I’ve heard various learning style theories advocated in public schools, teacher preparation programs, and college classrooms.  Pasher et al. (2009) make a compelling case that while learning preferences may exist, research has not supported the advantage of using different instructional strategies for these preferences.  Reading their article highlighted two key distinctions for me.  First, learning preferences should not be confused with learning aptitudes. The kind of information people prefer to receive is not necessarily the kind of information they remember most readily.  Pasher et al. demonstrated that there may be some need to vary the instructional context based on aptitude, although the studies they examined had mixed results.  In some cases, student achievement correlated with both aptitude and the amount of structure provided in the lesson, but in other cases, high aptitude students consistently outperformed low aptitude students regardless of the amount of structure.  At any rate, if a learning styles theory does exist, it appears that it would be more fruitful to target student abilities rather than student preferences.  Most commercial tests measure how students perceive they learn, and don’t systematically analyze how the students actually process information.  These tests may indeed be worthless.  There could be a place for tests targeting specific aptitudes, but more research needs to be conducted in this area as well.  Secondly, learning styles theories seem implicitly based on an either/or construct.  According to these theories, a person who is more verbal will learn more information if it is presented verbally rather than visually.  In reality, sensory registers work together to help people learn.  Even if someone is strongest in verbal ability, that person may also have well-developed visual ability.  Strength in one area does not necessitate weakness in another area.  As the lecture by Dr. Willingham pointed out, some kinds of information can only be appropriately presented in one modality.  Furthermore, students may benefit from receiving some kinds of information in mixed modalities.  Too narrow a focus on targeting information to a student’s highest ability could reduce overall learning by limiting the parts of the brain that can be employed to help that student process the information.  Much of the research indicates that an effective pedagogy can benefit most students, regardless of learning style.  There is room, though, for more research in this field.

Going through these exercises really helped me reflect on the strategies I use to remember information.  I definitely experienced the dual channels for auditory/phonetic and visual/spatial that Baddeley described on the long list number recall because I recited some of the numbers in a repeating loop while holding a picture of some of the other numbers in my mind.  I could not have pictured all of the numbers nor could I have repeated all of the numbers but I could hold both processes in my mind at once to remember a greater percentage of the numbers.  Also, just as Baddeley asserted, meaning associations were the most powerful memory aids for me.  On Item 14, most of the names I remembered were family members’ names.  In fact, this association was so strong in my mind that I erroneously substituted by brother’s name, Jason, for Jay.  When I first started the paired word recall, I can remember thinking to myself, “How in the world am I going to remember this?”  Then I started creating connections between the words.  I pictured actions in my head.  I did much better on that exercise than I expected.  I actually performed worse on the paired words involving imagery because I found the pictures distracting from my own connections.  Interestingly, Vince Kellen wrote a dissertation on how students with poor spatial skills can actually be hindered in learning by complex images.  I did feel more stressed during that exercise as I simultaneously worked to interpret both the words and the pictures.  This creates a caveat to the comments I made in my last blog post, where I discussed the importance of appealing to multiple modalities.  It raises the question of how a teacher can predict when involving multiple senses will aid learning and will it distract.  For me the images distracted by forcing associations other than the ones I was ready to make.

Pinker’s description of the accommodations that the brain makes in order to accurately perceive reality–such as the way the brain makes vertical objects look longer than horizontal objects to compensate for the natural foreshortening of 3D objects directed away from us in our vision (see Pinker, 2002, p. 200)—made a big impression on me.  I wondered if these accommodations are present at birth or develop through our interactions with the world.  As a result, I began searching visual perception in infants.  As an aside to the main thrust of this post, I did find a fascinating article on how infants respond to pointing movements that I think gives some evidence that the human tendency to follow a moving hand is innate rather than learned (see Click here for article in EBSCOhost).

In the course of my search, however, I stumbled on a TED Talk with a different focus, how complex hearing is and how that corresponds to our appreciation of music.  In this video, Charles Limb talks about the limitations of cochlear implants and the multitude of factors that go into deriving beauty from songs.

TED Talk by Charles Limb

Limb starts his presentation with an interesting assertion, that our senses do more than help us survive in the world.  They also make it possible for us to find beauty in our experiences.  Limb contrasts language, which is goal-driven, with music that is more experientially based.  Learning to interpret music is different than learning to interpret words.  As a result, patients with cochlear implants have a much easier time understanding and appreciating language than they do music. 

