Rainer Heilke wrote: > Actually, the fact that different people learn differently is now > well-known, and educators (the new, better ones) are now trying to > learn how to cope with this issue. My own experience in various fields > bears this out for me. Some people think visually, some textually, > some verbally, some mathematically, etc.
Speaking as a neurologist, you're basically right. People clearly have preferred learning styles, though typically I would say that even visually-oriented people want more than that, even though if visual were all they had, they could manage. I took a course once, in which one of the exercises was a self-assessment test, that in the end spit out scores which identified predominant learning preferences -- for whatever reason there were four "quadrants" of style which, by the way, also included personal, emotional aspects of learning. Now this was a room full of doctors (MDs), yet each quadrant had about one-fourth of the group in it. And even so, when each member of each group was asked how they wanted information presented, people tended to want it all, they wanted to be able to flesh out the whole of it even though they might preferentially focus on one aspect to best "understand" what they were trying to learn. So my interpretation of John's comments are not that texts are bad, but just that for him to get the most out of a text, he needs that lecture jump-start to help at first. After that, he can use the text to help him revive the lecture experience in his head when he needs it. Greg
