Teachers should indeed think about the modality in which they present material, but their goal should be to find the content’s best modality, not to search (in vain) for the students’ best modality. If the teacher wants students to learn and remember what something looks like, then the presentation should be visual.
For example, if students are to appreciate the appearance of a Mayan pyramid, it would be much more effective to view a picture than to hear a verbal description.
Many topics may call for information in more than one modality. In a unit on the Civil War, in addition to lectures and reading, it might be appropriate to include recordings of martial music used to inspire the troops, visual representations (maps) of battlefields, and perhaps a chance to handle the pack and equipment the troops carried so that students could appreciate their heft. Similarly, if students are to learn the form of an English sonnet, they should hear the stress forms of iambic pentameter, and then see a visual representation of it.
There are other ways in which modality of instruction can influence the effectiveness of a given lesson—but the influence applies to all children (see box, p. 34). Experiences in different modalities simply for the sake of including different modalities should not be the goal. Material should be presented auditorily or visually because the information that the teacher wants students to understand is best conveyed in that modality. There is no benefit to students in teachers’ attempting to find auditory presentations of the Mayan pyramids for the students who have good auditory memory. Everyone should see the picture. The important idea from this column is that modality matters in the same way for all students. ------------------------------------------
Essentially all learning styles stuff is gibberish*, and that's not just my reasonably-well informed opinion, but the result of a research study done in the UK:
http://www.lsda.org.uk/files/PDF/1543.pdf
And apparently another one as well. Check out Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles
Great way to raise awareness of differences, don't get me wrong, but most instruments (that is, assessments) are flawed, and misused. There's good stuff you can do, but few limit themselves to that. Go to an ASTD conference expo, and you'll see a veritable plethora of 'learning styles' assessments available to 'improve' your organization.
I do believe there're differences, but they're so contextualized that it's still best (as I heard about multi-cultural learning) to do the best learning approach for the content, and then maybe assist learners in adapting to it by giving them processing strategies for modalities that they're not comfortable with.
------------------------------------------
There is always someone pushing the accelerated learning issue and catering to individual issues and research proved a long time ago that catering to a preference does not necessarily make learning any better or easier. I have all of R. Clark's stuff and am rereading it. I finally managed to get Mayer's book today. Went to library for one book and came back with 40!
What I am trying to figure out is why people make choices to use certain methods/media with training/learning or are they just following a path that has been done before without thinking about what strategies they are using or if they even have a strategy.
Then there is the issue of adults vs kids and learning etc. using the same methods. What I see most is a lack of clear definition of terms, too many factors that are not accounted for/ruled out or studied or mentioned in the studies so you get conflicting findings.
-----------------------------------------
PS..I also downloaded all of the MIT Brain/Cog Sc material that was available. I am more focused on associating learning ideas/theories with actual biological data to prove/disprove learning theories.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/index.htm
------------------------------------------
One of the most intriguing models I've ever encountered is the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Boston, where the entire k-6 curriculum is taught through music, to non-musician students. All subjects are filtered through learning through music, and most exams are actually performances. Students do just fine in later grades, even if their perspective is a lot richer. See http://www.conservatorylab.org/learning.html for some of that model.
The model they use at the Lab School, not coincidentally, has five methods:
"Five processes are intrinsic to learning music-listening, questioning, creating, performing and reflecting. These are applied across the school as a fundamental way for children to approach all learning. The five processes require use of kinesthetic, auditory, and visual modalities of learning. Thus, every child's preferred learning style is accessed while the weaker modalities are strengthened."
-------------------------------------------
There are five main cognitive processes in the cognitive theory of multimedia
learning: selecting words, selecting images, organizing words, organizing
images, and integrating.
--------------------------------------------
I have this link to his site:
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/mayer/publications/publications.ph
p
--------------------------------------------
Arabic didactic verse was intended to provide an accessible and easily remembered summary of a particular field of knowledge. Medical poetry became a popular device for learning simple concepts of therapeutics and regimen, because the rhyming quatrains enabled the student or practitioner to quickly retain the basic ideas. Numerous medical treatises (as well as essays on other topics such as grammar, divination, navigation, or astronomy) were rendered into verse to help students memorize basic concepts. The poems were usually written in rajaz verse, which is a kind of iambic meter whose pattern of syllabic repetitions produces a jingling sound that is particularly easy to remember. This poetic form of instruction was immensely popular in medieval literature and numerous examples are preserved today, some of them written by very prominent figures. Most examples, however, remain in manuscript form and are unpublished, for the use of didactic poetry to teach serious subjects such as medicine has long fallen out of fashion and has not attracted much attention from historians.
The most well-known Arabic didactic medical poem was that called simply "A poem on medicine" (Urjūzah fī al-ṭibb) written by Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna).
-------------------------------
Selecting words, selecting images: What the learner actually pays attention to and allows in to the sensory channels (eyes, ears)
Organizing words, organizing images: Making sense of the words and images in working memory so that it can be transferred to long term memory. This is a process of building internal representations for the information. Interestingly, the author of the paper you sent to start this discussion says that one representation does not substitute or another (or something like this). Yes, in the organizing state we can actually do this. For example, if you see a piece of fruit you might think of the verbal name for that fruit or vice versa.
