Learning Styles and the Brain

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on March 26, 2009 at 10:03am

Well, low and behold someone has been working on a virtual 3-D data design. See the You Tube videa at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdsYP-F3RXI. I have only just heard about it and haven't tried it, but this would be a boon to a spatial student.

Permalink Reply by Bob Zenhausern on March 26, 2009 at 12:28pm

I took a look at the youtube video you suggested. It was totally beyond me. No way I could make any sense out of it. But you found it useful. You of course are a visual spatial and I am an oral.

This distinction is at the heart of much of my neuropsych thinking. I can easilty be put into a right/left hemisphere distinction that has important implications for education.

Permalink Reply by Bob Zenhausern on March 26, 2009 at 6:35am

Tammy,

Are all the students you are talking about home schooled? When I looked at your website, it was homeschooling. Are these the students you are talking about? The reason I ask is I have the impression (correct me if I am wrong) that home school children tend to have parents of higher intelligence and I can agree with everything you are saying for such kids. My research has concentrated on learning disabled students. Do you have any like that? If so, how would you characterize them.

Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on March 26, 2009 at 8:09am

Much of the population of home schoolers are the ones that have children that fall way outside of the norms. The families of exceptionally gifted, learning/physically disabled, and immune compromised children often find that the smaller public schools cannot adequately meet the special needs of their kids. Many home school families adopt special needs kids specifically.

Several of my friends have children on the autism spectrum. I have worked locally with two children that carried the special ed label in our small local school. Their families wanted to supplement what the school was doing, so I pitched in to help. I am not convinced that either were learning disabled despite the label they were given though.

Lyndsey held the title of being the youngest surviving preemie in Arkansas until jut a few years ago. When she hit school, was was sick all the time. The doctors assumed it was because her immune system was not normal. She missed 3 days out of 5 in K through 2nd grade but in third her immune system seemed to kick in and she had more typical absences. The damage was done by then though. All the foundational skills in reading and math had all been helter skelter in bits and pieces. All she needed was some systematic attention to cover those years she basically missed out on. Her family came to me when she was in 9th grade and hoped I could help over the summer to get her reading level up. Her school records showed that she had tested at the 5th grade level on reading using the Slosson. My initial assessments showed early second grade and indeed early second grade Lexiled readers were about all she could do and even then her concentration would give out after about 100 words. I asked her about the Slosson and she told me they read the words to her and then asked her to read them. This invalidates the test because students are not to be exposed to the words prior to the test. She was reading them from short-term memory. I worked with her for two months that summer and she gained three grade levels to be a true 5th grade reader by the time she returned to school in the fall. Of course the school might well have quibbled that she made a gain at all since their records showed her at 5th when she left. sigh. Her family could tell she advanced though, so that is all that really matters. :0)

The other student I worked with for a while was a late bloomer and was suffering from bullying at school which had lead to deep depression. At the age of 9 he was suicidal. His mom stayed with the school's program for a while while I assisted on the side to get his reading level up, but the suicidal talk of her son scared her She switched to homeschooling out of desperate hope to save her son emotionally. After that, I merely helped with suggestions for curriculum and methodology. She did all the work and did a fine job. He caught up when his mind and body were ready and he had a break from the bullying. He is now in the local high school and doing well. His mom found an interest in education through the experiences she had with the school and with homeschooling and is currently working full-time in the school's special education and distance ed program while getting her teaching degree.

You may find NATHHAN to be an interesting resource to learn more about homeschooling the learning disabled. It is an organization run by home schoolers for home schoolers of the learning disabled.

Permalink Reply by Bob Zenhausern on March 26, 2009 at 5:21am

I was away Wednesday and have a bit of catching up to do. Quite a bit I want to comment on.

Tammy wrote: 'I have also wondered if the development of a natural learning style bent has a lot to do with how hard you work at it, much like the difference between a casual jogger and a dedicated marathon runner. My keen interest areas requires hours of intense and detailed attention to many subtle nuances of form, color, texture, etc."

I wonder if it is a chicken and egg kind of thing. If you have a "natural learning style bent" you are more likely to develop that and make it better. I could not develop the way you did because I do not have the basic visual aptitude. I cannot develop something I do not have.

Tammy, you did ramble on, but there is some interesting thinking in the rambling. Rather than crowding everything into one message, I am gong to answer in separate messages so I can give each of your ideas the attention it deserves/

Permalink Reply by Bob Zenhausern on March 26, 2009 at 5:45am

Auditory learning is more complex when you consider that there are two kinds of it. Learning by listening and learning by speaking and the two are not necessarily correlated and even may be negatively correlated (It sounds like your son is an exception and is strong in both.)

An example of learning by speaking is the student who after a lecture, says, "I have a question." Then proceeds to repeat in his or her own words what I just taught. The student was learning by re-auditorizing what I said.

One of my favorite examples, was an experience I had when visiting the Dominican Republic. I pulled together enough Spanish to order my breakfast. The waiter looked at me and smiled and said something to me and I had no idea what it was. It turned out he was just repeating my order. I could not hear the words that just came out of my mouth.

