It was a sunny day and twenty year old Edet, a 300 levels Nigerian student of Computer Science at the Stellenbosch University, South-Africa (SA) was unwinding at the school’s recreational facility after a typical hard day’s labour and wondering how fortunate she was to find lecturers who understood she was different, had personal idiosyncrasies and preferences which affected her learning style.
Before she left for the SA, she had attended both public primary and secondary schools in Nigeria. She still recalls her mathematics teachers had told her she had no business studying maths or maths related courses because she simply was not cut out for such abstractions. She believed this until her uncle took her to SA. At Stellenbosch University, she had various forms of psychometric tests administered on her to discover her particular learning preferences and style. This in turn helped her lecturers tailor their teaching style or pedagogy to her individual learning preferences.
Learning style is the preference or predisposition of an individual to perceive and process information in one particular way or a combination of ways. Research suggests that learning styles originate with a large genetic component – but they can change and develop throughout life. Understanding one’s learning style is the first step in learning how you learn. Using study methods appropriate for one’s learning style will facilitate learning, rather than impede it.
“One of the biggest problems for education in Nigeria is the tendency to ignore the individual differences and learning styles or preferences of students. In a bid to cover the content prescribed by the syllabus some teachers unwittingly make students learn by rote with little understanding because their learning styles would have been violated. What happens is that at the end of the day students have little understanding of what they were taught” said Odumosu Omolara, a curriculum development expert and CEO Class Climax Consulting Ltd.
Omolara added that one of the best approaches to learning and teaching is a project based learning methodology. In this light, learning outcomes are organised around a project meant to solve a concrete problem.
In research paper published by the Journal of Clinical & Diagnostic research, a cross sectional study was conducted on 100 first semester medical students who were enrolled at SMS & R, Sharda University, India. The VARK questionnaire, version 7.1 was used to categorise the learning preferences/modes as visual (V), auditory (A), read and write (R) and kinaesthetic (K). The students were also asked to rank the various teaching methodologies namely; lectures, tutorials, demonstrations and practicals/dissections from the most preferred choice to the least preferred one.
The majority, 61 percent of the students had multimodal VARK preferences. Among them, 41 percent, 14 percent and 6 percent preferred the bimodal, trimodal and the quadrimodal ways of information presentation. Thirty-nine percent of the respondents had one strong (unimodal) learning preference. The most common unimodal preference was kinaesthetic, followed by visual, auditory and read and write.
The most preferred teaching methodology was practical/dissection 39 percent and tutorial was the least preferred one 12 percent.
“There seems little doubt that tertiary students have preferences for sensory input and that their preferences may not be catered for by some teachers. The corollary is that some teachers may be reinforcing their own preferences rather than catering for those with different needs” said Anthony Anomah, a psychologist at the Spiritan University, Ghana.
Anomah added that in either case, there is a role for a straightforward, easily administered questionnaire to get both groups thinking about the fact that they may be different. “The current emphasis on reflection as one of the precursors for learning could be assisted with something that stimulates students and teachers to reflect on their preferences for exchanging information” he surmised.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
