Learning

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Learning Teaching Styles Whats a Student to
Do?

• Presented By

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Dont we all feel this waysometimes

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Gotta love those math teachers

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Gotta love those math teachers

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How Students Learn

• Students retain
• 10 of what they read
• 26 of what they hear
• 30 of what they see
• 50 of what they see hear
• 70 of what they say
• 90 of what they say as they do something

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Learning Styles Tests

• Learning Styles Tests
• http//www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.htm
  l

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Whats Your Learning Style?

• Lets find out

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Learning Styles Descriptions

• Three generic kinds of learners major factors
• Senses auditory, visual, kinesthetics
• Reasoning deductive, inductive
• Environmental intrapersonal,
  interpersonal
• http//www.accd.edu/sac/history/keller/ACCDit
  g/SSLS.html

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Learning Styles Descriptions

• Active doing
• Reflective thinking
• Sensing seeing, hearing, listening,
  touching
• Intuitive feeling
• Visual visualizing
• Verbal analyzing
• Sequential steadily, logically
• Global fits and starts

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Active Learners

• Retain understand
• information best by doing --
• discussing or applying
• or explaining to others
• Like group work
• "Let's try it out and see how it works"
• Find it difficult to sit through lectures
  without doing anything physical

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Reflective Learners

• Prefer to think quietly first
• "Let's think it through first
• Prefer working alone
• Have difficulty sitting through lectures without
  any active participation except note
  taking

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Sensing Learners

• Like learning facts solving
  problems
• Dislike complications surprises
• Resent being tested on material
  not explicitly covered in class
• Patient with details
• Good at memorizing facts
• Practical careful
• Like hands-on (laboratory) work
• Don't like courses that have no apparent
  connection to the real world

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Intuitive Learners

• Prefer discovering possibilities
  relationships
• Like innovation dislike repetition
• Better at grasping new concepts
• Comfortable with abstractions
  math formulas
• Work faster are innovative
• Don't like "plug-and-chug"
  courses of memory routine

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Visual Verbal Learners

• Visual
• Learn through seeing pictures, diagrams, films
  flow charts, time
  lines, demonstrations

• Verbal
• Learn through language written spoken
  explanations

Everyone learns more when information is
presented both visually and verbally
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Sequential Learners

• Focus on parts, not whole
• Need linear steps
• Respond to logical order
• Can solve homework problems or pass test if parts
  are logically connected may not fully understand
• Educational (state, fed) testing privileges these
  kinds of learners

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Global Learners

• Focus on the whole, not parts
• Learn in jumps suddenly get it
• May solve complex problems
  quickly or creatively
• Need to see big picture before details

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For some, it doesnt matter
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BUT, Teaching Styles

• Often antithetical to how students learn
• Lecture (89 of faculty lecture)

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What Can You Do?

• Understand learning styles
• Use variety of teaching methods
• Change methods during class
• Check in with students
• Understand we tend to teach to
  OUR strengths
• It is our responsibility to adapt to them
• not their responsibility to adapt to us.

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Collaborative Learning Three to Four Heads are
Better Than One

• Presented By

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Collaborative learning brings minds together
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What Works? What Doesnt?

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Traditional vs. Collaborative

• Student-centered
• In control
• Have power
• Make decisions
• Learn cooperation
• Focus on content process
• Content depends on
• active context
• Extends learning styles

• Teacher-centered
• In control
• Has power
• Makes decisions
• Encourage competition
• Focus on content
• Content independent of
• active context
• Limits learning styles

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Effects of Collaboration

• Collaborative learning helps students
• Use higher level reasoning strategies
• Increase critical thinking skills
• Develop more positive attitudes
  towards school, learning, teachers
• Develop a greater respect for ethnic,
  gender, ability, class, or physical
  differences
• Become better individual writers
• http//clte.asu.edu/active/main.htm

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Effects of Collaboration

• Major collaborative assignments should be
• Tailored for a real audience with
  real consequences (when possible)
• Complex enough to need three to
  four people
• Structured so each person contributes
  to final product
• Opportunity for students to learn to organize
  themselves play to group strengths
• Designed to draw on expertise of group members

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Research on Study Groups

• Will there be a significant difference in
  achievement on a test comprised of "critical-
  thinking" items between individual and
  collaborative learning?

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Research on Study Groups

• Students who studied in groups
• performed significantly better on
  critical-thinking test, but
  no difference on
  drill-and-practice test)
• performed at higher intellectual levels
• improved problem-solving strategies
• Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical
  Thinking
• Anuradha A. Gokhale
• http//scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/jte-v7n1/
  gokhale.jte-v7n1.html

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So

• Isnt that what learning
• is all about?