For me, this TED Talk has major implications for education.  First, it demonstrates how humans use a complex variety of information sources to construct meaning.  All of our senses are intricate devices that have evolved to distinguish subtleties in the kind of information they receive.  Am I attuned to this idea as a teacher?  Am I teaching my students how to construct meaning in multiple modalities?  Do I make sure that the messages I send are consistent across sensory inputs, that I have coordinated what my students experience with all of their senses?  For example, students who do not have hearing difficulties will react to a film showing a woman walk down a dark alley differently based on the music in the background.  If the music has frightening tones, they will interpret the act as dangerous, but if the music has playful tones, they will probably find the clip more humorous and harmless. 

Secondly, a wide range of physical impairments can affect my students’ ability to construct meaning from their experiences.  In the PowerPoint on sensory registers, the second component of the information-processing model, we learned that “sensory limitation can result in information being distorted.”  Limb described all the things that happen inside the ear while people listen to music.  A malfunction in even one area changes the way music is received and the potential response of the individual.  As a result, senses do not involve a simple have or don’t have binary.   A student may not have an obvious hearing impairment, but may still “hear” music differently from me.  Before jumping to conclusions about a student’s meaning-making ability, I should consider that something could be happening in a student’s sensory register.  In addition to meeting students’ different learning preferences, creating lessons in multiple modalities can help balance potential differences in students’ sensory abilities.

The school for geniuses that Bart attended had many of the elements of a constructivist environment outlined by Angela O’Donnell.  Students engaged in authentic problem-solving which they had a choice in selecting.  There was an emphasis on experiential learning, and students had access to a variety of real-world tools to assist them in completing their work.  The students learned in a variety of social contexts from dyads to whole class discussions.  Through the whole class discussions, they articulated their reasoning, building knowledge through the use of language.  On the other hand, one major element of dialectic constructivism missing was scaffolding.  Apart from the teacher’s questions in whole group discussion, problem-based learning appeared minimally guided, which made the class seem more attuned to endogenous constructivism.  Furthermore, the school assumed this environment was only appropriate for “geniuses,” while constructivist pedagogy assumes that all children learn in this manner.

I appreciated reading the article this week by Angela O’Donnell. It helped clear up some confusion I had regarding constructivism as an epistemology vs. pedagogy.  Last semester, I was told that it was logically inconsistent to teach in a constructivist manner if one held an objectivist epistemology.  To believe in an accurate knowledge external to the individual necessitated using direct instruction as a teaching strategy.  I don’t believe this way.  I believe that we construct our views of the world, but that these views can “correspond, more or less adequately, to reality,” to borrow the words of Piaget (as cited in our Module 3 PowerPoint).  Therefore, I think constructivist strategies are appropriate in the classroom.  Students must actively engage the environment in order to learn, even though I think that some forms of knowledge ultimately reside outside of the individual.  (I must qualify “some” because there are clearly some forms of knowledge which are socially constructed.  Unlike many social constructivists, though, I don’t believe that all knowledge is socially constructed.)  I appreciated O’Donnell’s explanation of Moshman’s three kinds of constructivism.  Moshman distinguished between exogeneous, endogenous, and dialectical constructivism.  Endogenous constructivism is the kind I encountered in my course last semester.  It is based on the idea that knowledge is internally developed and different from person to person.  In exogeneous constructivism, however, knowledge resides in the environment, but constructivist strategies are appropriate in helping learners to assimilate accurate mental models.  Dialectic constructivism is a blend of these two forms of constructivism.  I relate most to dialectic constructivism due to the distinction I made earlier between external and socially constructed knowledge.  I now understand much better from a theoretical perspective why I have been so drawn to Vygotsky, who I was previously led to believe resided in a much different intellectual camp from myself.  While I don’t think Vygotsky would have completely agreed with my epistemology, I can now see from O’Donnell’s explanation how Vygotsky’s perspective is more closely aligned with mine than many of the other education theorists.

