A Follow-Up On the Slow Learner's Journey

Wednesday, October 5, 2005 at 01:50PM
Michael Chacko Daniels

PeterKline One way to change the way you present information so that more of your students can get it would be to consider different learning styles.

These are not the same as Gardner's intelligences, but they have been useful to teachers nevertheless and can help you significantly raise the general responsiveness of your students to what you are teaching.

One of the most successful models in academic circles is that of Dunn and Dunn, who have noted such things as that some people learn new material best with the distraction of music or a television set in the background, while others require silence; or that some people learn new material best in the early morning, or perhaps right after lunch—and so on.

From a practical point of view, this is perhaps the best one for school administrators and teachers to use, because it helps in making decisions about when students should be scheduled for certain classes, or what kind of learning environment they should have.

A quick and easy way to approach this subject, though, is to talk about five learning modalities.

Note that these are different from Gardner's multiple intelligences.

This list is also helpful to classroom teachers, because they can better understand the student who is always reading in class, or the one who always wants to be talking to someone else, often about what is being discussed in class.

It has been found that 80% of school dropouts are kinesthetic learners, whereas they make up only about 18% of the population. This means that the most powerful way to improve schools is to introduce kinesthetic modeling into them.

 

Article originally appeared on New River Free Press International: Visions of Survival & Improvement by People Remaking Our Small Planet (https://indiawritingstation.com/).