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Structure of Collaboration

• Collaborative groups can be structured according
  to
• abilities
• skills
• schedules
• interests
• personalities
• diversity
• randomness

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Principles for Success

• Plan each stage very carefully
• Give specific instructions
• Teach students skills they need
• Evaluate project individuals
• Expect problems
• Expect success

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Designing Teams

• Create group assignments
• Require interdependence
• Make group work relevant real audiences
  outcomes
• Create assignments to fit students' skills
  abilities
• Create group size appropriate for complexity of
  task
• Adapted from
• Tools for Teaching by Barbara Gross Davis
  http//teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/collaborative.htm
  l

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Designing Teams

• Assign tasks that allow for
  fair division of labor
• Evaluate final product
  individual students
• Set up team competition
• OR
• Allow groups to share
  information compare
  team products

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Organizing Teams Forming

• Decide how groups will be formed
• Randomness
• Personality
• Prior achievement
• Levels of preparation
• Work habits
• Diversity
• Schedules
• Be conscious of group size
• Complexity of the task
• Less skillful members (smaller groups)
• Shorter amount of time (smaller groups)

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Organizing Teams Managing

• Help groups plan how to proceed
• Create plan of action who, what,
  where, when, how
• Review groups' written plans and/or
• meet to discuss
• Check in regularly
• Give time to work in class
• Collect progress reports
• Design assignments with clear divisions of labor
• Complexity of task critical

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Organizing Teams Working

• Keep groups together
• Help team solve conflicts
• Give students recourse for
• uncooperative members
• Handle shirkers
• Keep groups at three students all with work to do
• Give strategies to handle unproductive group
  behavior

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Diversity in Team Dynamics

• Different cultures define
• collaboration and all its
• factors differently

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Cultural Complications Definition

• An established set of values a way of thinking
  behaving that dominates everything we do,
  think, say, is passed from generation to
  generation
• the characterization of character Edward T.
  Hall

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Cultural Complications

• Euro-North American values dominate
• educational assumptions
• Group Individual Emphasis
• Achievement Responsibility
• Decision-Making
• Thinking Communication Styles

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Individual Emphasis

• Ideal of individual
• Ability to shape destiny
• Make decisions in own best interest
• Provide for own needs satisfaction
• Society helps us achieve individual
  goals free from restraints
• Country founded on precept of
  inalienable individual rights
• Education founded on and supports this individual
  competitive environment

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Group Emphasis

• 70 of cultures around the world
• needs of family, community,
  even corporations come
  before individual
• Americans assume primacy of individual
• many peoples assume highest goal
  is conformity to and identity with the
  extended family (which includes
  school workplace)

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Achievement Responsibility

• Our criteria for success standards of
  achievement not shared around
  the world
• activity resulting in accomplishments
  measurable by standards conceived
  to be external to acting individual
• Other cultures measure achievement
• how many contributions a person makes to groups
  welfare

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Achievement Responsibility

• Hispanic and Asian clients are not necessarily
  impressed with our penchant to quantify the
  virtues of a product
• quality aesthetic considerations often more
  important
• Actions in non-Western cultures understood as
  directed toward preserving enhancing their
  particular position within the social structure
• consideration about tangible progress
  improvement are secondary in importance, if
  present at all

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Achievement Responsibility

• Despite research suggesting that individual
  responsibility enhances group activity
• evaluating students individually may undermine
  collaborative experience by placing emphasis on
  competition
• Euro-North Americans believe that intra-group
  competition increases productivity
• other cultures believe that competition among
  individual members disrupts group harmony and
  decreases productivity

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Decision-making

• We regard most highly people who make decisions
  leadership the decider.
• Americans believe they should be their
  own source of opinions solve their
  own problems.
• An intense self-centeredness of the individual --
  so striking that an American psychologist (Carl
  Rogers) suggested this as university value, which
  it is not

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Decision-making

• Middle Easterners Asians
  consider it rude shameful to
  make decision on ones own to
  do so is to
  ignore the importance
  of collective decisions.
• Students who believe in group harmony may not be
  able to live up to the expectations we have about
  what makes good group members.

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Thinking Communicating

• We tend to be linear thinkers looking for cause
  and effect problem-solving skills
• Cross-cultural research suggests that
  problem-solving approach is culturally based.
• Problem-solving in educational standards means
  problems are solved when the correct answer has
  been discovered and verified
• cross-cultural perspective suggests that problems
  solved when people apply abilities to overcome
  difficult situation
• emphasis on process not product.
• We value a rational approach
• international context values the social emotive
  response

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Oral Communication

• High-context cultures
• speakers use context to convey
  much information
• more of message is left unspoken
• accessed through non-verbal cues
• interpretations of what is meant
  rather than what is said
• Low-context cultures
• speakers more specific direct
• do not rely so much on context to convey meaning
• listeners do not need to interpret so much.

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Oral Communication

• Students from high-context
  cultures speak far less frequently
  and rely on context for
  meaning
• far more comfortable with silence
• Students teachers from low-context cultures
  (ours) may incorrectly interpret quietness of
  students from high-context culture as a
• lack of concern
• disinterest
• passivity

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Written Communication

• Native English speakers begin
  with general statement then
  elaborate
  on that point
• Romance and Slavic writers regard digression
  as an intelligent, creative form of
  expression
• written documents tend to circumscribe point
• Euro-North American readers expect clarity to be
  most important element of writing.
• Japanese perceive beauty, surprise, and flow as
  desirable measures of good writing.

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Evaluating Teams

• Grade individual student performance
• Mid-way through project
• What has member done that was helpful?
• What could member do better?
• End of project
• Give students opportunity to evaluate group
• Grade both the product and the performance

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Using Technology

• E-mail
• Blogs
• Chat rooms
• Collaboration across miles
  (WebQuests)
• Interdisciplinary collaboration

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Funded by The National Science Foundation
Presented by
July 2007