Integrating: Recall of previously learned information that relates. The old and new information are integrated.
----------------------------------------------
For example, if students are to appreciate the appearance of a Mayan pyramid, it would be much more effective to view a picture than to hear a verbal description.
Many topics may call for information in more than one modality. In a unit on the Civil War, in addition to lectures and reading, it might be appropriate to include recordings of martial music used to inspire the troops, visual representations (maps) of battlefields, and perhaps a chance to handle the pack and equipment the troops carried so that students could appreciate their heft. Similarly, if students are to learn the form of an English sonnet, they should hear the stress forms of iambic pentameter, and then see a visual representation of it.
There are other ways in which modality of instruction can influence the effectiveness of a given lesson—but the influence applies to all children (see box, p. 34). Experiences in different modalities simply for the sake of including different modalities should not be the goal. Material should be presented auditorily or visually because the information that the teacher wants students to understand is best conveyed in that modality. There is no benefit to students in teachers’ attempting to find auditory presentations of the Mayan pyramids for the students who have good auditory memory. Everyone should see the picture. The important idea from this column is that modality matters in the same way for all students. ------------------------------------------
Essentially all learning styles stuff is gibberish*, and that's not just my reasonably-well informed opinion, but the result of a research study done in the UK:
http://www.lsda.org.uk/files/PDF/1543.pdf
And apparently another one as well. Check out Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles
Great way to raise awareness of differences, don't get me wrong, but most instruments (that is, assessments) are flawed, and misused. There's good stuff you can do, but few limit themselves to that. Go to an ASTD conference expo, and you'll see a veritable plethora of 'learning styles' assessments available to 'improve' your organization.
I do believe there're differences, but they're so contextualized that it's still best (as I heard about multi-cultural learning) to do the best learning approach for the content, and then maybe assist learners in adapting to it by giving them processing strategies for modalities that they're not comfortable with.
------------------------------------------
There is always someone pushing the accelerated learning issue and catering to individual issues and research proved a long time ago that catering to a preference does not necessarily make learning any better or easier. I have all of R. Clark's stuff and am rereading it. I finally managed to get Mayer's book today. Went to library for one book and came back with 40!
What I am trying to figure out is why people make choices to use certain methods/media with training/learning or are they just following a path that has been done before without thinking about what strategies they are using or if they even have a strategy.
Then there is the issue of adults vs kids and learning etc. using the same methods. What I see most is a lack of clear definition of terms, too many factors that are not accounted for/ruled out or studied or mentioned in the studies so you get conflicting findings.
-----------------------------------------
PS..I also downloaded all of the MIT Brain/Cog Sc material that was available. I am more focused on associating learning ideas/theories with actual biological data to prove/disprove learning theories.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/index.htm
------------------------------------------
One of the most intriguing models I've ever encountered is the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Boston, where the entire k-6 curriculum is taught through music, to non-musician students. All subjects are filtered through learning through music, and most exams are actually performances. Students do just fine in later grades, even if their perspective is a lot richer. See http://www.conservatorylab.org/learning.html for some of that model.
The model they use at the Lab School, not coincidentally, has five methods:
"Five processes are intrinsic to learning music-listening, questioning, creating, performing and reflecting. These are applied across the school as a fundamental way for children to approach all learning. The five processes require use of kinesthetic, auditory, and visual modalities of learning. Thus, every child's preferred learning style is accessed while the weaker modalities are strengthened."
-------------------------------------------
There are five main cognitive processes in the cognitive theory of multimedia
learning: selecting words, selecting images, organizing words, organizing
images, and integrating.
--------------------------------------------
I have this link to his site:
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/mayer/publications/publications.ph
p
--------------------------------------------
Arabic didactic verse was intended to provide an accessible and easily remembered summary of a particular field of knowledge. Medical poetry became a popular device for learning simple concepts of therapeutics and regimen, because the rhyming quatrains enabled the student or practitioner to quickly retain the basic ideas. Numerous medical treatises (as well as essays on other topics such as grammar, divination, navigation, or astronomy) were rendered into verse to help students memorize basic concepts. The poems were usually written in rajaz verse, which is a kind of iambic meter whose pattern of syllabic repetitions produces a jingling sound that is particularly easy to remember. This poetic form of instruction was immensely popular in medieval literature and numerous examples are preserved today, some of them written by very prominent figures. Most examples, however, remain in manuscript form and are unpublished, for the use of didactic poetry to teach serious subjects such as medicine has long fallen out of fashion and has not attracted much attention from historians.
The most well-known Arabic didactic medical poem was that called simply "A poem on medicine" (Urjūzah fī al-ṭibb) written by Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna).
-------------------------------
Selecting words, selecting images: What the learner actually pays attention to and allows in to the sensory channels (eyes, ears)
Organizing words, organizing images: Making sense of the words and images in working memory so that it can be transferred to long term memory. This is a process of building internal representations for the information. Interestingly, the author of the paper you sent to start this discussion says that one representation does not substitute or another (or something like this). Yes, in the organizing state we can actually do this. For example, if you see a piece of fruit you might think of the verbal name for that fruit or vice versa.
Integrating: Recall of previously learned information that relates. The old and new information are integrated.
----------------------------------------------