Learning Styles Analysis

 Learning Styles of My Small Group

Last week, my mentor teacher and I surveyed a small group of students using a learning styles inventory. Because I teach first grade, we implemented a 20-question inventory that used a happy face/sad face answering system. As I met with this small group during our intervention, I read each statement, and the students colored a happy face if it applied to them or a sad face if it did not. The intent behind this inventory is to get to know my students' learning style preferences while also learning about their personal interests. This information is useful because it will help me differentiate future lessons for them and allow them a greater amount of voice and choice that will include options they are actually interested in (Dabrowski & Marshall, 2019). Below is a summary of the results. Things to note:

• The students' results will not add up to 20, what you see is their tendency to answer in favor of that learning style. If they answered a question negatively, it was not a part of their score. Verbal answers were noted and taken into account in the event that there was a tie between scores.
• Girl 3 was absent leading up to Spring break, and we have not yet returned to school. She will be asked to complete the inventory when we do.
• Every student noted that they enjoy coming to school and like to learn new things in their learning styles inventory.

Learning Styles and Student Development

Now that we have reviewed my small group's learning styles, we can look at how their learning styles interconnect with their cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical development. Students' learning is impacted by their developmental progression as well as their environment and individual schema and funds of knowledge (Dartmouth, 2019). For example, Girls 1 and 2, along with Boy 1, all struggle with speech, yet they tend to favor auditory learning. This is because their linguistic development impacts their ability to read and write, so they prefer to listen and learn with visual supports when necessary. All of these students receive Title One support in reading. Let us take a brief look at each student individually.

Girl 1 is helpful yet reserved in class. She likes to work with others but prefers not to talk. When she does, her language is more casual and colloquial. She does not show much emotion and does not like to acknowledge it when she is unhappy. She has good fine and gross motor skills, but overall, she prefers auditory learning with visual supports. She is Tier 1 (at grade level) in math and Tier 2 (nearing grade level) in reading.

Girl 2 is usually friendly, but she tends to tease her friends without noticing if they are bothered or not. She struggles with grammar such as matching pronouns to their nouns and sometimes needs to try again in order to be understood. She has good fine and gross motor skills and is Tier 1 in math and Tier 3 (below grade level) in reading.

Girl 3 struggles with all of her adaptive skills (conceptual, social, and practical). She likes to be a part of the group but struggles to make herself understood. This can impact her self-confidence and make her feel down. She lashes out when this happens. She has many friends and likes to help others. She has good fine and gross motor skills and is Tier 2 in math and Tier 3 in Reading. When she returns to school, she will complete the learning style inventory. From what we have observed in class, she seems to enjoy multimodal instruction with a greater benefit from kinesthetic or tactile learning.

Boy 1 has fairly strong adaptive skills. He has many friends across many grade levels and is strong in academics during class most of the time. While he has some colloquialisms in his speech, linguistically he is on par with the rest of his classmates. He is petite, but he has good fine and gross motor skills. His biggest struggle is with focus as he is easily distracted, and sometimes when communicating with his peers, he can cross their boundaries without understanding what he is doing. He is Tier 2 in math and reading.

Boy 2 struggles with focus and tends to be reserved. His social-emotional and language development is not quite on par with his classmates, and he also lacks self-efficacy when it comes to doing things. He prefers visuals that he can reference as needed over auditory and kinesthetic or tactile learning. He is Tier 1 in math and Tier 2 in reading.

Knowing where my students are at in their development and being able to link that with their learning styles and interests helps me differentiate for them in more meaningful ways with greater relevancy and accuracy.

Use for Planning

This small reading group has shown through their inventory that they tend to prefer auditory learning with visual supports. Only one student has demonstrated a true preference for kinesthetic or tactile learning. This tells me that I need to differentiate for my small group by including multimodal instruction that includes a lot of auditory and visual support. Using multimodal instruction with multiple means of representation can make learning more accessible for a greater variety of students and learning styles (Murawski & Scott, 2019). Because they all need to work on communicating with their peers, I will also need to look into incorporating more activities that allow them to practice with each other in this small group.