Permalink Reply by Bob Zenhausern on March 26, 2009 at 6:11am

Reading and phonics is one of my favorite topics. Phonetic decoding is a means to an end, but we have made it an end in itsefl. Reading means getting meaning from the printed word. One way to do that is via the indirect phonological route to meaning...a fancy way of saying: look at the word, convert it to its sound, and from that sound you get at meaning. Some students just do not have auditory decoding skills and perhaps spending more time on decoding is important, but separate that from reading
Some arguments against the importance of phonics.

1) When we teach speed reading we de-emphasize phonetic decoding.
2) If phonetic decoding were essential to reading the deaf could not learn to read
3) The Chinese have a pictographic and have done a lot better than the Phonecians
4) In Japan, the children start out with a phonetic kana and switch to pictographic kanji for more complex material
5) English is only semi phonetic and even if the child can sound out the word, the word must already be in the working vocabulary for decoding to be useful.

To determine whether a child knows what a word means, see if they can pair a word with an appropriate picture. If he or she can, the child can read the word, whether or not the word can be decoded. In this case, the child knows what the word means but cannot auditorize it. It is like a chronic tip of the tongue. You know how frustrating that can be, especially when someone keeps at you to say the word. Imagine a child with that problem.

Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on March 25, 2009 at 8:17pm

Have you ever read Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain by Betty Edwards? It has some interesting insights about how the mind works while at the task of drawing and how the brains of amateur and practiced artists differ.

Another interesting book that examines teaching and learning styles based on Isabel Brigg's Meyers work on personality theory is Effective Teaching, Effective Learning: Making the Personality Connection in Your Classroom by Alice M. Fairhusrt and Lisa L. Fairhurst. This is an excellent book that take the theory and looks at practical application of it to the teaching process. If you like it, definitely go next to the authority on the theory - Isabelle Briggs Meyers.

Permalink Reply by Bob Zenhausern on March 26, 2009 at 6:42am

Tammy,

I have done considerable work with right and left hemisphere oriented kids and am very familiar with the Betty Edwards book. I guess my major problem is that most people are right handed and the left hemisphere controls the right hand. How is that drawing with the right side of your brain? That said, there is no question that people do draw better after following her exercises. That shows the exercises are good, but I question the theory behind it.

You are using learning style terms as audio and visual spatial. How do you determine this? Is it via your experience or are you using some learning style instrument?

Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on March 26, 2009 at 9:01am

Theory can be' leading' in that if you don't do more observing separate and first you tend to make observations fit the theory instead of the other way around.

I have used a variety of informal learning style instruments over the years because learning styles and personality theory is an interest of mine. Mostly it is by observation of what I see in my own family since they are the ones I know best from real experience. It helps that we have some extreme differences from one another. The dichotomies are amplified and therefore easier to draw observations and speculations. It is something we all find quite interesting and we talk about it a good bit in everyday conversation.

The corpus callosum does a fine job integrating the information between right and left hemispheres. Handedness isn't a necessary indicator of preferred hemisphere. An analogy would be if an amputee lost their left arm and had to use their right arm exclusively. Their right hemisphere would not atrophy in ability because of the loss. The left hand/right hemisphere connection came out of the research from the 1960's when the corpus callosum of epileptics were cut in the effort to reduce the severity of seizures. Without the integration provided by this brain structure the two hemispheres had no way to communicate to the other side and the hemisphere/handedness connection was revealed to science. I am strongly right-handed and I have no doubt that I am visual/spatial dominant. Science can get myopic at times. The observations seen in a patient with the corpus callusom severed can reveal interesting things about how the brain works, but that doesn't mean the same thing is going to apply with someone that has an intact corpus callosum that is doing what it was designed to do - integrate, so the two hemispheres are not isolated from the other side of the brain or body.

Permalink Reply by Bob Zenhausern on March 26, 2009 at 2:15pm

A wonderful statement about the integrated functioning fo the two hemispheres. I concur, but with an exception. As we know from stroke victims, the speech center is located in the LH for at least 90% of people. This one difference has major implications.

Any oral response a person makes must involve the LH speech center. So to the extent we require an oral response to a language task, we are making the task LH. If you required non-oral response, the task would not be LH.

Phonetic decoding also demands the LH.

In all my research, I have found 85% of the students we label as learning disabled have a visual spatial orientation like you as compared to your husband and older son. There is some kind of basic weakness in the LH speech center that clashes with our educational system.


PS. Let me suggest a game that all of you can play and see how that fits into the learning style discussions that you say you have.

Find words that are spelled exactly the same but depending on the accent can be either a verb or noun: eg: EXport and exPORT Be curious who would enjoy that.

While you are at it, would you ask them: "When a song runs through your head, is it you or the artist who is doing the singing.

Permalink Reply by Anne Pemberton on March 25, 2009 at 8:28pm

Thanks for the book recommendations. I'm sure they will be helpful to others who may join the discussion. These days my reading is usually history, to write those children's books. Just finished on on the writing of the constitution and starting on one about Native American life before Europe interfered.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next ›
• Page