Teaching and Learning Styles

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Learning Style Inventories

Everyone loves career tests and personality tests, right? You get to answer questions about yourself, be self-centered for a few minutes, and then get (sometimes hilarious) results.

So why not extend it into a learning styles test?

These suckers will help students figure out how they learn best and what strategies can help them really dig into a subject—even when it doesn't seem to play to their strengths.

1. The 7 Perceptual Learning Styles are identified as print, aural, visual, haptic, interactive, kinesthetic, and olfactory. (Olfactory? Yes, olfactory.) You can have your students complete a self-assessment to determine their preferences using the Perceptual Modality Preference Survey. They'll have to become members first, but they can take advantage of a free trial offer to do so, and then get crackin'. Or readin', or viewin', or, um, smellin', as the case may be.

2. There are four possible components of a VARK profile: visual, aural, read-think, and kinesthetic (we know, kinda like the 7 perceptual guys, but not quite). Your students can find out which is their dominant learning style by taking the 16-question VARK Questionnaire. It's free, it's quick, and it provides immediate feedback. That said, the feedback is a bit vague unless you're willing to pay for more in-depth analyses. Still, even the basic profile information is a good first step toward analyzing learning styles, and it could give your students a thing or two (or three) to think about. Including a few strategies for playing to their strengths in multiple content areas.

3. Developed by Barbara A. Soloman and Richard M. Felder, the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire is an online tool (free to educators and for personal use) that will assess your students' Felder-Silverman Learning Styles. (Yes, the tool is Felder and Soloman, but the learning style is Felder and Silverman. We know). So. Are your students active/reflective? sensing/intuitive? visual/verbal? sequential/global? Find out, and then read more about each style in our article on Felder-Silverman Learning Styles.

4. The Dunn and Dunn Learning Styles inventory measures learning preferences in five categories: environmental, emotional, sociological, physiological, and psychological. It's a pretty complex assessment that identifies everything from what level of light and background noise a student may prefer to whether he may work better alone or in groups, in the early morning or late at night, and with rigid structure or a free-form approach. Intense? Yes. Helpful? Also yes. The online assessment tool is easily accessible, but there is a fee of $5 per assessment, so be sure to check out their sample surveys and assessments to see if you think the information you could glean for that cost would be worth your hard-earned dolla-dolla bills.

5. Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles put a title (and possible career goal) on each of your students. They include the activist, the reflector, the theorist, and the pragmatist. Help your students pinpoint their preferred approach by having them complete this 80-statement inventory. You can print it, project it, or have them view it on individual devices and note which statements they agree with. It includes a scoring mechanism on the last pages…which may sound pragmatic in theory, but depends how you reflect on it.

For a much quicker assessment of H&M Learning Styles, you can have your students complete this 24-statement assessment from LifeTrain that will provide them with pretty pie-charts and graphs showing their learning preferences. Because there are only 24 statements, it may be less reliable, but it's quick, attractive, and still provides some great fodder for a learning styles discussion.

6. The Memletics Learning Styles include visual, aural, verbal, physical, logical, social, and solitary learning preferences. We know, some of 'em sound familiar, but we promise, it's a whole 'nother theory. Your students can use the print version or the Excel spreadsheet version (which will automatically calculate their totals) of the Memletics LS Inventory to determine theirs.

7. Okay, okay, Howard Gardner insists that Multiple Intelligences—at least as he intended them—are not learning styles…and yet there are numerous books in print detailing how you can use them as such in the classroom.

Fancy that, Mr. Gardner.

It's pretty baller for students to find the areas in which they are strongest, whether it involves musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, or one of the other 7 areas: visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, existential, or logical-mathematical. So go ahead—have 'em take a test. There are plenty to choose from, including:

  • Birmingham Grid for Learning's online form that allows you to view your own results as well as the results of all your class members (provided they share their individual codes with you). NOTE: Existential intelligence isn't measured on this one.
  • Literacy Net's 56-question assessment to help students find their strengths by scoring them in eight of the intelligences (existential isn't included here, either—it's a newer one, give it a break). It also gives them brief overviews of their top three.
  • This one, from Surfaquarium, includes existential intelligence, but you may have to print it out, and you'll have to do the calculations yourself. Still, it's more comprehensive than some shorter surveys, and because of its organization, it's pretty easy to see where one's strengths lie.
  • The quickest of the quick is this survey from Edutopia. Only 24-questions in length, it'll give your students their results within minutes. NOTE: Again, no existential, and when we took this one, well, let's just say we didn't really agree with the results. Still, nothing like a quick questionnaire to kill a few minutes.

Oh, and one last thing. If you're not in the assessment-making biz, you're doing it wrong.