Since I will need to accommodate auditory, visual, and kinesthetic/tactile learning, I will need to use a variety of instructional strategies. The first strategy I would use is the incorporation of audio books or recordings when working on reading comprehension. These recordings would allow my students to reference them as many times as necessary while still being able to follow along with the printed words. The second strategy I would use is the use of pictures or diagrams when teaching new academic vocabulary. Using pictures gives them an image to link the definition and word to, making it easier for them to remember as well as activating their schema with familiar images. The third strategy I would use is to incorporate more sorting activities, particularly cut-and-paste style. My first graders love to cut and glue, and this would appeal to any kinesthetic learners as they physically sort the words or images into categories. In order to help my learners practice communicating, we would practice describing what happened in a story or justifying why we sorted concepts a certain way. The latter provides us with an opportunity to practice navigating opposing opinions.

Use for Instruction and Decision-making

It is important to keep my students' strengths, interests, and needs in mind while instructing them and making decisions regarding our next steps. Using the interest inventory is a good way to survey them for their learning style preferences and interests, and I can analyze their benchmark assessment data to look for strengths and weaknesses. For example, this group's students were all higher tiered in math than in reading, so we will be focusing on reading. I can also use formative assessments like think-pair-shares to see how they are doing during instruction. In order to monitor how they feel they are doing (an extremely important factor in student success) I could also have them use our learning platform, Otus, to keep a digital diary of their interests and goals. Self-reflection will help them with their social skills practice, which they need, while goal setting supports their practical skill growth (Murawski & Scott, 2019). The digital aspect means they can record themselves speaking their thoughts, removing their writing barriers and allowing them to work on their speaking skills. I can have them share important moments from their digital diaries too to further practice their communication skills. With all of this data and skill practicing happening, I will want to put it to good use in designing and implementing assessments.

Learning Styles and Assessments

When I design assessments for my students, I try to stay focused on the content mastery I want them to demonstrate, not necessarily their mode of demonstration. Allowing them voice and choice also lets them use their strengths while their weaknesses are supported (Murawski & Scott, 2019). For example, when assessing their knowledge of diphthongs, I allowed my students to create a comic strip retelling a heard story using the medium of their choice. They could do a traditional comic strip using drawings, or a 3D comic strip using craft supplies, or they could create a photo comic strip using objects and toys to create scenes and take photos. They then would write a sentence for each scene using at least one word with an appropriate diphthong. This would allow me to assess their spelling in an authentic context as well. In designing and implementing assessments for this group, I would allow them to demonstrate their learning in a way that they feel comfortable while providing prompts and supports as audio recordings. Whenever possible, I would also provide pictures, diagrams, and examples as they have shown that they benefit from visual supports as well.

One of my favorite ways to design and implement assessments for this group is to use our learning platform, Otus. I can create a sorting assessment for images, sounds, or words. I can type the prompt and instructions and attach any images, links to read-alouds, or videos they may need. I can include a check answer button to provide them with an opportunity to reflect on their answers and change if need be. I can also allow them to access a text-to-speech feature which will read any words on the page and highlight them, something which greatly improves access for my struggling readers. This kind of assessment appeals to all of the learning styles in my group because it includes auditory and visual supports, and the manipulation of the images, words, or sounds into their categories allows for some kinesthetic learning to take place.

Conclusion

Students are coming to school with a variety of interests and needs. They have varying levels of cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical development. It is imperative for us as teachers to evaluate their strengths, interests, and need for growth in order to inform our planning, instruction, and assessment. My favorite way to support my varied learners is to use multimodal instruction as described above that will appeal to all of my students and their learning styles.

Thank you for reading!

Cassandra Coleman

References:

Dabrowski, J., & Marshall, T. R. (2019). Choice & Relevancy: Autonomy and personalization in assignments help motivate and engage students. Principal, 98(3), 10–13.

Dartmouth. (2019, March 12). Student Development. Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. Retrieved March 22, 2023, from https://dcal.dartmouth.edu/resources/teaching-learning-foundations/student-development

Murawski, W. W., & Scott, K. L. (2019). What really works with universal design for learning. Corwin.