Blog Junkie

I found these YouTube videos by Dan Willingham, a cognitive psychology professor at UVA, on Eduwonkette’s blog, here. Mr. Willingham is presenting a very interesting argument regarding a deeply held educational belief: that students have learning style preferences and that we, as educators, are teaching to those student preferences. If we find that we have a student who has a strong preference for learning visually we teach that student visually – preferably mostly visually.

Mr. Willingham is saying that while research in cognitive science shows that we do actually have learning style preference, we do not learn specifically by those modalities. That learning takes place when meaning is created and stored as a memory representation. If we present visual images to our visual learners they will remember parts of the images as the “gist” of the content. The part of the images remembered will be stored as a visual memory and the meaning of the lesson will be stored as a separate memory representation. I hope I have that correct.

What surprised me was that there is, apparently, some notion that teachers are using one modality only to teach a lesson ie: visual, so all the visual learners will be able to learn. Then the lesson would be presented in an auditory manner for the auditory learners as in some form of centre style format. That is not what I do or ever considered doing. I teach all three modalities simultaneously: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. I am specifically going after learning meaning, not the modality. Mr. Willingham suggests in his paper, here, that each lesson should be taught according to which modality it is best suited for not students‘ learning style preference. I certainly hope that is what I have been doing with the goal of reaching as many students’ learning preferences as possible in order to create meaning (understanding of the content) while being as motivating as possible.

Thoughts, opinions…..???