O’Donnell, A. M. (2012). Constructivism. In K. R. Harris, S. Graham, & T. C. Urdan (Eds.) APA educational psychology handbook, Vol. 1: Theories, constructs, and critical issues (pp. 61-84). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

According to Vygotsky’s social constructivism, humans construct knowledge through interaction with other people, particularly the more knowledgeable other.  Teachers should model a cognitive process within the students’ zone of proximal development, and then assist students to complete tasks until the students can internalize the process and perform the tasks independently.  In a math class, for example, this could take the form of showing students how to complete a problem and then providing them a similar problem with some of the steps already supplied. As students show facility at inserting the needed information, they are asked to complete greater numbers of steps until they can solve the problem without assistance. William James likewise stressed the importance of imitation in learning, that teachers and peers can set an example, which is basically another expression for modeling.  James (1899/2001) claimed, “The teacher who meets with most success is the teacher whose own ways are the most imitable.  A teacher should never try to make her pupils do a thing which she cannot do herself. ‘Come and let me show you how’ is an incomparably better stimulus than ‘Go and do as the book directs’” (p. 26).  Both Vygotsky and James emphasized the importance of social influence in learning.

In Piaget’s cognitive constructivism, humans organize information about their experiences in schemata that they create.  Piaget demonstrated that children of different ages have differing abilities to form certain kinds of schemata.  James mentions stages of development, although his focus is on students’ changing interests and tendencies rather than abilities:  “In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a certain determinate order . . . the proper pedagogic moment to work skill in . . . is when the native impulse is most acutely present” (James, 1899/2001, p. 31).  Piaget and James both explain that teachers should be sensitive to development in designing instruction.  For Piaget, this means not rushing students to tackle tasks for which they are not cognitively able.  For James, this means targeting instruction to a child’s current interests.

James, W. (1899/2001). Talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life’s ideals. Mineola, NY: Dover. ISBN: 0486-41964-9 

I’ve been really struck in my reading by one particular assertion that William James (1899/2001) makes:  “The ‘nature’, the ‘character’ of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form of his associations.  To break up bad associations or wrong ones, to build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into the most fruitful channels, is the educator’s principle task” (p. 42).  This is a new thought.  I’ve always assumed that bad behavior was either derived from some hereditary temperament or the product of poor training (which could include not having the child’s needs met).  I’ve never envisioned behavior as the result of the mental connections that one makes.  It’s really intriguing to consider how my approach to my students might change if I followed James’ advice to “acquire a habit of thinking of your pupils in associative terms” (p. 45).  I’ll need to spend a lot more time drawing out how this practice could affect my teaching, but as an initial reaction, I can think of people I know who tend to act in certain ways because they immediately jump to particular thoughts.  For example, I have a longtime friend who some people consider stubborn.  If someone “tells” him to do something, he will not do it, because he does not like being bossed around.  It has caused problems in our friendship because sometimes he reacts badly to my sincere efforts to tell him things that bother me.  If I am interpreting this passage correctly, I think that James would say my friend has formed an association between being asked to do something and being controlled by another person.  He has a negative association that influences his behavior.  If I could help him replace this negative association with a more positive association between expressing something I need in our friendship as evidence of how much I trust him and desire his friendship, he might react differently.  I’m still not certain how you can guide somebody’s associations, but I want to spend more time pondering this idea and what it’s practical implications might be in how I react to people.

James, W. (1899/2001). Talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life’s ideals. Mineola, NY: Dover. ISBN: 0486-41964-9

According to Piaget, knowledge does not exist somewhere outside of the mind.  As people interact with their environment, they interpret what they experience.  In doing so, they actively “construct” knowledge by forming categories of associations.  Rather than impart knowledge to students through lectures and reading, the teacher’s role is to help students build schemas by having them actively experiment and explore the world.  When students encounter new experiences, they feel cognitive disequilibrium, which is uncomfortable, so they attempt to restore equilibrium by either “assimilating” information about the new experience into their existing schemas, or by “accommodating” the information through changing their mental frameworks (altering their schematic structures).  The greater the variety of experiences the student has, the more information he or she will need to incorporate through assimilation and accommodation, leading to more accurate knowledge structures. 

Another key idea presented by Piaget is that people go through stages of development.  They have different cognitive abilities at each stage.  A person cannot learn in a way for which she or he is not cognitively able, so teachers should be sensitive to what students are able to do at each age when presenting new concepts.

I just saw this article in Fast Company:  http://www.fastcompany.com/3013178/unplug/why-youre-sleeping-with-your-smartphone.  What a great example of behaviorism in action.  In the beginning the author describes how you can help someone to replace one behavior (being unplugged) for another (being constantly connected) using praise.  There’s even an example of negative reinforcement.  Notice the “you slap their hand”.  Later the author talks about making small changes, which sounds very much like shaping.  The part about having a common goal isn’t really behaviorism, but there’s definitely elements of behaviorism in her approach.