

      ACT                              X                    REF
          11  9   7   5   3   1   1   3   5   7   9   11
                             <-- -->

     SEN                      X                            INT
          11  9   7   5   3   1   1   3   5   7   9   11
                             <-- -->

     VIS          X                                        VRB
          11  9   7   5   3   1   1   3   5   7   9   11
                             <-- -->

     SEQ      X                                            GLO
          11  9   7   5   3   1   1   3   5   7   9   11
                             <-- -->

The test took only about 5 minutes to complete. It's 44 questions long and I probably spent about 5-7 seconds thinking about each one. How do you read the results? You can read about the four categories on the Learning Styles and Strategies page.

I'm not very surprised by the first one. I tend to learn well in all sorts of settings and I don't really believe I'm strongly biased one way or the other. The second is also a balance that doesn't surprise me, either.

The last two are clearly dramatically skewed. I had initially thought that I would be balanced between visual and verbal, since I tend to be able to hold a lot of auditory information in my head, but after some reflecting I found that the questionnaire is probably right. Memorizing information is not the same as learning. So while I can hold audio in short term memory, it's not information that is being processed in any way. When students ask me questions in section, I tend to have to write down what they say and stare at it before I can see what they're asking.

Seeing that I'm a sequential learner is unsurprising. I've always been better at the "nuts and bolts" operations than trying to see the everything at once. I think this is part of why students tend to like my teaching style: I often break things down into small steps (or sometimes decision trees).

I'm greatly amused by this sort of thing. Perhaps this is an indication that I should really start looking into Math Ed research or at least SoTL research as a scholarly pursuit.