Writing
Centers and Learning Styles
Nowadays,
we all know many things affect academic achievement. One factor is learning style, a concept that has
received scholarly attention more recently but has been around since the 1920s.
Since the goal of the writing center is to improve the writer, part of role of
the tutor becomes providing instruction in
a manner that the student will comprehend. There are many different ways to
offer this guidance, so I thought sharing some information on learning styles
for writing tutors might be useful.
What is
a learning style? Basically, a learning
style is not an ability, but a preference for learning a certain way.
These preferences include the things people do to learn things (e.g., making diagrams,
re-reading, practice) as well as broader styles (step by step instructions,
collaborative learning, etc.).
Research
on learning styles shows that individuals
differ in how they prefer to take in, process, and acquire new information,
but much remains unknown. For instance, scholars and psychologists don’t know
where learning styles come from. Are they associated with personality traits?
Are they fixed ways of thinking? This research on learning styles impacts
education: if it’s true that individuals learn in different ways, what should
educators do about it? There are essentially two camps when it comes to
addressing learning styles in the classroom. One feels that instructors should
diagnose individuals, and then tailor instruction to meet each individual’s
learning style. An entire business has sprung up because of these advocates;
that is, commercial measurement devices (tests) to help teachers assess
individuals are constantly being invented and sold. Unfortunately, most of
these tests don’t produce concrete results and there is no concrete evidence to
suggest that matching presentation of material to an individual learner makes a
significant difference. The other camp sees this lack of evidence and claims
that because teaching to individual styles does not work, we should instead focus
on multi-dimensional teaching.
The most important outcome from
research into learning styles is awareness. Just being aware that students prefer to understand
new information in different ways goes a long way for instructors. In fact,
recent literature on learning styles suggests that both educators and the learners themselves should
investigate their personal learning styles. This important concept of metacognition leads to the ability to teach to different styles and
provides vocabulary for talking about
learning styles, where the learner can express his or her individual needs
or adapt accordingly. Teachers are encouraged to diversify their lessons, and
learners are encouraged to use different learning strategies and move beyond
their preferred method when necessary.
To help
us think about the ways we learn and the ways we tutor in the writing center,
I’m highlighting 5 basic cognitive
styles that relate to learning style. What kind of learner are you? What
kind of learner is your client? How do stages of the writing process fit into
these cognitive styles, and can you think of ways to alter how you provide
instruction to match each style?
1.
Field
independent/ dependent. Field independent
learners are internally motivated with self-directed goals, structure their own
learning, and define their own study strategies. Field dependent learners, on the other hand, are externally motivated,
respond better to clearly defined performance goals, need structured guidance
from the instructor, and prefer to collaborate.
2.
Convergent-Divergent.
Convergent style learners seek the
one accepted correct answer from the available information, and divergent style learners tend to
produce a number of potentially acceptable solutions to the problem.
3.
Leveler-sharpener.
Similar to convergent/divergent styles in many ways, the leveler has a tendency to oversimplify and reduce the complexity of
a task, but the sharpener introduces
more complexity, treating each detail or event as a serious event.
4.
Holist-serialist.
Although these are different cognitive processes, they can produce the same end
result. Serialists operate on a step-by-step
approach to learning, while holists
will use significant amounts of information from the start, looking for
patterns or trends to understand the data.
5.
Verbalizer-visualizer.
Visualizers tend to learn best from
pictorially-presented material, while verbalizers
learn best from text-based materials. These styles are seen as incompatible
with each other and are often cited as a problem when instruction doesn’t
match.
Keeping
these basic divisions in our tutor tool-belts might help us recognize how to
best present materials to our clients, and practicing different ways to present
that material will help us stay sharp (and maybe even save a session where something
just doesn’t seem to be working!)
Cassidy, S.
2004. "Learning Styles: An Overview of Theories, Models, and
Measures." Educational Psychology
24:419-44.
Coffield, F., D.
Moseley, E. Hall, and K. Ecclestone. 2004. Should
We Be Using Learning Styles? What Research Has to Say to Practice. LSRC
reference, Learning & Skills Research Centre, London.
Fan, J. and L.
Zhang. 2013. "The Role of Learning Environments in Thinking Styles." Educational Psychology 34:252-68.
Hatami, S. 2012.
“Learning Styles.” ELT Journal
67:488-490.
Pashler, H. M.
McDaniel, D. Rohrer, and R. Bjork. 2008. "Learning Styles: Concepts and
Evidence." Psychological Sciences in
the Public Interest 9:105-19.
Rolfe,
A. 2012. "Learning Styles." InnoAiT
5:176-81.
Definitely a great thing to keep in mind here. People learn in lots of different ways, and some are more effective for an individual than others. I can definitely say I'm a visualizer, myself!
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